Tell Halif gives us an example of the pillared house from the Iron Age II period. Based on this house, what we can address is whether there is a typical set of activities undertaken in this house. Do the “de facto” assemblages of artifacts reflect a typical everyday use of space or a different use of space because of military activity associated with the siege and destruction of the settlement? It can be demonstrated from Tell Halif’s archaeological data that, once the specific activities are identified, their organization also can be identified. These remains are compared with other Iron Age houses from the same site and other sites in the Negev and the southern Shephelah. The purpose of this research is to examine and add to our understanding of the Iron Age household and how it is reflected in the patterning of artifacts in the buildings occupied by the household.

The map of Iron Age Anatolia (ca. 1200-550 BCE, Turkey) is dotted by territorial kingdoms that rose and were subsumed into larger political entities throughout its history. Current archaeological narratives commonly place Lydia into this scene quite late in the Iron Age with the rise of its Mermnad elite in the seventh century BCE. Their power is well attested by the rapid expansion of their influence in Anatolia, as well as by their ambitious buildings programs that monumentalized their capital city Sardis. Among these programs, monumental urban terrace platforms hold a unique position, for they regularized the rugged topography of a naturally elevated district at the heart of Sardis, converting it into a visibly dominant promontory to house the Lydian palace. Until recently there were no precedents for these enormous man-made investments, hence the narrative of the Mermnad elite’s late and fast emergence and the reconstruction of Sardis as an agglomeration of small sites before their time. The fresh discovery of a long sequence of large-scale constructions (2000-700 BCE) in the city’s elite precinct now casts doubt on this narrative. In this dissertation, I study these early monumental constructions along with the later terraces to investigate the course of Lydian elite placemaking and their wider implications for Lydia’s place in Iron Age Anatolia. This research is multi-scalar, expanding out from a detailed study of architecture, to the place of terraces within the socio-spatial fabric of diachronic settlements at Sardis, and finally to wider regional Anatolian context. I begin with the examination of the corpus of urban terrace constructions in Sardis and their architectural design principles and dating evidence. Next, I compare the terraces to constructions from domestic neighborhoods as well as other Mermnad elite structures. Their scalar facets—large size, costly materials, and large labor requirements—mark them as monumental in each building episode. I consider symbolic and experiential facets using a variety of theoretical frameworks—memory, social submission, performance, and domination—to demonstrate how these terraces shaped their socio-spatial environments through ongoing claims of an old central precinct. This was achieved by introducing architectural novelties as well as more formality and regularity, employing transformative labor as a means of public spectacle and creating built representations of spatial control and domination. At the same time, I show the extent to which these practices foreshadow Mermnad elite placemaking ideologies. Thus, this research marks Lydian constructions in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE as productions of a previously unregistered early Lydian elite. I conclude by contextualizing early Lydian placemaking practices within Anatolia’s broader socio-political spheres. This study reveals terracing to demarcate elite space as a Lydian mode of placemaking and that in timing and ideology it followed the culture-political trajectories of Anatolia—by peer-polity competition—more so than those of the Aegean. As a result, I acknowledge the deeper history of the ruling elite in Lydia, one that reverses the narrative of a sudden, late, and rapid development fostered by the Mermnads. This study, thus, makes a place for Lydia in the Iron Age maps of Anatolia two centuries earlier than has been previously believed.

No

Roundhouses are ubiquitous in prehistoric Britain, yet previous studies of these iconic features have tended to overlook their human occupants, focusing instead on their external morphology and structural engineering. Those studies which have attempted to move beyond functionalist frameworks, have often applied overarching and broad-scale cosmological models which, though re-orientating study towards social considerations, have likewise failed to shed light on the interaction between roundhouse and their inhabitants, particularly at a household level. This research reanalyses the Late Iron Age settlement at Broxmouth, East Lothian, using new theoretical approaches and advances in AMS dating to ask new questions of a 30 year old data-set. Biographical and materiality approaches, which draw heavily on relational analogy with the ethnographic record, have allowed for detailed reconstruction of the life-history of each structure, and important moments within these histories. Roundhouse replacement appears to have taken place on a roughly generational basis, as a means by which households renegotiated their social identities within the community. Structured deposition, and the materiality of the roundhouse fabric itself, appears to have played an important role in the communication of identity, where the retention of previous structural fabric, the deposition of curated items, and the referencing of former internal features, created physical and symbolic links with the past, and with the ancestors. As such, this study demonstrates that roundhouses were far more than mere dwellings, and were integral to the ways in which past societies rationalised the world around them. / AHRC funding the affiliated Collaborative Doctoral Awards / The full text was made available at the end of the extended embargo, 31st March 2020.

