Hua Wang , Wen Li , Zhouyong Sun , Jing Shao , Min Li
{"title":"Craft Specialization in the Highland Longshan Society: Perspective from the Bone Needle Workshop on the Central Mound at the Shimao Site, Shaanxi, China","authors":"Hua Wang , Wen Li , Zhouyong Sun , Jing Shao , Min Li","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101611","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101611","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The emergence of Shimao, a proto-urban center at the contact zone between agropastoral communities of the Loess Plateau and herders/hunter-gatherers of Monogolian Plateau, offers critical insights into the economic activities during the transition to the Bronze Age in continental East Asia. Unprecedented in scale in prehistoric China, the bone needle workshop at the central mound was a prelude to the specialized, industrial-scale bone production workshops seen in the Bronze Age cities of Zhengzhou, Anyang, and Zhouyuan during the second and early first millennium BCE. The bone needle production at Huangchengtai probably supplied a sophisticated craft industry for the production of garments using animal hides and textiles.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101611"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416524000424/pdfft?md5=aac02df9df63d78b22a5155c2d84c15c&pid=1-s2.0-S0278416524000424-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141736500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mark Robinson , Jamie Hampson , Jo Osborn , Francisco Javier Aceituno , Gaspar Morcote-Ríos , Michael J. Ziegler , José Iriarte
{"title":"Animals of the Serranía de la Lindosa: Exploring representation and categorisation in the rock art and zooarchaeological remains of the Colombian Amazon","authors":"Mark Robinson , Jamie Hampson , Jo Osborn , Francisco Javier Aceituno , Gaspar Morcote-Ríos , Michael J. Ziegler , José Iriarte","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101613","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101613","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon hosts one of the most spectacular global rock art traditions. Painted in vibrant ochre pigments, the artwork depicts abstract and figurative designs – including a high diversity of animal motifs – and holds key information for understanding how Amazonians made sense of their world. We compare a zooarchaeological assemblage with painted depictions of animals at the Cerro Azul site, and utilise relevant ethnographies and ethnohistories. A lack of direct proportional relationships between the animal representation in the art and zooarchaeological remains alludes to the complex socio-cultural interconnection between Amazonian communities and their ritualised environments. We discuss the benefits and limitations of quantitative categorisation and explore Indigenous ontologies, highlighting Amazonian perspectives on human-animal relationships.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101613"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416524000448/pdfft?md5=d6e622fb5c1cb82fe6f5fd776da8dd2e&pid=1-s2.0-S0278416524000448-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141729135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dylan S. Davis , Alejandra I. Domic , George Manahira , Kristina Douglass
{"title":"Geophysics elucidate long-term socio-ecological dynamics of foraging, pastoralism, and mixed subsistence strategies on SW Madagascar","authors":"Dylan S. Davis , Alejandra I. Domic , George Manahira , Kristina Douglass","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101612","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The environmental impacts of human societies are generally assumed to correlate with factors such as population size, whether they are industrialized, and the intensity of their landscape modifications (e.g., agriculture, urban development). As a result, small-scale communities with subsistence economies are often not the focus of long-term studies of environmental impact. However, comparing human-environment dynamics and their lasting ecological legacies across societies of different scales and forms of organization and production is important for understanding landscape change at regional to global scales. On Madagascar, ecological and cultural diversity, coupled with climatic variability, provide an important case study to examine the role of smaller-scale socioeconomic practices (e.g., fishing, foraging, and herding) on long-term ecological stability. Here, we use multispectral satellite imagery to compare long-term ecological impacts of different human livelihood strategies in SW Madagascar. Our results indicate that the nature of human-environmental dynamics between different socioeconomic communities are similar. Although some activities leave more subtle traces than others, geophysics highlight similar signatures across a landscape inhabited by communities practicing a range of subsistence strategies. Our results further demonstrate how Indigenous land stewardship is integrated into the very fabric of ecological systems in SW Madagascar with implications for conservation and sustainability.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101612"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416524000436/pdfft?md5=a75a76894f30db0d9932f6f9f0459343&pid=1-s2.0-S0278416524000436-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141607745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Paul Halstead , Valasia Isaakidou , Nasia Makarouna
