Academic literature on the topic 'Excavations (Archaeology) – Arizona – Joint site'

Archaeologists have had difficulty resolving the issues surrounding chronology and external relations during the late prehistoric occupation (A.D. 1150–1450) of the far southwestern corner of New Mexico and the far southeastern corner of Arizona (generally labeled the Animas phase). This article addresses these concerns using data from excavations at the Boss Ranch site (AZ FF: 7:10 [ASM]), an Animas habitation site located in the upper San Bernardino Valley. A suite of data is reviewed, including stratigraphy, architecture, radiocarbon dates, ceramic types, and chipped stone and faunal assemblage characteristics. Based on these analyses, the occupational history of the site likely spans more than a century, with three separate occupations. Mobility patterns appear to change through time, with the earliest occupation suggesting part-time residence. Finally, the regional implications of a more dynamic view of the Animas phase are presented.

This field report covers the work of the Egypt Exploration Society and Macquarie University Joint Mission during the period of 2018 and 2019 at Qubbet el-Hawa (third to fifth field seasons). Excavations focused on the infrastructure of the Lower Necropolis (Sites B and C) and the discovery of the causeway of Tomb QH90 (Site E). A detailed analysis of the pottery found and archaeometrical results complement the report.

In April 1995 a three week season of excavation was conducted at the ancient city of Euesperides by the Society for Libyan Studies and the Department of Archaeology, Gar Younis University, Benghazi, in collaboration with the Libyan Department of Antiquities. This note provides a brief account of the main findings.The background to the new work at the site is as follows: in the early 1990s unauthorised excavations for a shopping precinct took place immediately to the north of the known archaeological zone of Sidi Abeid, bringing to light huge quantities of pottery and other artefacts of the Greek period. Eye-witnesses report also the removal of large quantities of ancient building stone during these operations. Following initiatives by the Department of Antiquities and Gar Younis University a legal judgement was obtained suspending further construction (the court case is continuing) and archaeological investigations were set in train.The condition of the site was brought to the attention of Drs Susan Walker and Joyce Reynolds during their visit to Benghazi in September 1993. A year later, following further visits by the first-named author of this note (in December 1993) and by the Libya Society's Chairwoman, Dr Walker, and Head of Mission, Professor Graeme Barker (in Spring 1994), a joint programme of research was agreed and a two-year contract with the Department of Antiquities was signed in Tripoli. The Society was able to divert resources immediately to the site, and the results of the ensuing investigation, which benefited greatly from the participation of the Department of Archaeology, are reported elsewhere in this volume. The field directors, Drs Peter Hayes and David Mattingly, very kindly made available the full records of this work in advance of the excavations.

The first phase of the Trypillia mega-sites' methodological revolution began in 1971 with aerial photography, magnetic prospection, and archaeological excavations of huge settlements of hundreds of hectares belonging to the Trypillia culture in Ukraine. Since 2009, we have created a second phase of the methodological revolution in studies of Trypillia mega-sites, which has provided more significant advances in our understanding of these large sites than any other single research development in the last three decades, thanks partly to the participation of joint Ukrainian-foreign teams. In this paper, we outline the main aspects of the second phase, using examples from the Anglo-Ukrainian project ‘Early urbanism in prehistoric Europe: the case of the Trypillia mega-sites', working at Nebelivka (also spelled ‘Nebilivka’), and the Ukrainian-German project ‘Economy, demography and social space of Trypillia mega-sites', working at Taljanky (‘Talianki’), Maydanetske (‘Maydanetskoe’), and Dobrovody, as well as the smaller site at Apolianka.

