Recent arf_stahlreports items

Archaeobotanical Sample Processing, Taraco Archaeological Project

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Archaeobotanical Sample Processing, Taraco Archaeological Project

Nemea, Sanctuary of Zeus Excavations at 100

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nemea, Sanctuary of Zeus Excavations at 100

City life at Palenque: 2023 season

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

City life at Palenque: 2023 season

Preliminary Excavations of Secondary burials in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Wed, 1 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Preliminary Excavations of Secondary burials in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Material Culture and Archaeology of Citizenship on the United States/Mexico Border

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The crossing of the United States/Mexico border is a dangerous one, so there must be a “push and pull” factor leading many of these individuals to make the journey. This research has based its framework on forensic anthropology work addressing these questions in the past, however, it became clear that identifying and examining those that died crossing the border does not necessarily address the issues or questions in regard to the emotional, social, and political reasons for leaving their country. During the span of this research 30 individuals who have crossed the border within the last 20 years were interviewed. This was done in order to gain an understanding of why they decided to cross. These in person interviews lasted an hour and asked approximately 13 questions. Individuals were asked questions regarding where they were from, their life before crossing, during crossing, and now living in the United States. Individuals were able to pinpoint specific details that led to their...

Pompeii Artifact Life History Project: 2022 Field Season

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Pompeii Artifact Life History Project completed its eighth field season at the site of Pompeii (Italy) during the period July 3 - July 30, 2022. The project team completed the description of the artifact assemblage from the Casa della Venere in Bikini (I.11.6.7) and completed rapid architectural surveys of this residence and the Casa di Saturninus (I.11.16).

Excavation and Conservation of the Early Christian Basilica, Sanctuary of Zeus, Ancient Nemea

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The multi-year project of the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology (DAGRS), the Excavation and Conservation of the Early Christian Basilica, at the Sanctuary of Zeus in Ancient Nemea, Greece, began in 2022. The west end of the 5thc. CE building was investigated including the narthex and two rooms added later to the building on the north and south sides. We cleared areas that had been excavated in the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980 to reveal the building’s foundation walls, floor surfaces, and other architectural features, including previously unrecorded interior walls of the 4thc. BCE Xenon building from the pagan panhellenic sanctuary. Overlooked small finds, like coins and painted terracottas, were recovered and we began the full study of pottery and related finds from the previous excavations which remain unpublished.

The ancient foundations of the Basilica, now accessible in the west part of the building, will be conserved this fall by consolidating the original crumbling...

City Life at Classic Maya Palenque, Mexico

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The 2022 field season of "City Life at Classic Maya Palenque, Mexico" involved excavations in a densely built up neighborhood in the urban core of this site, most well known for the palaces, temples, and historical monuments of its ruling family, which reached an apogee ca. 600-800 AD. The 2022 excavations are the first season of a multi-season effort to explore a stratified random sample of presumed residential compounds of varied sizes and configurations, identified in our previous analyses as possibly representing different social strata. The first selected compound produced an assemblage from middens adjacent to two structures that reflects everyday life, and includes evidence of wealth in the form of imported obsidian and pieces of discarded white stone luxury objects. Like other known residential compounds of the ruling family and nobles who produced written monuments, the residents of this compound undertook ritual practices, but these appear to be distinct from what has...

Geophysical Survey of a Choleric Mass Grave in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In 1855, Puerto Rico was struck by the cholera epidemic, killing 20,000 to 50,000 individuals – 4-10% of the total population at the time. Due to the high volume of corpses piling up and fear of the disease’s further spreading, a cemetery outside of the walls of El Morro was established. This cemetery remained untouched for over a century, due to fears that the disease might resurface. Today, however, this cemetery is in danger of being destroyed, as tourists in Old San Juan have been recently granted access to this section of the fort, uncovering human remains as they walk in the trail. My research is a rescue bioarchaeological investigation of the site, with the main objectives of collecting, analyzing, preserving, and repatriating the human remains buried here before erosion and intrusion destroy or further compromises the site and its contents. Furthermore, I plan to study the social determinants that affect predisposition and mortality of infectious disease, particularly...

Gazelle Tooth Enamel Stable Isotope as a Paleoclimate Proxy at Kharaneh IV, Jordan

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Gazelle Tooth Enamel Stable Isotope as a Paleoclimate Proxy at Kharaneh IV, Jordan

Ancient Animal Vocabulary

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Ancient Animal Vocabulary

Pompeii Artifact Life History Project: 2019 Field Season

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The 2019 season was the second of the second phase of the project, projected as a series of five study seasons (to be carried out 2018-2022) in which the team will focus on the documentation of the sets of artifacts recovered in the excavation of eight houses of small to medium size that occupy one specific block in the city of Pompeii - Regio I, Insula 11 (I.11) - with a view to elucidating patterns of household consumption in the middle and lower ranges of the socio-economic scale in the final period of the town’s occupation. (figs. 2-3) This block was excavated in its entirety under Vittorio Spinazzola during the period 1912-1913 and Amedeo Maiuri during the years 1952-1962, with most of the artifacts recovered in this work remaining unstudied and unpublished.

