A Comparison of the Medieval White Castle Flute with the Chalcolithic Example of Veyreau

1989 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-260
Author(s):  
Paula M. T. Scothern

The clearance of White Castle, Gwent, in the late 1920s led to the discovery of an end-blown flute or flageolet in the moat (Megaw 1961). This was a metatarsal of red deer, pierced by five regularly spaced finger-holes, two rear thumb-holes, a sound and suspension-hole (pl. 35 a, b). Its association with medieval pottery suggested a 13th-century date which was supported by its scratch and dot engraving reminiscent of medieval examples from Bornholm and Wartburg (fig. 2). Megaw considered it to be one in a long tradition of block and duct flutes dating as far back as Avebury (1500 BC) and Malham Tarn (Iron Age).

Radiocarbon ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Federico Manuelli ◽  
Cristiano Vignola ◽  
Fabio Marzaioli ◽  
Isabella Passariello ◽  
Filippo Terrasi

ABSTRACT The Iron Age chronology at Arslantepe is the result of the interpretation of Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions and archaeological data coming from the site and its surrounding region. A new round of investigations of the Iron Age levels has been conducted at the site over the last 10 years. Preliminary results allowed the combination of the archaeological sequence with the historical events that extended from the collapse of the Late Bronze Age empires to the formation and development of the new Iron Age kingdoms. The integration into this picture of a new set of radiocarbon (14C) dates is aimed at establishing a more solid local chronology. High precision 14C dating by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and its correlation with archaeobotanical analysis and stratigraphic data are presented here with the purpose of improving our knowledge of the site’s history and to build a reliable absolute chronology of the Iron Age. The results show that the earliest level of the sequence dates to ca. the mid-13th century BC, implying that the site started developing a new set of relationships with the Levant already before the breakdown of the Hittite empire, entailing important historical implications for the Syro-Anatolian region at the end of the 2nd millennium BC.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Matteazzi

Abstract This paper deals with the analysis of the ancient road network around the city of Padua, attempts to reconstruct its morphology and to define its genesis and development between the second Iron Age and Late Antiquity (6th/5th cent. BC to 6th cent. AD). The study follows a methodological approach that today we define as „archaeomorphological“, first proposed by E. Vion in the late 1980s. By applying this methodology to the Paduan territory, it was possible to identify a series of routes of probable ancient origin radially converging toward the center of Roman Patavium, and linking it to other urban centers in the region and to the minor centers located within its ager. The presence of Iron Age settlements along the path of many of these routes suggests that the development of such a road network likely begins in pre-Roman times, which also highlights the ancient strategic importance of Padua and its territory as a fundamental junction between the center and the North-East of the Italian peninsula. On the other hand, the Roman road network somehow survived into the Late Antiqueand Early Medieval times, always influencing the distribution of settlements and the orientation of churches, until it was for the greater part restored by the Commune of Padua over the 13th century.


Radiocarbon ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (5) ◽  
pp. 825-850 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yotam Asscher ◽  
Dan Cabanes ◽  
Louise A Hitchcock ◽  
Aren M Maeir ◽  
Steve Weiner ◽  
...  

The Late Bronze Age to Iron Age transition in the coastal southern Levant involves a major cultural change, which is characterized, among other things, by the appearance of Philistine pottery locally produced in styles derived from outside the Levant. This transition in the coastal southern Levant is conventionally dated to the 12th century BC, based on historical and archaeological artifacts associated with the Philistine pottery. Radiocarbon dating can provide a more precise independent absolute chronology for this transition, but dating for the period under discussion is complicated by the wiggles and relatively flat slope in the calibration curve, which significantly reduce precision. An additional complication is that the stratigraphic record below and above the transition at this site, as well as at most other sites in the region, is far from complete. We thus used a variety of microarchaeological techniques to improve our understanding of the stratigraphy, and to ensure that the locations with datable short-lived materials were only derived from primary contexts, which could be related directly to the associated material culture. The 14C dates were modeled using Bayesian statistics that incorporate the stratigraphic information. Using this integrative approach, we date the appearance of the Philistine pottery in Tell es-Safi/Gath in the 13th century BC.


1977 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 131-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reay Robertson-Mackay

This report should be read in conjunction with the report on the excavations in the interior of the fort (previous paper in these Proceedings).The site of the hill-fort lies on the north side of the North Downs Trackway (National Grid Reference SU/614528). It is also on the southern edge of the Lower Thames valley. In this area there is a gap through the Hampshire Downs which connects the Thames valley with that of the River Test.The derivation of the place name Winklebury is not entirely clear. Medieval spellings, e.g. Wiltenischebury, c. 1290; Wyltenysshbury, 1407; Wynnyshbery and Wynlysbery, 1443, suggest that the name may be of Anglo-Saxon derivation and mean the ‘fort or stronghold of the people of Wilton’, i.e. the fort owned, occupied or built by the Wiltshiremen. However, Wiltonish occurs as a surname in Romsey in the 1289 Assize Rolls, in Walter le Wyltenysshe, and thus the site name may have evolved in the 13th century through associations with this family.Building development threatened the north side of the hill-fort in 1959. Excavations were accordingly carried out by the Ancient Monuments Inspectorate of the then Ministry of Works (now the Department of the Environment), under the direction of the writer in July and August of that year.


