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Bethany Beyond the Jordan, where Jesus was baptized on the east bank of the Jordan River, has been further excavated and has revealed a Byzantine complex consisting of stone staircase, a foundation base and a small Byzantine church near the river itself. This raised the number of churches identified in the region to four at the Jordan River and three at the Byzantine monastery at Tell el-Kharrar (Elijah’s Hill), nearly two kilometers east of the river. The discovered remains represent a distinguished and rare churches in the history of Christianity during the Byzantine period on the eastern bank of Jordan River dated to 5th- 6th AD.
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Paul the Silentiary’s famous description of the church of Hagia Sophia, built on the orders of Justinian I between 532 and 537,1 has understandably attracted much attention from architectural historians and archaeologists, as it contains valuable information about its architecture, decoration and liturgical furnishings. Moreover, the text of the ekphrasis itself has been recently the subject of important studies by Mary WHITBY, Ruth MACRIDES and Paul MAGDALINO. For understandable reasons, Paul’s poem, first recited early in 563, deals primarily with the main body of the church, which was repaired following the earthquake damage of 557 and reconsecrated on 24th December 562.
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This paper deals with some problems concerning divine images in ancient Semitic religions. As an introduction, it presents a survey of information from primary sources. The archaeological evidence of Semitic cult statues is very sparse. We can find their representations only in some stone reliefs and in the presentation scenes of cylinder seal motifs. There are some written materials: sporadic references in royal inscriptions, a small number of cultic texts with a complete description of the purifying rituals for a new or renewed divine statue (the so called «mīs pî» texts in Mesopotamia), other references can be found in mythic and ritual texts (for ex. in the Epic of Erra, in the Ugaritic and in the Emar ritual texts) or anti-idolatrous polemics in the Old Testament. According to the literary documentation, the „idolatry“ (from the Greek eidōlon, image, portrait) of pre Judaic and pre Islamic Semites might be defined as the worship of an object considered as a legitimate substitute for the divine in the cult, but not as a „living“ entity. These vehicula of the divine presence played an essential role in many important rituals and regular religious ceremonies in the temple area and sometimes even outside the sanctuaries. However, the donation of food and drink to the images of gods (i.e. the presentation of sacrifices and libations), the giving of votive gifts, the anointing with oil and washing the mouth of statues, their ritual fashioning and clothing, and finally, their taking to bed on purpose to evoke either symbolic divine rest or „sacred marriage“ (hieros gamos) represent the core of this ritual complex in the temple. In the final part of this paper, the question of finding some correlates of these forms of idol’s worship in a sphere of social ethics is treated. For example, the two first tablets of the Gilgamesh Epic reveal that fundamental ritualised concomitants of interpersonal communication (the common consummation of food and drink; the exchange of conventional gifts; the anointing with oil and washing of the guest; the provision of clothes; the offering of „sexual favours“) correspond to the cultic rules of communication with the sacred through idolatry.
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Since the 1950s the term “gombik” has been used in Czech and Slovak archaeological literature to describe artifacts from the Early Middle Ages resembling buttons, which appear as an accessory of modern Hungarian as well as some Slovak men’s and women’s clothing. & e most frequent occurrence of spherical pendants was recorded in graves of women and children; a lesser occurrence was recorded in graves of adult men. We may presume that the class that is referred to in written sources as dukes or even as noble faithful men applied it to jewelry – the “gombik” was probably created in the cultural space of this class and thus became indentifying symbol.
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The end of the Coţofeni culture in northeast Oltenia and, implicitly, of the transition period to the metal age, is related to the distribution of some strong influences coming from the two great circles or cultural areas. Noticeable in the pottery repertoire, but also in terms of their spiritual origin, their source is found in the Kostolac, Vučedol and Iamnaia cultures. The vast resources of salt in this area were a vital element in the development of the human communities, as demonstrated by their setting near the brine springs. This article identifies the various stages of development among northeastern Oltenia populations, observing their coexistence in the area over a period of relative calm. It also explores how the evolution of the Coţofeni culture was interrupted by the entrance of Glina communities in the early Bronze Age period, and how elements of their ceramic decoration style were adopted.
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Any discussion of the organization and administration of the medieval road system in Transylvania automatically raises the issue of illegal actions related to its functioning. These cover a wide range of manifestations, from common robbery and banditry to the more complex aspects of corruption within administrative structures and the abuse of economic power and/or social status by certain groups and individuals. These caused disarray within the traffic system through over-taxation, the introduction of fake tolls, illegal use of certain road segments, and the violation of traffic regulations and tax exemptions. The neglect of road tracks and river crossings by those responsible for their upkeep also generated problems. This paper studies transgressions of the rules and regulations governing the road system, based on the decrees issued by the Hungarian Kingship from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, with particular focus on decrees issued by Kings Louis the Great, Sigismund of Luxemburg and Matthias Corvinus. It also explores judicial rulings resolving complaints regarding their implementation. Both the royal decrees, which contain repeated stipulations attempting to enforce the same laws, and documents dealing with resolution of transgressions reflect the ongoing problems experienced in implementing a safe and fair transportation system, and the difficulty of enforcement when many of those responsible for judging transgressions were themselves beneficiaries of road tolls. This article analyses these documents in order to create a general picture of the frequency and nature of corrupt practices at a provincial level, and examines the legal solutions employed to counter them during the Middle Ages.
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In the history of archaeology of ancient Thrace, the analysis of indigenous ceramics has re‑ ceived less attention than other archaeological material, especially imported Greek wares. In recent years however, more archaeologists have begun intensively analyzing these ceramics in an attempt to further understand external influences on the manufacturing and consumption practices of ancient Thracians. The purpose of this article is to describe recently excavated, locally made ceramics from an inland market site known as emporion Pistiros. Although this site has a long history of archaeological excavation, this article utilizes diagnostic sherds ex‑ cavated during the field school campaigns of the Balkan Heritage Foundation between 2013 and 2016, which are hitherto unanalyzed. Through the use of a systematic cataloguing and analysis system this article attempts to present characterizations about these ceramics from the Late Iron Age in the Northwestern Rhodope Mountains, which will result in a typological system for use at the site as well as cross‑site comparisons.
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Early Eneolithic multiple burial discovered in 2005 at Alba Iulia-Lumea Nouă (Transylvania, Romania) revealed various traumatic injuries on both adult and non-adult crania. The aim of this paper is to present the traumatic injuries on adult skulls and establish sex differences regarding type, location and shape of the skeletal lesions. Radiocarbon data indicates a timeframe 4621-4483 BC for this particular event. The minimum number of individuals based on cranial elements was established as being approximately 50, within this, 34 being represented by adult individuals. 23 restored skull caps were macroscopically determined as belonging to female individuals the rest being represented by male specimens. Multiple traumatic injuries were observed on several skull caps, but no postcranial injuries were identified.
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This paper focuses on Eneolithic female burials discovered in the Sultana-Malu Roşu cemetery (c. 5000–4000 cal. BC), in order to set constants and variables that define the women’s status in those past communities. The targeted cemetery is located in south-eastern Romania, in the proximity of two settlements (Boian and Gumelnița) that have used it apparently continuous for more than 900 years. The 99 inhumation graves identified until now were grouped on the terrace edge and along the slopes of Mostiştea Lake high terrace. The graves contain a minimum number of individuals (MNI) of 104 individuals, and it represents a substantial group that is suitable to analyse the current study. Thus, our analysis will focus on the investigation of women’s burials in relation to funerary rituals (e.g., body positions, orientations, grave structures, grave goods and offerings), the spatial location of the burials in the cemetery (GIS analysis), correlated with palaeodemographic and anthropological data. Each of these elements is a potential active representation of special treatment that may have been applied to females and could, therefore, be interpreted as a reflection of the individual identity alongside with the collective status assigned by the family or community. Moreover, differentiation between female burials and other graves, but also variation between Boian and Gumelnița graves, will also be explored by current paper.
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Bela Vista 5 is a double ditched enclosure near the town of Beringel (Beja, Portugal) dating from the last quarter of the 3rd millennium BCE. Eighty-four pits are associated with the enclosure. During archaeological works in 2012, 26 pits and sections of the ditches were excavated. The single pit found within the inner ditch contained the only funerary context found in the site. Votive items accompanying this individual included three ceramic vessels, a metal awl and a Palmela copper point. Although not all pits were excavated, the seclusion of this burial within the inner circle might suggest attention was meant to be drawn to its only occupant. Despite the presence of a weapon, the human remains belonged to an adult woman. Moreover, the human remains had undergone a very peculiar funerary treatment that implied one or more visits to her tomb after the primary deposition of the corpse, including the reorganization of parts of the skeleton and removal of some bones. This is probably the best documented case of a female burial with a complex long term funerary chaîne opératoire in the Late Prehistory of Portugal. The attention and goods dispensed to this individual might point to her importance within the community that made use of the site. Her association with a prestige weapon raises doubts on the role women played in these societies and might point to the association of at least some women to tasks and objects traditionally considered as male attributes.
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The research regarding the depictions of Scythian females in the Scytho-Sarmatian and Greek art shows that there is a division between images of armed Scythian females (who are represented as ordinary people) and Scythian females without weapons (who are represented as rulers on the throne or mythological beings with zoomorphic or vegetative limbs). The written sources and archaeological findings show that sometimes the last two functions were united, as was the case of the Massagetian queen Tomyris and burials of armed females from the Mound No. 5 near village Zelenoe of Kherson, which contained weapons and pronounced female objects (bronze mirror, beads, stone tile with a wooden grinder), as well as symbols of the supreme Scythian goddess (plaques with an image of the goddess). Even though Scythian women could carry weapons and participate in military actions, in Scythian art they were never depicted with weapons. Graves of Amazons are very common in the Northern Black sea region during the Scythian and Sarmatian periods. Even though the written sources also point to the presence of Amazons in Athropatene, the archaeological evidence to support these statements is very rare. The graves of female warriors were registered in the archaeological findings from Azerbaijan during the Late Bronze (or Early Iron) Age, in the burial mound No. 6 (with a child) and mound No. 12 from the necropolis of Plovdag in Nakhchivan. The reason for the female burials to be rare in this particular geographic area may be due to insufficient studies of skeletal remains to establish the gender of the buried. As a conclusion – the archaeological sources alone are insufficient to determine social and military status of females in the Scythian and Sarmatian burials. Only a comparative research of written sources, ancient art, archaeological and anthropological remains will allow us to establish it.
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This paper studies the social aspects of burial practices at the beginning of the Modern Age, as evidenced in the case of a necropolis in the village of Bubanj near Niš (Serbia). The devastation of the necropolis, which took place over the past decades, and an insufficient number of unearthed skeletons have largely limited anthropological reconstruction and interpretation and precluded the study of internal population dynamics of this group. However, apart from the diseases usual in archaeological populations, a striking presence of congenital spinal and sacral anomalies in women was noticed. So many anomalies are rarely found at a single site; even before the exact etiology of many of them is determined, we can assume that this was a hermetic population or that the anomalies were hereditary. A series of paleopathological changes noted in womenʼs pelvises are likewise uncommon in archaeological populations. Most of them could have occurred as a consequence of pregnancy and childbirth. Dental analyses have revealed a poor oral hygiene and indicated a monotonous diet typical for agricultural societies. Judging by very prominent muscular and ligamentous entheses, squatting facets and Schmorlʼs nodes, it can be concluded that the members of this population were engaged in hard physical labor, most likely agriculture and everyday household duties. Burial rites practiced at Bubanj reveal the economic and social status of the community. Simple graves covered with planks and modest repertoire of grave goods were common in Christian communities in the Balkans at the beginning of the Modern Age. As such, they should not be taken at face value as illustrative of a poor economic status; persons with higher income who lived in a peaceful environment could be buried in the same manner as well. In such a setting, the grouped burials of women, including a young woman in full wedding attire, with a rich scarf and amulets, reflect not only the complexity of mortuary practices and cultural identity of Christian Serbs under Ottoman rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also the status of women within the community.
