Pottery, as an artifact, is often used as evidence of exchange patterns among groups during prehistory. This research incorporates paradigmatic classification and petrography to answer questions related to provenience, production mode, and exchange patterns of handmade prehistoric pottery from Gajtan, Zagorë, Kodër Boks, Tumuli 088 and 099 in Shkodër, in Northern Albania. Pottery samples analyzed in this study were collected from test excavations by the Shkodra Archaeological Project (PASH). The results yielded evidence that the area has sufficient local clay sources and other easily accessible natural resources to produce pottery in a domestic mode. Gajtan and Zagorë appeared as two distinct entities, but the former settlement seems to have played a dominant role as a production and distribution center within the region. Results from this study indicate that pots appear to have played an important socio-economic role in northern Albania, across time and space.

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No description available.

No description available.

Following excavations in the Promontory Caves and at several open sites in the Provo River Delta region, Steward (1937) characterized the Promontory culture as large game hunters. He based this on the high number of bison bones recovered within the Caves. Excavations at additional Promontory sites along the Wasatch Front contain faunal assemblages which differ significantly from those in the caves, showing that people living at open sites relied more heavily on small game, waterfowl, and aquatic resources than large game. These differences have been mostly attributed to Steward's sampling strategy and lack of screening, but faunal material recovered during 2011 excavations at the caves support Steward's initial assessment: the people living in the caves were hunting large game and little else. Using faunal data from seven sites, I discuss how the faunal assemblages differ and the implications of hunting practices in discussions of Promontory culture.

This is a study of cobblestone tools from metalliferous mine sites in England and Wales dated to the Bronze Age which were most probably used to extract copper ore. The site assemblages studied are from the Great Orme, Copa Hill in Cwmystwyth, Nantyreira, Parys Mountain and Alderley Edge. The majority of the tools are hammerstones used to mine and beneficiate metal ore. Some of these have been modified to facilitate hafting. The functional uses of these tools have been identified by the form and position of use- wear on a macroscopic level. The recording procedure encompasses cobble morphology, the degree, type and direction of use, breakage patterns, the reuse of tools and tool fragments and the classification of hafting modification. The possibility of tool specialization within tool types has been examined by the analysis of use-wear and cobble shape and size. The analysis of stone hammer size suggests that the Great Orme material is related to specific working techniques employed to extract ore from the different types of ore deposits. Ore comminution has been demonstrated to have been generally achieved by ‘block-on-block’ crushing with flat-sided hammers. Conclusions are draw on the overall efficiency of ore extraction in the Bronze Age and theories on the organization of mining are presented. The sedimentary form of the cobblestone tools has also been examined, including the identification of natural abrasion marks and features. At Cwmystwyth and the Great Orme possible sources of cobblestones have been studied in order to assess the nature of cobble selection. / SERC studentship / The additional content files which accompanied the thesis are not available on Bradford Scholars, but are available from the British Library Ethos Service.

In the central Andes, complex civilizational processes and dramatic biophysical phenomena have concurred for thousands of years. The confluence of these cultural and natural forces implies that environmental disturbances should be neither overemphasized nor ignored but adequately included as a variable in the modeling of the cultural processes of the Andean prehistory. In this sense, it is justified to clarify why and how people from pre-Hispanic urban centers preferred to accept risk associated with disaster-prone settings and how they eventually developed social responses to biophysical hazards through centuries.Framed within this purpose, this dissertation takes as a case study the prehistoric urban center of Cajamarquilla (138 ha) located in a flood-prone sector on the arid Peruvian central coast, and occupied mainly but intermittently for a period of almost 800 years between ca. AD 650 and 1400 (from the Middle Horizon to the Late Intermediate Period). My research was built on the basis of theoretical and methodological contributions of the Historical Ecology, Anthropology of Disasters, and Environmental Archaeology. Thus, it included conventional archeological procedures, a geomorphological characterization of the study area, and archaeobotanical and geoarchaeological methods and techniques. Although a range of contexts were analyzed, the study of the hydraulic (first-order irrigation canals) and storage (underground silos) systems associated with the site were strongly emphasized. Results indicate that the interspersed occurrence of droughts and floods with phases of dynamic constructive activity in Cajamarquilla express a form of risk normalization. This included the maximum use of clay soils and the involvement of the site residents with planned abandonment processes, although apparently sudden final abandonment has also been documented. While it has been verified that occupational dynamics in Cajamarquilla were constantly constrained by regional eco-climatic conditions, these always responded simultaneously to the socio-political controls of each era, so that social responses were not only multifactorial in their origins but also multipurpose in their ends, an illustration of this being the thousands of bottle-shaped, capacious silos that characterize the site. This makes sense with the integrative culture-nature worldviews of the indigenous Andean societies. Finally, this investigation also finds that, beyond the common socio-environmental connotation noted above, social action in Cajamarquilla also shows substantial differences between its different cultural occupations when dealing with environmental determinants: Its earliest inhabitants carefully planned an ambitious technological equipment (canals and silos), while its later inhabitants were characterized by their marked sense of opportunism and pragmatism both in the use/readjustment of such inherited technologies and the rules of community life within the settlement. In general, beyond usual binary frames that oppose determinism versus possibilism, or collapse versus resilience, the case of Cajamarquilla raises the anthropological need for an integrative approach focused on how and to what extent cultural and natural forces intermingle in urban life.

Native American societies in the Yazoo Basin during the Mississippian Period (ca. 1000 – 1700 A.D.) extensively built platform mounds often associated with “elite” or “sacred” areas, and exotic or energy expensive artifacts. Excessive energy expenditure, or “waste” behaviors, may be explained with costly signaling and bet-hedging, hypotheses stemming from evolutionary theory. I argue that costly signaling may best explain the waste evident in hierarchical and agricultural Mississippian Period societies of the Mississippi Valley. Consequently, I feel that differing levels of energy expenditure may be evident from the remains of perishable construction excavated from mound summits and off-mound contexts. During that time, wattle and daub was a common method of wall construction in the Yazoo Basin, leaving abundant evidence at Mississippian sites. By studying imprints from preserved daub fragments, the use of specific construction methods can be compared between mound and non-mound contexts and relative energy expenditure assessed.

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No description available.