AbstractThe study of ancient sites in Turkmenistan has in the 80s focused on the oasis of Merv (ancient Margiana), the Uzboy valley and Old Nisa. At Merv a joint Central Asian-Italian team has been preparing an archaeological map of the oasis, based on information from a complete survey of the area (over 220 sites), fixed-site excavations and sondage digs. The survey shows the continuity of different monuments on the same sites, the shift of the centre of the oasis from north to south by the time of the building of Antiochia Margiana in the 3rd c. B.C. and the reoccupation of the north by fortified settlements following the full settlement, irrigation and cultivation of the south after the 1st c. B.C. Excavations were made of fortified settlements at Chilbourj and Göbekli-depe (where over 2000 Parthian clay bullae were found). Study of sites along the Uzboy valley has altered views about changes in aridity/humidity in the area. A new period of humidity in the 7th c. B.C.-4th c. A.D. has been associated with the activity of a group of nomadic cattlebreeders, identified with the Massagetae, whose tribal centre is thought to have been the unusual site at Ichjanli-depe. At the important Parthian centre of Old Nisa recent study has been made of the "building with a square hall" (which may have been a fire temple), the "tower" of Old Nisa (whose architecture is unique in the Hellenistic Orient) and the "round temple", while near to the city investigations of the important Parthian complex at Mansurdepc have revealed two remarkable pottery fragments with painted portraits.

AbstractOne of the most intriguing questions of South American archaeology is the time, place, and origin of the earliest pottery. Since the late 1950s, the earliest pottery has been attributed to the materials of the Early Formative Valdivia culture (5600–3500 BP), coastal Ecuador. Excavations at the Real Alto site conducted in the 1970s and 1980s allowed the rejection of the spectacular “Jomon–Valdivia” hypothesis and established a local origin of the phenomenon. Recent radiocarbon dates from a joint Russian–Japanese–Ecuadorian project at Real Alto open a new page in our knowledge of the transition from pre-ceramic Las Vegas to ceramic Valdivia cultures.

In 1997, the .Joint Italian-Libyan Archaeological Mission in the Akakus and Messak (Libyan Sahara)., presently directed by Savino di Lernia, started a program of historical archaeology aimed at recovering remains of the Garamantian period, ca 800 BC to 350 AD. One of the selected sites is Fewet, a small but well nucleated oasis some 10 km SW of Ghat. After a first sounding in 2001, part of the settlement was excavated in 2002-2003, and the adjacent necropolis was surveyed in 2003. The excavated settlement is a rounded compound, with a perimeter wall of stones and mud bricks and a series of small dwelling units, with partition walls in mud bricks, around a central empty space and a communal well. One half of the compound is well preserved, with smashed pottery and remains of carbonized seeds and basketry on the sandy floors. The site is radiocarbon dated to the 2nd-1st centuries BC. The necropolis, including ca 1000 tumuli (but the survey is not yet complete) extends over the entire course of Garamantian history, about one millennium or more, and the typological development - from conical to drum-shaped tumuli - is confirmed by the associated pottery from Final Pastoral to Post-Garamantian times. The site of Fewet provides a good example of a small rural settlement at the SW border of the Garamantian kingdom, and the entire research project (geology and palaeo-environmental studies, archaeological excavation and survey) helps to figure out the life and the material culture in a small Saharan oasis of the proto-historical period.

The first excavation season of a joint project of the PCMA and Department of Archaeology and Excavations, Ministry of Heritage and Culture, Oman, was carried out in the microregion of Qumayrah in the fall of 2016. A single tomb was investigated at an Umm an-Nar period burial site in the area of the village of Al-Ayn. A complete ground-plan was traced, identifying the tomb as an example of a well-known type with interior divided into four burial chambers by crosswalls. The excavated quadrant yielded commingled skeletal remains and mortuary gifts: numerous beads, a number of pottery sherds and a single complete vessel, a few metal objects and a score of stone vessel fragments.

The site of Kouphovouno, just south of Sparta, is one of the main Neolithic sites in Laconia. It was first settled in the Middle Neolithic period and developed into a large village with remains occupying some 4–5 hectares. A joint team from the British School at Athens and the Ecole française d'Athènes carried out excavations at the site in 2001–6. There is evidence for occupation during the Bronze Age, and for an extensive Late Roman villa, but this article concentrates on the chronology of the site during the Middle and Late Neolithic phases. The evidence from stratigraphic sequences, pottery typology, seriation and Bayesian analysis of the radiocarbon dates is brought together to present a detailed chronological sequence covering the periodc.5800–5000bc. In particular the analysis relies on the results from two deep soundings, one excavated in Area C carried down to the natural sediments underlying the site and exposing the earliest period of occupation, and the second in Area G covering the later Middle Neolithic and much of the Late Neolithic phase. The findings from Kouphovouno are placed more generally in the context of finds from other sites in the Peloponnese and in particular in relation to the important sequence from Franchthi Cave. On the basis of the evidence it is argued that the transition from Middle Neolithic to Late Neolithic in southern Greece was not abrupt, as had previously been thought, but showed a gradual evolution. This finding has implications for our understanding of the process of transformation that southern Greece underwent in the course of the later sixth millenniumbc.