SOIL ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marieke Doorenbosch ◽  
Jan M. van Mourik

Abstract. The evolution of heathlands during the Holocene has been registered in various soil records. Paleoecological analyses of these records enable reconstruction of the changing economic and cultural management of heaths and the consequences for landscape and soils. Heaths are characteristic components of cultural landscape mosaics on sandy soils in the Netherlands. The natural habitat of heather species was moorland. At first, natural events like forest fires and storms caused small-scale forest degradation; in addition on that, the forest degradation accelerated due to cultural activities like forest grazing, wood cutting, and shifting cultivation. Heather plants invaded degraded forest soils, and heaths developed. People learned to use the heaths for economic and cultural purposes. The impact of the heath management on landscape and soils was registered in soil records of barrows, drift sand sequences, and plaggic Anthrosols. Based on pollen diagrams of such records we could reconstruct that heaths were developed and used for cattle grazing before the Bronze Age. During the late Neolithic, the Bronze Age, and Iron Age, people created the barrow landscape on the ancestral heaths. After the Iron Age, people probably continued with cattle grazing on the heaths and plaggic agriculture until the early Middle Ages. Severe forest degradation by the production of charcoal for melting iron during the Iron Age till the 6th–7th century and during the 11th–13th century for the trade of wood resulted in extensive sand drifting, a threat to the valuable heaths. The introduction of the deep, stable economy and heath sods digging in the course of the 18th century resulted in acceleration of the rise of plaggic horizons, severe heath degradation, and again extension of sand drifting. At the end of the 19th century heath lost its economic value due to the introduction of chemical fertilizers. The heaths were transformed into "new" arable fields and forests, and due to deep ploughing most soil archives were destroyed. Since AD 1980, the remaining relicts of the ancestral heaths are preserved and restored in the frame of the programs to improve the regional and national geo-biodiversity. Despite the realization of many heath restoration projects during the last decades, the area of the present heaths is just a fraction of the heath areal in AD 1900.


Antiquity ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 35 (137) ◽  
pp. 21-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Green

Evidence has for long been accumulating to show that the shores of the Thames estuary now lie at least 15 ft. lower in relation to the sea than in early Romano-British times (summarized, e.g. Wheeler, 1928; Francis, 1932). Francis has suggested that this submergence began early in the 2nd century A.D., its effects being widely felt by the end of the century. Similar evidence has been noted both from the east and south coasts of England though, in the East Anglian ‘Great Estuary’ (Yare-Bure-Waveney) behind Yarmouth, it had formerly been assessed as about 2 ft. only.Most writers, however, have been content to assume without confirmatory evidence that these changes took place in a simple progression, so that a graph of them from Roman times to the present day might be represented by a roughly straight line. Godwin, indeed, had sounded a warning note in his analysis of the Fenland deposits at Wiggenhall St German (Godwin and Edmunds, 1933; Godwin, 1940), Jennings had pointed to a ‘standstill’ or slight regression after the Romano-British transgression of the Broadland valleys (1952, 50) and a short note by Swinnerton (1955) discussing pottery found below marine clays at Chapel St Leonards, Lincs, came to confirm them. But now substantial evidence from the Yarmouth district has been adduced to show that, after the Iron Age—Romano-British marine transgression, represented by the Broadland ‘Upper Clay’, land emergence took place during the Saxon period to culminate about the time of the Norman Conquest or soon after, the ‘Saxo-Norman Marine Regression’ as it has been named (Green and Hutchinson, 1960). Under the South Denes at Yarmouth, a beach with its low water mark now at - 17.5 ft. O.D. has been dated by pottery finds to the 13th century, with a silt covering-layer also containing pottery, inferred to have been deposited by the great flood of A.D. 1287. Supported by a variety of other evidence, they have shown that, at that date, the coast here still stood some 13 ft. higher in relation to the sea than it does today. Thereafter a rapid submergence began which, by Tudor-Stuart times, was much retarded and which today has been reduced to the very low rate of some 1.6 mm. per annum.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 1181-1198
Author(s):  
Fabian Welc ◽  
Jerzy Nitychoruk ◽  
Leszek Marks ◽  
Krzysztof Bińka ◽  
Anna Rogóż-Matyszczak ◽  
...  

Abstract. In the densely forested Warmia and Masuria region (northern Poland) there are many small endorheic lakes characterized by their low sedimentation rate, which makes them excellent archives of Holocene environmental and palaeoclimatic change. Lake Młynek, located near the village of Janiki Wielkie, was selected for multi-faceted palaeoenvironmental research supported with radiocarbon dates. Sediments from this lake also contain unique information about human impact on the environment, because a stronghold has been operating on its northern shore since the early Iron Age to the early Medieval period, giving the opportunity to correlate palaeoenvironmental data with the phases of human activity over the last 2400 years. During the second and third centuries BCE the lake was surrounded by a dense deciduous forest. From the first century BCE to second century CE the forest around the lake was much reduced, which can be associated with the first pre-Roman (La Tène) and Roman occupation phase evidenced by the construction of the stronghold located close to the lake. From the second up to ninth century CE gradual restoration of the forest and a decline in human activity took place, along with lake deepening and the onset of a colder and humid climatic phase which corresponded to the global cooling episode known as the Bond 1 event (1.5 ka BP). The next intensive phase of forest clearing around the lake occurred between the 9th–13th century CE as result of human activity (Middle Age settlement phase of the stronghold). Whilst this period is marked by a warming, the human impact which has transformed the landscape likely overprints any signals of climate-driven environmental changes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-315
Author(s):  
Dragoş Măndescu ◽  
Mihai Constantinescu ◽  
Monica Mărgărit
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  

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