Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory最新文献

This article focuses on the taphonomy of inequality visible in within-church burials from the site of the Church of St. George at Đurđevac-Sošice, a Medieval church in Northern Croatia. Building on concepts of Whitehead’s Poetics model, the three-body model, and landscape archaeology, we examine the role of church architecture in the development and affirmation of social inequality though burial practices. Burial within church spaces was typically limited to those of higher social status (relative to the rest of the community). Here we examine how those practices acted both as leveling acts that promoted group identity at the same time as they highlighted social inequality. This theoretical model is then used to understand more about the use of the Church of St. George at Đurđevac-Sošice as a burial location. The Church of St. George was used as a place of worship from twelfth until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and as a place of burial (as far as the current research has shown) between the twelfth and first half of the sixteenth century. During excavations in 2017–2019, 243 graves were identified, many of which were disturbed or incomplete due to subsequent burial activity during the use of the church as a burial location. These disturbances resulted in a large amount of comingled remains from within the fill of the recognized graves, as well as from levels which resulted from overlapping of younger burial fills over older ones.

On the Caribbean island of St. Croix, archival documents reference settlements of runaway enslaved Africans in the mountainous range known as Maroon Ridge. These settlements provide an important record of Afro-Atlantic resistance to enslavement. However, as both intentionally secluded and ephemeral places of refuge, these maroon settlements are difficult to locate in the archaeological record. Geospatial modeling provides one avenue for understanding African geographies of resistance. Building on prior geospatial modeling efforts, this paper uses a GIS-based multicriteria suitability analysis to characterize the shifting affordances of marronage on Danish colonial St. Croix across the second half of the eighteenth century. By considering how the island landscape “looked” to those seeking refuge, we trace how possibilities for refuge were distributed through space and over time. In this paper, we develop affordance heuristics to model refuge using digitized historic maps and publicly available LiDAR data. The resulting model suggests shifting maroon refugia sites over time and demonstrates how geospatial approaches, paired with historical archives, can model historic affordances across time.

The human cranium is probably the most common single anatomical element manipulated after the death of the individual. However, it is not uncommon to find isolated crania for which it is difficult to unequivocally determine the nature of the deposition, either intentional or natural. In order to establish whether naturally deposited and intentionally deposited skulls are characterised by different taphonomic patterns, we evaluated the state of preservation of 75 isolated crania (68 naturally deposited and 7 intentionally deposited) from sites in Africa, Europe, Near East and Asia, from approximately 2 million to 20,000 years BP. As a comparative reference, we evaluated the preservation pattern of further 101 skulls from individuals buried in primary deposition at two cemeteries. Finally, to determine whether the breakage pattern of skull-cups (skulls intentionally modified and manufactured into bowls) mimics a natural skull breakage, we analysed the preservation pattern of 19 skull-cups from archaeological and ethnographic contexts. Preservation and breakage patterns were evaluated using the Zonation method and the Landmark method. Results suggest that the intentionally deposited skulls have a pattern of preservation similar to the skulls found in cemeteries, and for both these categories, skulls were generally better preserved than naturally deposited skulls. The natural breakage pattern of isolated skulls also significantly differs from the breakage pattern of skulls modified into skull-cups, suggesting that it is unlikely that skull-cups were fashioned in a manner that imitates natural breakage patterns.

Taphonomy as it applies to human remains from archaeological contexts typically considers issues of preservation and diagenesis in the burial environment. Less attention has been paid to biocultural taphonomic factors including excavation techniques, expertise of excavators, and post-excavation treatment. The ways in which human remains are transported from the field to the lab and long-term storage area; effects of field conservation; how skeletons are cleaned, stored, and organized; the degree to which excavation records and osteological analyses are documented; and the management and maintenance of collections over time all have substantial impact on the ability to evaluate and contextualize them. Examples drawn from fieldwork and study of human remains from Cyprus, Egypt, Sudan, and the USA confront these human-induced taphonomic factors. Insufficient expertise and planning for storage and ongoing care of human remains may lead to missing or damaged skeletal elements, mixing, loss of provenience information, and limited accessibility. Best practices are recommended, even where locally available materials are limited. All archaeological projects in which human burials are anticipated must include experienced bioarchaeologists in fieldwork and study to minimize damage and loss of information and to ensure ethical treatment of human remains at all stages.

The dissection of archaeological palimpsests has become a crucial process for achieving a diachronic understanding of the history of human groups. However, its widespread application to archaeological deposits has been hampered by both methodological and theoretical limitations, as well as by the inherent characteristics of the deposits. This paper explores whether overcoming these barriers, both methodological and theoretical, truly represents a significant shift in understanding past human behaviour, thereby motivating the pursuit of shorter timescales. To this end, we have analysed the lithic assemblages of Unit Xb from the Neanderthal site of El Salt (Alcoi, Iberian Peninsula) focusing on lithic attributes and raw material analyses, enabling the definition of raw material units and refitting sets. Considering these variables, we have applied archaeostratigraphic and spatial analyses in order to generate units of analysis whose content is compared to that of the entire unit. The defined archaeostratigraphic units display different spatial distributions and lithic composition. Some of them are attached to certain hearths and composed of refitted sets, while other units are related to areas without combustion evidence and integrated with bigger and heavier single products. Through this approach, here, we show that reducing the spatiotemporal scale of the record helps to unravel behavioural variability, reducing interpretative errors implicit in the assemblage-as-a-whole approach. This highlights the role of temporal resolution in reconstructing site formation processes and challenges research perspectives that assert the unnecessary or impossible nature of palimpsest dissection.

Cereal remains are common and important archaeological finds, providing crucial evidence for the origin and development of agriculture. Many previous studies have utilized one or several molecules as biomarkers to identify archaeological remains. However, there is a lack of systematic research on characteristic metabolites of common grains, especially of ancient varieties. The goal of this study was to derive a series of more species-indicative biomarkers using untargeted metabolomics as well as provide new insights into the identification of cereal remains excavated in archaeology. First, modern cereal, pottery and archeological samples were used for untargeted metabolomics to obtain plant metabolites. Then, statistical analyses were employed to screen candidate biomarkers. It was determined there are 73, 42, 138 and 58 metabolites representing broomcorn millet, foxtail millet, wheat and rice, respectively. Among the compounds mentioned above, 33 were found to be present in the archaeological samples from the Dongxiafeng site dating back around 3600 years. These 33 biomarkers would serve as characteristic elements for systematic clustering. The results indicated that among pottery sherds from the Dongxiafeng site, the most likely processed cereal is foxtail millet, and the least likely processed cereal is wheat. The theoretical calculated proportions of four grains are as follows: broomcorn millet 26%; foxtail millet 51%; wheat 18%; rice 5%. This aligns with the agricultural tradition in this region during the early Bronze Age, characterized by dryland farming with a focus on foxtail millet and broomcorn millet, while rice and wheat were also introduced.

Crescents are a distinctive component of several terminal Pleistocene–early Holocene (TP–EH) toolkits in the Far West, including the concave-based projectile point techno-complex, as demonstrated by archaeological associations, toolstone preferences, and manufacturing techniques. Archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence suggests regular association with periods of wetland expansion across this region. Numerous speculative hypotheses have been proposed for the possible function(s) of these tools, but little direct investigation or testing has been conducted. This study uses the method of multiple working hypotheses to investigate these competing propositions. It draws on multiple lines of evidence from morphological and techno-functional patterns of tool damage and rejuvenation developed from a large artifact assemblage; analogs from ethnographic, historic, and archaeological cases; paleoenvironmental and ecological observations; an actualistic experimental program; and applications of foraging and design theories. Results show how morphological variation often reflects original blank form and individual tool life-history. Patterned recycling strategies include occasional manufacture from concave-base projectile points and conversion into gravers. The combined evidence best supports the hypothesized interpretation of lunate crescents as specialized transverse projectile points used primarily for open-water hunting of waterfowl by early foragers of the Great Basin and California, especially during episodic and localized increases in their abundance. These conclusions contribute to the growing picture of diversity and adaptive flexibility among early foragers in the Far West and further indicate waterfowl as a significant but temporally and spatially variable dietary component.

The currently accepted narrative on the prehistory of bronze alloying technology follows deterministic, outdated assumptions of technological progression that ignore the role of contextual and performance factors in the decision-making processes, thus neglecting human agency. In essence, it is expected that newer techniques were overarchingly more advanced than older ones and hence replaced them. The validity of this narrative should be challenged and revised. A critical analysis of worldwide literature exposed that, contrary to predictions of the accepted theory, (1) the oldest alloying techniques persisted for centuries after newer ones were invented, and (2) several techniques usually coexisted in the same contexts. We hypothesised that these counterintuitive findings could be explained by differences in performance between techniques, (dis)advantageous at different settings. To obtain empirical information on the performance of techniques and test for behaviourally relevant performance differences between them, a series of alloying experiments were conducted. The results show that all techniques can produce objects of broadly equivalent quality while offering different trade-offs during production. Therefore, every technique—or a combination—can be advantageous under certain conditions, and there are no grounds to support a linear trajectory of substitution. These results debunk the traditional narrative and predict that co-smelting and cementation techniques were more frequently practiced in the past than hitherto assumed. Our propositions prompt a readjustment of explanatory models of bronze production organisation, trade, and consumption while opening unexplored research paths for archaeology and the history of technology.

The La Prele site (ca. 12,940 cal BP) is a deeply buried, single-component mammoth kill and campsite in Wyoming (USA). The site was discovered eroding from a creek bank 3 m deep within a 7-m tall terrace scarp, and prior investigations have primarily focused on excavations accessible from the creek bank, using heavy machinery to remove sterile overburden to access the deeply buried deposits. This approach has allowed excavations to occur safely outside of deep pits, but it has limited our ability to assess the total size and density of the site. To determine total site extent, we conducted systematic bucket auger testing of the La Prele site terrace, attempting 189 augers between 1.6 m and 6.2 m deep across the landform. We use a simulation and other mathematical procedures to infer artifact density from auger artifact counts and interpolate artifact densities across the site using GIS. We determine that La Prele is around 4500 m² in area and likely contains a buried bison bonebed and two additional artifact concentrations comparable to or exceeding the size and density of previously excavated areas. We use these insights to infer Early Paleoindian group size, concluding that around 30 people occupied La Prele.

Basalt is a widely used raw material for tool manufacture at prehistoric sites, but a unified methodology for assessing how hominfins used basalt in prehistory is lacking. A comprehensive experimental investigation of basalt tools is, thus, necessary to establish a reliable methodological framework that can be used to explore the functional properties of archaeological basalt assemblages.

The aim of this study is to contribute to the development of a methodological framework for the analysis of use-wear on basalt tools. Basalt, characterised by its distinct mechanical and structural properties and unique response to mechanical stress, requires specialised treatment and investigation.

To address this, our basalt varieties were characterised using SEM–EDS analysis. Sequential experiments were conducted, using the experimental basalt tools in different activities, including butchery, hide, bone and woodworking to determine use-wear formation patterns. Subsequentially, various analytical tools, including optical and scanning electron microscopes, were used to analyse macro- and micro-wear traces on basalt.

Our results provide useful information on methodological aspects of use-wear formation on basalt. The inclusion of detailed cleaning and experimental protocols enhanced the robustness of our methodology. Furthermore, the combined utilisation of various microscopes enabled to compile a comprehensive and complementary information on such a complex raw material such as basalt and to characterise thoroughly the diagnostic features of the micro-wear traces (e.g. edge damage, rounding, polish).