The long-standing archaeological research of the Serbian Vinca culture sites of Belovode and Plocnik has been strengthened with the joint collaborative work with the UCL Institute of Archaeology in the past 6 years. This collaboration yielded scientific demonstration of the world?s earliest copper smelting amongst the excavated materials, c. 7000 years old. In the six years since the first publication of this finding in 2010, a number of detailed analytical studies followed, together with another breakthrough discovery of the world?s earliest tin bronze artefact. This artefact was excavated in a secure context within a Vinca culture settlement feature at the site of Plocnik, which was radiocarbon dated to c. 4650 BC. On the basis of the early metallurgical results from Belovode, the UK Government funded a large international collaborative project from 2012-2015. This included Serbian, British and German teams all of whom brought substantial experience and cutting-edge technology to the study of the evolution of the earliest known metal-making in its 5th millennium BC Balkan cultural context. This project?s forthcoming publications, including a major monograph published by UCL Press, which will be free to download, promise to shed new light on the life of the first metal-making communities in Eurasia, and also outline integrated methodological approaches that will serve as a model for similar projects worldwide. The open, balanced and respectful research atmosphere within our core project team is currently being challenged by an unsubstantiated controversy. This controversy arises from accusations against the project team members by Dusko Sljivar, a once an extremely supportive and prominent member of our team. Each of these accusations by Dusko Sljivar is completely contradictory to his own previous documented work, and have therefore easily been refuted. The work by Dusko Sljivar in question encompasses: two decades of excavations at the sites of Belovode and Plocnik; including single-authored and joint publications prior to 2012, including those with Miljana Radivojevic and Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic; and official field documentation, either signed off solely by him, or together with his co-excavator at the site of Plocnik, Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic. The first accusation, published in 2014, saw Dusko Sljivar deny, together with another colleague, the veracity of his original field journal notes on the context of the previously mentioned tin bronze foil, for which he received an immediate and successful rebuttal. In the second accusation, published in Starinar LXV/ 2015, Dusko Sljivar continued with the same practice of denying his own official field journals and publications which he (co-) authored with a series of false accusations relating to the manipulation of the original data from the excavations of the sites of Belovode and Plocnik by Radivojevic and Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic. In the third accusation, Sljivar argues that his copyright was infringed, and that field journals were used without permission. This is despite the fact that these accusations are legally and formally unsupported, and that he shared his data and materials during the course of a long collaboration and co-authorship on a number of articles with both Radivojevic and Kuzmanovic- Cvetkovic over the course of the last two decades. In other words, in order to validate his accusations and to seek to damage our untainted academic standings, Dusko Sljivar has denied all his professional and academic achievements, research articles, field diaries and formal documents that he ever (co-) wrote and/or signed on the topic. He even goes as far as to exclude a landmark joint publication in an international peer-reviewed scientific journal (Radivojevic et al. 2010) from his citation list in order to support his claim that a formal agreement on the joint publishing of Belovode metallurgy results has never been fulfilled. Sljivar also omitted the published rebuttal (Radivojevic et al. 2014) to unsubstantiated claims on alleged manipulation of contextual data of the tin bronze foil from the Vinca culture site of Plocnik put forward in a joint article by him and another colleague (Sljivar and Boric 2014). In order to end this malicious debate, we present our rebuttal from 2014 and further elaborate upon it by showing the original quotes from the Plocnik field diary on the day that the tin bronze foil in question was found, and from the concluding remarks of the diary in question. We again clearly demonstrate that there has never been any doubt regarding the secure context of the tin bronze foil within the Vinca culture material, that the Vinca horizon is the only cultural occupation at the site of Plocnik and that no intrusion has ever been observed in the context of this find, not on the day of the discovery, not in the conclusions or the excavation field diary, and not in the first publication of the said find by Dusko Sljivar. We have presented a detailed account of this particular case in order to show Sljivar?s contradictory and inconsistent account of the official fieldwork documentation that he co-authored. It would appear that either Sljivar made a false field diary entry regarding the context of the tin bronze foil on the day of its discovery in 2008, or he presented incorrect information in the later joint commentary. The former hypothesis that Sljivar made a false entry in the field diary in 2008 in order to potentially mislead later scholarship does not seem plausible, especially as the object of dispute was not identified as tin-bronze on the day of discovery, but merely as another copper object from Plocnik and therefore not nearly as important to early metallurgical scholarship. To underline further the absurdity of the situation in which we found ourselves with Sljivar, we should also mention Sljivar?s initial agreement to co-author the paper we published in Starinar XLIV/2014, from which he withdrew without offering any constructive comments, only to publicly publish his views as well as professional and personal insults directed towards us in Starinar XLV/2015. The situation where Sljivar had the opportunity to act in his best professional interest was while our article was still in preparation and he chose not to do it; this leads us to assume that professional interests were not his priority on this matter. Finally, Sljivar?s deceitful and erroneous claims were executed in a spiteful language that is unfit for a scholarly journal, and damages both his reputation and the decision of this journal to publish them. We further elaborate on these developments in the broader context of Serbian archaeology, quoting the legislation on the intellectual copyright of excavation directors over the archaeological materials that they have excavated. The current law on Cultural Monuments recognizes the exclusive rights of excavation directors to publish their research for the period of 12 months after the excavations ended. After this period, other interested parties in the field can access the materials and any related field documentation. This demonstrates, alongside previously mentioned scientific arguments, that we have worked with the Belovode and Plocnik materials in accordance with the valid legal regulations. We conclude that there is no formal support for the exclusive interpretation of lives of communities in the sites of Belovode and Plocnik c. 7000 years ago, and emphasise the value of our original scientific contribution as illuminating a particular economic activity of the inhabitants of these two prehistoric villages. Finally, we call for the reinforcement of existing procedures in Serbia so that our profession can prevent any future misconduct such as that exemplified in the attempt by Dusko Sljivar.

This paper presents the results of the first 3 years of activity of the joint Italian-Armenian expedition between the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Science (Armenia) and the ISMEO – Association of Mediterranean and Oriental Studies (Italy) in the Republic of Armenia. The Italian-Armenian project, named Kotayk Survey Project, aims to evaluate the archaeological landscape patterns of the territory of the Hrazdan river basin, which is located between two of the most important regions of Armenian highlands: the Araxes valley and the Lake Sevan basin. Along with a detailed surface survey, test excavations have been performed in a fortified site dated to the Middle Iron Age.

Of all the livelihoods made possible by land development, Cory Breternitz’s job was one of the more peculiar. He was paid to do archaeological excavations by people who hoped he would find nothing of interest. His Phoenix-based firm was one of many private archaeology firms that sprang up in response to legislation (the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970) designed to protect cultural resources such as prehistoric artifacts or remains. These laws require government agencies and private developers to hire historians and archaeologists to survey sites and inventory the results before they start building. At the height of the Arizona housing boom, Breternitz, who had previously worked for the Navajo Nation for more than twenty years, spent much of his time on the urban fringe, sifting through desert soil, looking for evidence of Hohokam settlement before the bulldozers “scraped the desert clean” and the construction crews moved in with chipboard, two-by-fours, and stucco to throw up a brown-tiled subdivision. If Breternitz uncovered a prehistoric structure, even a hamlet, it was still the developer’s prerogative to plough it under. “The United States,” he explained, “is different than most countries in the world in that private property is sacred, and the government cannot tell you what to do with it. In places like England, historic properties on your land belong to the Crown, and whatever you find—like a hoard of medieval coins—belongs to the government. In the U.S. if you find a ruin on your land, it belongs to you and you can bulldoze it or sell the artifacts.” Some of the developers he worked for might decide to preserve his discoveries and have them curated on-site by the state so that they could be promoted as an attractive sales feature to add value to the development. But ultimately, he reported, most of them simply “want their clearance, or their permits, to move forward with their projects and make money.” Human remains are the exception to this rule, since private ownership of these is prohibited by federal and Arizona law.