Pompeii Artifact Life History Project: 2018 Field Season

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Pompeii Artifact Life History Project: 2018 Field Season

Evidence for Teeth-as-Tools and Palliative Oral Hygiene at Late Medieval Villamagna

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Evidence for Teeth-as-Tools and Palliative Oral Hygiene at Late Medieval Villamagna

Preliminary Paleoethnobotanical Analysis at G-995 La Chiripa, Costa Rica

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My research investigates the human-environmental interactions of Prehispanic peoples in the Arenal region of Costa Rica. This area is an ideal location to look at resilient practices in the past, since domestic settlements in Arenal persevered through powerful volcanic eruptions that impacted the landscape every few centuries. As a paleoethnobotanist, I collected soil samples that will help reconstruct the past foodways and environmental management strategies of these past peoples over time through the study of archaeological plant remains preserved within an ancient domestic structure (La Chiripa) that was situated near the Arenal Volcano. At this site, distinct ash deposits distinguish between periods of human occupation, with abandonments, ecological recovery, and then re-occupations after each volcanic eruption, spanning from 1450 BCE to 1530 CE. In 2018, supported by Stahl funds, I constructed a flotation machine and processed the soil samples collected from this ancient...

Investigating Food Preparation Strategies Within the Pompeian Home in the First Century CE

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Between July and September of 2019, I conducted dissertation research supported by a grant from the Stahl Endowment of the Archaeological Research Facility investigating how the inhabitants of 1st-century CE Pompeii (Italy) prepared their daily meals and what factors influenced their choice of cooking techniques. Through an examination of the frequencies of particular types of vessels (bronze and ceramic) and utensils used for food and drink preparation recovered in the course of earlier excavations from a series of properties in Pompeii, my research reconsiders what constituted the standard batterie de cuisine within the Pompeian kitchen and how this could be modified according to the needs and preferences of the one stocking the shelves. I also attempt to reconstruct the various cooking methods employed and preferences exhibited by the cooks who used these cookwares through an analysis of use alterations (e.g. sooting/fire blackening, scratching, denting, etc.) exhibited by...

Exploratory Soil Micromorphological Analysis of Floor Constructions at the Omo Temple Complex, Moquegua, Peru

Thu, 5 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Exploratory Soil Micromorphological Analysis of Floor Constructions at the Omo Temple Complex, Moquegua, Peru

Subsistence and Social Life on the Edge of Empires: The Dhiban Project’s 2013 Season

Thu, 5 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Subsistence and Social Life on the Edge of Empires: The Dhiban Project’s 2013 Season

Skeletons in the Closet: Archival Research on the Megiddo Collection at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Skeletons in the Closet: Archival Research on the Megiddo Collection at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Funding from the Stahl Endowment in 2018 was used for adding more material to the Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Lists (DCCLT). Lexical texts are lists of words and lists of cuneiform signs that were used by ancient Mesopotamian scribes and scholars to teach and document the complex cuneiform writing system. These texts play an important role in the study of the history of education and scholarship, but are also of crucial and foundational importance for the decipherment of cuneiform and the reconstruction of Sumerian vocabulary. Last year's effort added, among other things, important bilingual lists of hides and leather objects and of metal objects. The editions are freely available through the internet; the data can also be downloaded in JSON format for re-use (for instance in Computational Text Analysis).

TAPHOS. Tombs of Aidonia Preservation, Heritage, and explOration Synergasia

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

TAPHOS. Tombs of Aidonia Preservation, Heritage, and explOration Synergasia

Pañamarca Collections Storage Management Project

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Pañamarca Collections Storage Management Project

Funerary Practices and Personhood: Bronze Age Burial Assemblages from Tel Megiddo, Israel

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Funerary Practices and Personhood: Bronze Age Burial Assemblages from Tel Megiddo, Israel

The Pompeii Artifact Life History Project: 2013 Field Season

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Pompeii Artifact Life History Project: 2013 Field Season

The Social Uses of Swahili Space and Objects

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The dissertation begins by discussing the field of ethnoarchaeology in general and then specifically in relation to the archaeology of the Afro-Arab or the Swahili sites on the coast of eastern Africa. A more theoretical chapter follows which explores an approach to the study of societies through looking at the process of structuration; i.e. the social uses of spaces, objects and time. The third chapter is devoted to placing my study of the houses located in the Lamu archipelago, within an historical context.

Next is a chapter based on the ethnographic data which I collected in thirty-two houses located in Lamu, Pate and Shela. This material is used to demonstrate ~o w spaces and objects are given social meaning, the process which structures the society. Chapter 5 is a presentation of the comparative ethnographic data which I collected in twenty-one houses in Gujarat (north-western India). This area is linked by Indian Ocean trade to the Swahili settlements in Africa....

Excavation of Ancient Nemea, 2014 Study Session: the Prehistoric Origins and early Historic Development of the Pan-Hellenic Sanctuary of Zeus

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Excavation of Ancient Nemea, 2014 Study Session: the Prehistoric Origins and early Historic Development of the Pan-Hellenic Sanctuary of Zeus

Report for Stahl Foundation about the past four years of research on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia