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"Copper age."
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Creating Histories: Different Perspectives, Controversial Narratives at Rákóczifalva, an Early Copper Age Site on the Great Hungarian Plain
A Copper Age settlement and cemetery was fully excavated at Rákóczifalva-Bivaly-tó Site 1/C in 2005-2007, making it possible to compare the use of its material culture in closely related, coeval, but different archaeological contexts. Such a rare set of circumstances allows the authors to highlight methodological issues associated with the distorting effect of archaeological finds made on sites where only settlement or burial data are available, and on the importance of choosing appropriate analytical units.
Journal Article
X-ray computed microtomography of Late Copper Age decorated bowls with cross-shaped foots from central Slovenia and the Trieste Karst (North-Eastern Italy): technology and paste characterisation
About 20 Late Copper Age bowls with cross-shaped foots from Deschmann’s pile dwellings (Ljubljansko barje, central Slovenia) and Trieste Karst (North-Eastern Italy) have been investigated using X-ray computed microtomography (microCT) in order to study the vessel-forming technique, to characterise their pastes and to test the hypothesis that some Karst bowls could have been imported from nowadays central Slovenia or even more distant regions. In three selected virtual slices per sample, clay, lithic inclusions and pores have been segmented and quantified. In addition, the area, maximum length and width of each lithic inclusion have been calculated. Then, the microCT-derived results have been statistically analysed by principal component analysis (PCA). The orientation of pores and disjunctions in microCT volumes show that the basins of the bowls were built using mainly the coiling technique, while the base was shaped starting from a central piece, to which a layer of clay was added and then reshaped in order to produce the foots. The Slovenian bowls include both medium/coarse-grained and very fine- or fine-grained vessels mainly tempered with carbonate inclusions. The pastes of the Karst bowls are considerably heterogeneous. One bowl was most likely imported to the Karst but not from central Slovenia as it shows peculiar components, shape and decoration. The other two imported vessels show a very fine-grained paste comparable to the one of several samples from Deschmann’s pile dwellings. Such technological similarity is confirmed by PCA of microCT data and petrographic observations. Our study confirms the existence of strong cultural connections between central Slovenia and the northernmost Adriatic coast during the Late Copper Age.
Journal Article
New insights into the Iron Age archaeology of Edom, southern Jordan : surveys, excavations, and research from the University of California, San Diego - Department of Antiquities of Jordan, Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP)
\"Situated south of the Dead Sea, near the famous Nabatean capital of Petra, the Faynan region in Jordan contains the largest deposits of copper ore in the southern Levant. The Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP) takes an anthropological archaeology approach to the deep-time study of culture change in one of the Old World's most important locales for studying technological development. Using innovative digital tools for data recording, curation, analyses and dissemination, the researchers focused on ancient mining and metallurgy as the subject of surveys and excavations related to the Iron Age (ca. 1200-500 B.C.E.), when the first local, historical state-level societies appeared in this part of the eastern Mediterranean basin. This comprehensive and important volume challenges the current scholarly consensus concerning the emergence and historicity of the Iron Age polity of biblical Edom and some of its neighbors, such as ancient Israel\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Polished Stone Axes in Caput Adriae from the Neolithic to the Copper Age
This paper reports the results of a long-term project on the stone axes from Caput Adriae. Available data show that jade axes originating in the western Alps reached the Neolithic groups of Friuli Venezia Giulia and coastal Istria as early as the second half of the 6th millennium BC, during the Danilo/Vlaška culture. The exchange of this and other classes of lithic artefacts testifies that in this period this area was fully integrated into long-distance exchange systems that used mainly coastal routes. These systems would have continued in the 5th millennium BC, as indicated by a few oversized jade axe blades and other materials. Far from the coast, jade axes entered central Slovenia, probably reaching sites of the Sava Group of the Lengyel culture in the first half of the 5th millennium BC. In roughly the same period, shafthole axes made of Bohemian metabasites (BM) spread over central and southeastern Europe, crossed the Alps and reached Italy. According to different Neolithic traditions, during the 5th millennium Europe appears to be divided into a jade-using western area and a central-eastern BM-using one. During the 4th millennium BC, the exchange ne Alpine and Balkan world, where the raw material sources of the main groups of shaft-hole axes are located. The association of the rocks used for axe production and copper ore suggests that the changes in raw material exploitation strategies during the Copper Age were probably related to the development of the first metallurgy.
Journal Article
Bioarchaeology and climate change : a view from South Asian prehistory
In the context of current debates about global warming, archaeology contributes important insights for understanding environmental changes in prehistory, and the consequences and responses of past populations to them.
In Indian archaeology, climate change and monsoon variability are often invoked to explain major demographic transitions, cultural changes, and migrations of prehistoric populations. During the late Holocene (1400-700 B.C.), agricultural communities flourished in a semiarid region of the Indian subcontinent, until they precipitously collapsed. Gwen Robbins Schug integrates the most recent paleoclimate reconstructions with an innovative analysis of skeletal remains from one of the last abandoned villages to provide a new interpretation of the archaeological record of this period.
Robbins Schug’s biocultural synthesis provides us with a new way of looking at the adaptive, social, and cultural transformations that took place in this region during the first and second millennia B.C. Her work clearly and compellingly usurps the climate change paradigm, demonstrating the complexity of human-environmental transformations. This original and significant contribution to bioarchaeological research and methodology enriches our understanding of both global climate change and South Asian prehistory.
eBook
Burials and Society in Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Ireland
Burials and Society in Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age
Ireland describes and analyses the increasing complexity of
later Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age burial in Ireland, using
burial complexity as a proxy for increasing social complexity, and
as a tool for examining social structure. The book commences with a
discussion of theoretical approaches to the study of burials in
both anthropology and archaeology and continues with a summary of
the archaeological and environmental background to the Irish
Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Then a set of criteria for
identifying different types of social organisation is proposed,
before an in-depth examination of the radiocarbon chronology of
Irish Single Burials, which leads to a multifaceted statistical
analysis of the Single Burial Tradition burial utilising
descriptive and multivariate statistical approaches. A
chronological model of the Irish Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age
is then presented which provides the basis for a discussion of
increasing burial and social complexity in Ireland over this
period, proposing an evolution from an egalitarian society in the
later Chalcolithic Period through to a prestige goods chiefdom
emerging around 1900 BC. It is suggested that the decline of copper
production at Ross Island, Co. Cork after 2000 BC may have led to a
'copper crisis' which would have been a profoundly disrupting
event, destroying the influence of copper miners and shifting power
to copper workers, and those who controlled them. This would have
provided a stimulus towards the centralisation of power and the
emergence of a ranked social hierarchy. The effects of this 'copper
crisis' would have been felt in Britain also, where much Ross
Island copper was consumed and may have led to similar
developments, with the emergence of the Wessex Culture a similar
response in Britain to the same stimulus.
eBook
Physical Barriers, Cultural Connections
This book considers the early copper and copper-alloy metallurgy of the entire Circum- Alpine region. It introduces a new approach to the interpretation of chemical composition data sets, which has been applied to a comprehensive regional database for the first time.
eBook
Chronology of the perishables: first AMS sup.14C dates of wooden artefacts from Aeneolithic-Bronze Age waterlogged sites in the Trans-Urals, Russia
Intriguing wooden objects, excavated (mostly unstratigraphically) from peat bogs in the Trans-Urals region of Russia, are here dated by AMS and found to belong to the Aeneolithic and Bronze Age. In spite of a long sojourn in museums, and conservation with various chemicals, the dates obtained were consistent and reliable.
Journal Article