scholarly journals НЕКРОПОЛЬ ФАНАГОРИИ – ПЕРВЫЕ РЕЗУЛЬТАТЫ РАДИОУГЛЕРОДНОГО ДАТИРОВАНИЯ

Author(s):  
A. Strokov ◽  

In Russian archaeology radiocarbon dating is used in very rare cases when antiquities from historical periods are studied based on coin finds and historical sources which have their own historical chronology. However, this arrangement does not always work, as some graves do not contain items that can be dated to a narrow time span while a great number of graves often have no funerary offerings at all. The State Historical Museum in Moscow houses archaeological materials from the Phanagoria necropolis excavated in 1936. Phanagoria is is the largest city of the Classical period and the early medieval period (540 BC–10th century). The collection from the necropolis excavations has preserved organic carbon-containing finds from grave 21 (the wood served to make a coffin – juniper, and sea algae). These materials were selected for AMS-dating. The following results were obtained: wood: 342–420 calAD, sea algae – 132–241 calAD. Of particular interest is the impression of the coin of the Roman Emperor Valens (364–378) found in this grave. The AMS-date of the coffin wood fully confirms the traditional archaeological dating of the finds whereas the coin offers an opportunity to narrow down the timeline of the grave to several decades (375–420). The older age of sea algae is caused by a marine reservoir effect which must be taken into account during the verification of the radiocarbon age of the consumers the food intake of which probably included algae.

Radiocarbon ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (03) ◽  
pp. 777-797
Author(s):  
Vladimir Matskovsky ◽  
Umalat Gadiev ◽  
Andrey Dolgikh ◽  
Alexander Cherkinsky ◽  
Polina Polumieva ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTThere are hundreds of preserved medieval buildings in the mountainous part of Ingushetia, including Christian churches, crypts, temples, sanctuaries, battle towers, and living buildings. The chronology of their construction period is still questioned, as there are no radiocarbon (14C) dates published for these buildings and their dating is mainly based on architectural features, a few historical sources, and sometimes on accompanying archaeological material. The aim of this study is to assess more precisely the period of their construction. To do this, we selected the 10 most prominent medieval buildings that contain wooden construction elements and sampled these wooden elements in order to apply 14C accelerator mass-spectrometry dating (AMS) followed by wiggle-matching. From two of these buildings, plaster and mortar were also sampled for 14C AMS dating. This is the first time that these kinds of analyses have been performed for medieval buildings from the mountainous part of Ingushetia. For 6 out of 10 buildings, we acquired sufficiently precise dates that helped us to clarify their construction period. For the other 4 buildings, the acquired dates are still informative but could be refined further with additional 14C analyses. The calibrated dates obtained cover the period from AD 662 until recent time with the majority of them concentrated in 15th–17th centuries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Wojenka ◽  
Elżbieta Jaskulska ◽  
Danijela Popović ◽  
Mateusz Baca ◽  
Frog ◽  
...  

Abstract Cave burials are generally absent from historical periods in Europe. Consequently, the discovery of a post-medieval inhumation of a child buried with at least one bird head placed in the mouth in Tunel Wielki Cave (southern Poland) is an exceptional find. The aim of this paper is to discuss this unique burial based on multiproxy analyses conducted on the human and avian remains, including genetic and isotopic analyses as well as CT scans, radiocarbon dating, and anthropological and paleontological assessment. The results reveal the burial was that of a 10–12 year old girl of likely Fennoscandian or Baltic genetic ancestry, who died in the post-medieval period and was buried in the cave with the placement of one, and possibly two, bird heads in the mouth of the deceased. We propose that the girl is associated with Finno-Karelian troops of a Swedish garrison stationed at the adjacent Ojców Castle during King Carl Gustav’s invasion of Poland in 1655–1657.


2012 ◽  
Vol 78 ◽  
pp. 173-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Ripper ◽  
Matthew Beamish ◽  
A. Bayliss ◽  
C. Bronk Ramsey ◽  
A. Brown ◽  
...  

The recording and analysis of a burnt mound and adjacent palaeochannel deposits on the floodplain of the River Soar in Leicestershire revealed that the burnt mound was in use, possibly for a number of different purposes, at the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. An extensive radiocarbon dating programme indicated that the site was revisited. Human remains from the palaeochannel comprised the remains of three individuals, two of whom pre-dated the burnt mound by several centuries while the partial remains of a third, dating from the Late Bronze Age, provided evidence that this individual had met a violent death. These finds, along with animal bones dating to the Iron Age, and the remains of a bridge from the early medieval period, suggest that people were drawn to this location over a long period of time.