{"title":"Τhe domestication of southwest Asian ‘farmyard animals’: Possible insights from management of feral and free-range relatives in Greece","authors":"Paul Halstead , Valasia Isaakidou , Nasia Makarouna","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101609","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Understanding early animal domestication is complicated by disagreement over what, in cultural terms, differentiates domestic (closely managed? privately owned?) from wild and by the difficulty of distinguishing these categories zooarchaeologically. We describe recent feral populations of goats, sheep, cattle and pigs in Greece, comprising descendants of animals escaped or released from controlled domestic herds but remaining in private ownership. Many such animals are systematically exploited for meat by trapping or driving, while provision of fodder or water, especially as bait for traps but also to shape their movements, blurs the distinction between wild and domestic. Selective culling (mainly of young males) of goats, sheep and cattle confirms previous concerns regarding zooarchaeological use of mortality data to detect domestic management but also suggests that such data might help to identify private ownership of animals. Applying these observations to mortality data for goats and sheep from early Neolithic southwest Asia, we argue that some animals previously interpreted as early herded domesticates may instead represent trapped and selectively culled wild individuals in private ownership. In conclusion, we consider whether and why private ownership of free-range animals may quite widely have preceded classic domestic control of goats, sheep and perhaps cattle in southwest Asia.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101609"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416524000400/pdfft?md5=a8da6634f96b5884cb6af5efb1e261b8&pid=1-s2.0-S0278416524000400-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141596335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Adrian S.Z. Chase , April Kamp-Whittaker , Matthew A. Peeples
{"title":"Archaeologies of people and space: Social network analysis of communities and neighborhoods in spatial context","authors":"Adrian S.Z. Chase , April Kamp-Whittaker , Matthew A. Peeples","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101607","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Applications of SNA to interpret archaeological evidence have been increasing dramatically, as has an interest in identifying communities and neighborhoods. Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be a lens and a tool to explore neighborhoods and communities with archaeological datasets from a range of temporal periods and regions. The spatial distribution of material culture facilitates the creation of spatially located networks that demonstrate social linkages between individuals or communities. Yet, limitations exist in using archaeological data; we cannot directly ask individuals who they interacted with or for how long – and we must work to combine data and theory in reconstructing emic perspectives. Communities exist interstitially at multiple scales through a combination of relational and categorical identities. Neighborhoods represent a specialized form of community (one of spatially co-located residents with frequent face-to-face interaction that exhibit a union of relational and categorical identity). The articles in this special edition use network theory to identify, reconstruct, and test the presence and extent of communities and neighborhoods in the past, and in doing so they open avenues of research with applicability beyond archaeology.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101607"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141540097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Xinyi Ouyang , Zhipeng Li , David Cohen , Xiaohong Wu
{"title":"Dogs under urbanization: Isotopic insight from the Bronze Age Central Plains of China (ca. 2000–1000 BCE)","authors":"Xinyi Ouyang , Zhipeng Li , David Cohen , Xiaohong Wu","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101608","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Although dogs played multifaceted roles during the early stages of urbanization in China’s Central Plains, research remains limited concerning the management of dogs, the dynamics of human–dog relationships, and dogs’ entanglements with the political economy, ritual, and daily life. Here, we compare stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data from 95 dogs and associated human skeletons from 15 Late Neolithic – Bronze Age sites. Results show two distinct dietary patterns in dogs. Early sites (Xinzhai-Erlitou period, 1900–1520 BCE) show more variability in dog diets, indicative of looser approaches to dog management. Later sites (Late Shang-Western Zhou periods, 1320–770 BCE) show a widespread, homogeneous diet among dogs characterized by higher consumption of C<sub>4</sub> millet (greater than in humans’ diets), suggesting the possibility of the emergence of specialized, broadly shared dog management practices linked to increased ritual use of dogs. This study also underscores the complexity of management practices, which would have been influenced by site-specific conditions, including environment and available resources, the site’s position in hierarchical settlement networks, and the varying roles of the dogs. Importantly, this study demonstrates that the comparison of isotopic data from broad temporal and spatial contexts can shed light on animal management practices in early urban economic systems and political economies.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101608"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141540091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jan Bill , David Jacobson , Susanne Nagel , Lisa Mariann Strand
{"title":"Violence as a lens to Viking societies: A comparison of Norway and Denmark","authors":"Jan Bill , David Jacobson , Susanne Nagel , Lisa Mariann Strand","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101605","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101605","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Comparing Viking Age Norway and Denmark, the article examines the primary proposition that as centers of authority become progressively more robust, violence will be proportionately contained. The article introduces a new approach in using indications of violence as a focal point to elicit broader social practices. The disciplines employed in this study – archaeology, osteology, philology, and sociology – are used together in the study of covariance of different indicators across a societal range. The indicators for assessing violence include skeletal trauma and weapon frequency. For assessing the steepness of the social pyramid, we use runestones, indicating variations in social stratification, and monumental constructions as a measure of power to command labor. Among the findings: weapons and interpersonal violence in Norway was much more widespread than in Denmark, and the social pyramid in Denmark was progressively steeper and more complex than in Norway. “Official” executions accounted for the preponderance of violence in Denmark, while rare in Norway. Denmark was evidently a more “civilianized” society than Norway. The comparative research supports the primary proposition. The research, furthermore, suggests that Denmark and Norway were sociologically distinct societies, which accords with recent findings that the respective regions displayed distinct, though still similar, genetic profiles.