Khirbet Summeily is an early Iron Age II site located northwest of Tell el-Hesi in Southern Israel. Excavations sponsored by the Cobb Institute of Archaeology have revealed a large structure with a potential ritual space dated to the Iron Age IIA (ca. 1000-980/850 B.C.E.). Recent interpretations suggest the site was integrated into a regional economic and political system and functioned as a potential administrative outpost based on the material culture and architecture recovered from the Iron Age IIA layers. This thesis presents the carbon, oxygen, and strontium isotopic analyses of intra-tooth samples from ovicaprine and cattle remains to test herd management strategies in connection to administrative and cultic provisioning activities. The animal remains are used as proxies to identify political and economic ties through herd management patterns. These results will test the hypothesis that Khirbet Summeily was an administrative outpost integrated into a larger political and/or economic network.

No description available.

This thesis investigates breastfeeding and weaning patterns in an Iron Age (7th – 4th century BCE) sample of subadults (n=12) and adults (n=9) buried at the sites of Botromagno, Parco San Stefano and Padreterno in southern Italy. Stable isotope analysis of both human tooth dentine and bone collagen for each subadult, and tooth dentine for adults, was undertaken to create early-life feeding histories. The dentine serial sections were used to determine the onset and completion of weaning for each individual, as well as distinguish general trends in early feeding practices at these Iron Age sites. Results indicate that the average onset of weaning in subadults occurred at 8 ± 3.4 months and weaning was completed by 4 years of age at the latest for all individuals; however, the patterns of breastfeeding and weaning were variable in this sample. This study also explores variation in early childhood diet between survivors and non-survivors (i.e., < 4 years of age). Non-survivors were weaned more rapidly than survivors – possibly contributing to their earlier death – and some non-survivors demonstrated elevated δ15N values that may have been a result of physiological stress. It is, however, difficult to distinguish signals of breastfeeding versus stress in young children who were still likely consuming breast milk. Finally, differences in isotope data between dentine serial sampling and bulk-bone sampling of rib and femoral collagen from the same individuals were investigated. The results show that the combined use of dentine and bone data contribute to more nuanced interpretations of weaning. Further, rib samples represent diet closer to the time of death than femoral samples, as faster bone turnover rate in ribs allow for the incorporation of more recent dietary changes. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

No / The agricultural ¿revolution¿ in Iron Age Orkney is the subject of Julie Bond¿s paper. Focusing on Pool in Sanday, she outlines the perceived changes in animal husbandry and cultivation over the lifetime of the settlement ¿ changes she describes as ¿innovations and intensification in the agricultural economy of Orkney before the arrival of the Vikings.¿ The apparent success of these Iron Age farming settlements may well be, she adds, the reason they may have been early targets for Scandinavian settlers.

Yes / DNA analysis demonstrates that all seven individuals buried in an Early Iron Age barrow at Dolge njive, southeast Slovenia, are close biological relatives. Although group composition does not suggest strict adherence to a patrilineal or matrilineal kinship system, the funerary tradition appears highly gendered, with family links through both the male and female line being important in structuring communities. We explore the implications for our understandings of kinship and funerary practices in Early Iron Age southeast Europe. / This research forms part of ENTRANS: a collaborative project involving the Universities of Bradford, Zagreb and Ljubljana, and the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia. ENTRANS (PI: Armit) received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 291827. The project is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, BMBF via PT-DLR, DASTI, ETAG, FCT, FNR, FNRS, FWF, FWO, HAZU, IRC, LMT, MHEST, NWO, NCN, RANNÍS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socioeconomic Sciences and Humanities programme. Research for this paper also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 834087 (COMMIOS). The ancient DNA work was supported by NIH grant GM100233, John Templeton Foundation grant 61220, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Allen Discovery Center program, a Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group advised program of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

Yes / Previous research on the Iron Age in Britain has argued that no fishing occurred during this period in Britain. This argument has now been complicated by large assemblages of fish bones that have been excavated from Iron Age sites in the Northern Isles. Further investigation into this issue became the focus of the author's MSc dissertation research in 2016, specifically on the recently excavated fish bone assemblages from the site of Swandro on Rousay, Orkney. Analytical methods, including stable isotope analysis and scanning electron microscopy, were applied in an attempt to determine how the fish may have been utilised at the site. Results have revealed evidence that could be interpreted as fishing activity and possible consumption by humans at Swandro. This paper disseminates and further examines these results and considers how this particular project is useful as a pilot study in the application of analytical methodologies to problematic faunal remains such as fish, and why this could be important to future zooarchaeological and environmental archaeological research.