Radiocarbon dating by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) differs fundamentally from conventional 14 C dating because it is based on direct determination of the ratio of 14 C : 12 C atoms rather than on counting the radioactivity of 14 C. It is therefore possible to measure much lower levels of 14 C in a sample much more rapidly than the conventional technique allows. Consequently, minimum sample size is reduced approximately 1000-fold (from ca . 1 g to ca . 1 mg) and the datable time span of the method can, theoretically, be doubled (from ca . 40 ka to ca . 80 ka). As yet, extension of the time span has not been achieved, because of the effects of sample contamination, but the great reduction in sample size is already having a major impact on archaeology by extending the range of organic remains that can be dated, and, especially, by allowing the archaeologist and the radiocarbon chemist to adopt more selective sampling strategies. This greater selectivity, in the field and the laboratory, is the most important archaeological attribute of AMS 14 C dating. It allows on-site chronological consistency to be tested by multiple sampling; archaeological materials to be dated that contain too little C, or are too rare or valuable, to be dated by the conventional method; and the validity of a date to be tested by isolating and independently dating particular fractions in chemically complex samples. AMS laboratories have only been processing archaeological samples since 1982, but already several, notably those at Oxford, Toronto, and Tucson, Arizona, have made substantial contributions to archaeological dating. The Oxford laboratory has, since 1983, processed ca. 1200 samples and published over 500 archaeological dates. Particular attention is therefore paid in this paper to the archaeological significance of the dates obtained at Oxford. The ams 14C technique can contribute to archaeological dating in two complementary ways: (i) by testing prevailing assumptions about the antiquity of indirectly dated objects and materials, i.e. verification or falsification dating; and (ii) by dating new or existing archaeological sequences in greater detail than can be achieved by the conventional 14 C technique, i.e. the building of new and more detailed chronologies. In this paper, recent archaeological applications of the new technique are reviewed under these two headings: verification dating applied to the origin and spread of anatomically modern humans in Europe and the Americas, to putative evidence for early (pre-Neolithic) agriculture in Israel and Egypt, and to the dating of rare Palaeolithic and later artefacts; and the building of new and more-detailed chronologies illustrated by reference to Upper Palaeolithic sequences in Europe, Mesolithic—Neolithic sequences in Southwest Asia, and Neolithic-Bronze Age chronologies in Britain. It is concluded that the development and application of the ams technique represents a revolution in 14 C dating that will have a profound impact on many aspects of archaeological research.


Author(s):  
Stefan Winter

This chapter re-examines the early development of the ʻAlawi community and its situation in western Syria in the medieval period in the wider context of what might be termed Islamic provincial history. It starts from the premise that the conventional image of the “Nusayris” has largely been fashioned by elite historical sources whose discourse on nonorthodox groups is a priori negative but which, when read against the grain and compared with other sources, can yield a less essentializing, less conflicting account of the community's development. In particular, the chapter aims to show that the ʻAlawi faith was not the deviant, marginal phenomenon it has retrospectively been made out to be but, on the contrary, constituted, and was treated by the contemporary authorities as, a normal mode of rural religiosity in Syria.


Author(s):  
Giovanna Bianchi

In 1994, an article appeared in the Italian journal Archeologia Medievale, written by Chris Wickham and Riccardo Francovich, entitled ‘Uno scavo archeologico ed il problema dello sviluppo della signoria territoriale: Rocca San Silvestro e i rapporti di produzione minerari’. It marked a breakthrough in the study of the exploitation of mineral resources (especially silver) in relation to forms of power, and the associated economic structure, and control of production between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. On the basis of the data available to archeological research at the time, the article ended with a series of open questions, especially relating to the early medieval period. The new campaign of field research, focused on the mining landscape of the Colline Metallifere in southern Tuscany, has made it possible to gather more information. While the data that has now been gathered are not yet sufficient to give definite and complete answers to those questions, they nevertheless allow us to now formulate some hypotheses which may serve as the foundations for broader considerations as regards the relationship between the exploitation of a fundamental resource for the economy of the time, and the main players and agents in that system of exploitation, within a landscape that was undergoing transformation in the period between the early medieval period and the middle centuries of the Middle Ages.


Author(s):  
Ross Balzaretti

This chapter responds to a point which Chris Wickham raised in his recent review of my book on Dark Age Liguria: did chestnut cultivation show any economic specialization in this region in the early medieval period? Chestnuts figured a great deal in that book, which drew briefly on the surviving charter documentation for the region. In this chapter a more detailed analysis of charters from the tenth and eleventh centuries develops an answer to the question of specialized production with a comparative study in which the Genoese evidence is set alongside similar charter evidence from Milan and its region, where chestnuts were also cultivated for food. The Genoa–Milan comparison puts into practice Wickham’s advocacy of comparative method at the micro as well as at the macro scale, for regions where comparison has not historically been the norm. The comparison suggests that chestnuts were more important to the Genoese than the Milanese economy, in part for local climatic reasons but also, perhaps, because of fundamental political and social differences between these two cities. It will be shown that some charters show that the production of chestnuts was to some degree specialized, how it was specialized and what the consequences of that specialization were for each economic system.


Antiquity ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 71 (272) ◽  
pp. 430-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gillespie

Minute biological traces, with their prospect of recovering even ancient DNA, are the most attractive of archaeological materials to work with. This supplementary report on field studies of rock-art first published in ANTIQUITY further explores how these studies may in truth be carried out.


2007 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-734 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Richards ◽  
Sheila Greer ◽  
Lorna T. Corr ◽  
Owen Beattie ◽  
Alexander Mackie ◽  
...  

We report here on the results of AMS dating and isotopic analysis of the frozen human remains named Kwaday Dän Ts'inchí and associated materials recovered from a glacier located in Northwest British Columbia, Canada in 1999. The isotopic analysis of bone collagen (bulk and single amino acids) from the individual indicates a strongly marine diet, which was unexpected given the location of this find, more than 100 km inland eroding out of a high elevation glacier; however, bulk hair and bone cholesterol isotopic values indicate a shift in diet to include more terrestrial foods in the year before death. The radiocarbon dating is not straightforward, as there are difficulties in determining the appropriate marine correction for the human remains, and the spread of dates on the associated artifacts clearly indicates that this was not a single use site. By combining the most recent date on a robe worn by Kwaday Dän Ts'inchi with direct bone collagen dates we conclude that the individual likely dates to between cal A.D. 1670 to 1850, which is in the pre-(or early) European contact period for this region.


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