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101605"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416524000369/pdfft?md5=c58b4c460df561af098c193d7885304b&pid=1-s2.0-S0278416524000369-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141463138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Accommodating agriculture at al-Khayran: Economic relations and settlement practices in the earliest agricultural communities of the southern Levant","authors":"Matthew V. Kroot","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101606","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101606","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Early agricultural practices are often viewed as such a radical transformation that they not only structured and drove the long-term development of subsistence economies, but also required a dramatic reorganization of how community-wide economic relations were reckoned and enacted. This article examines how data derived from loci of economic production can inform us about the structure of economic relations in early agricultural communities, so as to better test such claims of political-economic disruption against the archaeological record. It does so by analyzing the site of al-Khayran in the west-central Jordan. Al-Khayran dates to the southern Levantine Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, the time period when predominantly agricultural economies first emerge in the region. Results show that a typical village-based residential group temporarily and repeatedly inhabited a substantially-built in-field structure while practicing intensive agricultural production. These results indicate that the site’s inhabitants carried out a form of dual residence mobility with heavy investment on-site in perimetrics via landesque capital. Such behavior suggests that at least some residential groups in this time period were indeed corporate groups that agentively intervened in economic systems to actively assert and enact the private holding of the means of production during the emergence of agricultural economies.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101606"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416524000370/pdfft?md5=d2e7e822b5d03c28dfe6bf2694c4b703&pid=1-s2.0-S0278416524000370-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141463266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ancestral commons theorized: The entanglement of cosmology, community and landscape use in Bronze Age Northern Europe","authors":"Mark Haughton , Mette Løvschal","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101604","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The emergence of open, disturbed grazing landscapes across Early Bronze Age Northern Europe coincided with a boom in the building of monumental barrows, often placed in linear arrangements. The co-emergence of landscape and monument forms suggests an intimate link between cosmology, communities and pasture, which has not featured prominently in prehistoric narratives. We propose and explore a framework of ‘ancestral commons’ to recognize how these landscapes were always both cosmological and practical, with the ancestral presence acting as a key undergirding to potentially fraught issues of grazing rights and maintenance of pasture. We explore specific examples of pastures and linear arrangements of barrows across Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe to explore the institutional entanglements of communities, ancestral infrastructures and landscape forms, such as heathlands. We argue that such complexes were connected to new forms of communities of living and dead, and of landscapes and associated landscape practices, through which a shared sense of the past and ancestral affiliation could be communicated and consolidated.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101604"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141444367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dean M. Blumenfeld , Rudolf Cesaretti , Anne Sherfield , Angela C. Huster , José Lobo , Michael E. Smith
{"title":"Urban structure, spatial equilibrium, and social inequality at Ancient Teotihuacan","authors":"Dean M. Blumenfeld , Rudolf Cesaretti , Anne Sherfield , Angela C. Huster , José Lobo , Michael E. Smith","doi":"10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101603","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This study employs canonical methods and theory from urban economics and economic geography to analyze the urban structure of the ancient city of Teotihuacan. We present evidence that Teotihuacan’s overall configuration, which includes spatial patterning in land use, demography, and social class, reveals density gradients that are consistent with the assumptions of urban <em>spatial equilibrium</em>. In general, spatial equilibrium posits that locational advantages conferred by proximity to desirable land (i.e., urban amenities) are offset by the associated land and transportation costs. These results provide insights into the process of urbanization at the ancient metropolis as well as its structural underpinnings such as social inequality and spatial competition. Based on these results, we argue that the framework employed here is broadly applicable to archaeological case studies and can lead to new inferences about the comparative dynamics of ancient urbanization.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47957,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Anthropological Archaeology","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 101603"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141322948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}