GEOCHEMICAL ANALYSIS AND SOCIOCULTURAL COMPLEXITY: A CASE STUDY FROM EARLY IRON AGE MEGIDDO (ISRAEL)*

Archaeometry ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 705-722 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. P. HARRISON ◽  
R. G. V. HANCOCK
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-226
Author(s):  
Christian Løchsen Rødsrud

The point of departure for this article is the excavation of two burial mounds and a trackway system in Bamble, Telemark, Norway. One of the mounds overlay ard marks, which led to speculation as to whether the site was ritually ploughed or whether it contained the remains of an old field system. Analysis of the archaeometric data indicated that the first mound was related to a field system, while the second was constructed 500–600 years later. The first mound was probably built to demonstrate the presence of a kin and its social norms, while these norms were renegotiated when the second mound was raised in the Viking Age. This article emphasizes that the ritual and profane aspects were closely related: mound building can be a ritualized practice intended to legitimize ownership and status by the reuse of domestic sites in the landscape. Further examples from Scandinavia indicate that this is a common, but somewhat overlooked, practice.


2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Arnold

Archaeological chronologies tend to conflate temporalities from all cultural contexts in a region without consideration for the different depositional trajectories and life histories of the objects that serve as the basis of those chronologies. Social variables, such as gender, age, status, and individual mobility, act on artifacts in ways that must be identified and differentiated in order for seriations derived from one context to be applicable in another. This article presents evidence from early Iron Age contexts in Southwest Germany to illustrate this phenomenon and discusses its ramifications from the perspective of a case study focusing on the mortuary landscape of the Heuneburg hillfort on the Danube River. Gender in particular is strongly marked in this society and can be shown to affect the depositional tempo of certain artifact categories, which have different social lives and depositional fates depending on context. Artifact assemblages vary not only in terms of archaeological context and temporality but also are impacted by the social personae of the human agents responsible for, or associated with, their deposition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 238-266
Author(s):  
Malgorzata Daszkiewicz ◽  
Nadezhda Gavrylyuk ◽  
Kirsten Hellström ◽  
Elke Kaiser ◽  
Maya Kashuba ◽  
...  

AbstractIn an archaeometric research project supported by the Volkswagen Foundation (Project 90216 [https://earlynomads.wordpress.com/]), working groups consisting of chemists, geologists and archaeologists in Berlin, Kiev and Saint Petersburg collaborated on analysing pottery recovered from Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age burials and settlements from sites of different archaeological cultures in the steppes and forest steppes north of the Black Sea. The article presents the results of the classification of 201 samples using energy-dispersive X-Ray fluorescence spectrometer (pXRF) compared to the results of MGR-analysis and WD-XRF of these samples. Fingerprints for the seven sites studied could be defined.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 146-165
Author(s):  
Maximilian F. Rönnberg

The number of burials per year known from Athens decreases significantly in the Protogeometric period and then increases rapidly again in the Late Geometric period. The explanation offered for this development by Morris in 1987 is the most popular one so far. This paper will first quickly discuss this and other previous ideas and their wider implications, but then focus on providing a new one. The starting point of this new interpretation is that various types of burial sites may have different recovery rates. I will thus first sketch the different possibilities for the location of graves in Athens in the Early Iron Age and the Archaic period. The subsequent diachronic analysis of these different types of burial sites and their respective popularity forms the core of this contribution. A case study of the Kerameikos and the area of the later Agora as well as an overview of all Athenian sites is provided. These developments and their correspondences in the grave count allow for an interpretation which does account for the variations in the known numbers of graves as well as the changing spatial patterns. This is finally set into the wider field of socio-cultural changes in Early Athens.


2004 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
pp. 257-271
Author(s):  
Jari Pakkanen

This methodological paper uses the measurements of the Early Iron Age Toumba building at Lefkandi to study whether a single design-unit can be detected in the data set. Cosine quantogram analysis is used in the initial analysis of the building dimensions and, in the second phase, the relevance of the obtained results is calculated by using Monte Carlo computer simulations. A statistically significant unit of c. 49 cm can be isolated, but because of the very limited number of precise dimensions, this result should only be accepted with caution. The case study demonstrates how the complex statistical problem of deriving the lengths of possibly used design-units in ancient architecture can be approached; metrological analyses can only gain from employing appropriate quantitative methods.


Radiocarbon ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 54 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 635-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeroen De Reu ◽  
Guy De Mulder ◽  
Mark van Strydonck ◽  
Mathieu Boudin ◽  
Jean Bourgeois

The possibility of radiocarbon dating on cremated bones stimulated a systematic 14C dating project investigating the chronology of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age urnfield cemeteries in Belgium. The growing amount of 14C dates on these cremated remains led to new insights into the chronology, development, and disappearance of the urnfield phenomenon. Consequently, ideas about cultural and historical processes need to be modified. Also, the internal chronology of the cemeteries is much more complex than previously thought, stimulating the need for techniques to analyze and visualize the internal development of an individual burial site. The application of centrographic methods like the mean center, standard distance circle, and standard deviational ellipse illustrates the possibilities for analyzing the internal chronology of the cemeteries based on the available 14C dates.


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