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The work presented here discusses the largest known Islamic necropolis in Bulgaria explored in 2012/2013 in connection to the construction of Haemus Highway, in its section nearby the Makak residential area of Shumen, Northeastern Bulgaria. The excavations revealed more than 700 inhumation graves. According to the studies of ethnology and cultural anthropology the Muslim burial rite is rather simple compared to the pagan or Christian ones. It is seen to be a conservative one, strictly adhering to the canon as in most graves the deceased have been placed in supine extended position. However, some skeletons exhibit variations showing that those buried have not been arranged especially careful during the funeral. Furthermore, some skeletons indicated post mortem dislocation of bones. The finding of a female individual in grave No. 172 is the perfect example for such neglectful treatment. The current contribution will address this phenomenon by exploring in depth its archaeological and anthropological aspects. The burial will be analyzed both in its immediate intra-site context and within the range of similar cases during the Early and Late Middle Ages registered in one Islamic and some Christian cemeteries. Exercising thick descriptions in the engendered analysis of non-normative mortuary behavior offers another look on the social mosaics of Balkan communities from the Ottoman age.
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Epigraphic monuments in the Russian North are isolated and underrepresented in the Russian historiography. In 2018, on Lake Kolvitskoye in the southern part of the Kola Peninsula local residents discovered a unique monument – a small boulder with a Cyrillic inscription. On the flat side of the stone, a neat five-line inscription. is carved with a metal tool reading “These are Vyatka’s grandchildren who came here from Peresl”. The purpose of the work is to date and interpret the ancient text using epigraphy techniques and to make some assumptions about the aim of the inscription on the stone. The results of the paleographic analysis suggest that the inscription dates back to the first half of the XV century. By nature, this monument can be attributed to a variety of commemorative inscriptions. It testifies to the relocation of a group of people to the shores of the lake from other territories in the Middle Ages. In the Murmansk region there is another epigraphic monument – a rock with inscriptions dating from the XVI–XVIII centuries located on Bolshoy Anikiyev Island on the Rybachy Peninsula, which had been previously studied by specialists. However, this paper presents the first-of-its-kind special study of the ancient inscriptions of Russian Lapland.
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Moon-shaped idols comprise a very specific and variable category of ceramic, rarely even stone, artefacts. The beginnings of their occurrence and spread in Central Europe can be connected with the cultures of Urnfields, especially the Upper Danube and Middle Danube groups. Their development subsequently continued in the Early Iron Age, when they spread beyond Central Europe to northeast Spain and north Italy. The total number of finds currently exceeds the estimate from 2004, which was around two thousand individual items. The find environment of these products is relatively variable. They usually appear in settlements, but also in situations that can be considered manifestations of cult behaviour. In southeast France and south Germany, some of the moon-shaped idols are found in the context of graves from the Late Bronze Age. Graves equipped in this way can be recorded at the burial grounds of the Bylany and Kalenderberg cultures and in the environment of the Lusatian Urnfields of the Early Iron Age mainly in East Bohemia and Polish Silesia.
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The initial period of the Benedictine monastery in Chemnitz has become the subject of concentrated interest of historians, archaeologists and linguists in recent years. It has turned out that the foundation of this monastery was a well-thought-out action of Emperor Lothar III, which created the preconditions for a settlement to the Ore Mountains within the then Meissen Margraviate. The massive settlement wave, led by the imperial ministerialism and culminating during the reign of Emperor Fredrick I Barbarossa in the second half of the 12th century, originated from the territory at the rivers Sprotte, Pleiße, Zwickauer Mulde and Chemnitz, whose name was still written as Kameniza in 1174.The presented study first briefly summarizes the existing knowledge on the early medieval settlement in the area around today’s Rochlitz (Altgau Rochelinzi), where the royal court was located and whence important roads to Bohemia came (semita Bohemica). At the same time, a hypothesis is presented about the early settlement process along the River Chemnitz, which preceded the founding of the monastery. The author further argues – based on linguistic analysis – that the contents of the founding deed, which dates back to 1143, can be used to know the early period of the monastery in Chemnitz. Then attention is turned to the documents and history of the monastery in the second half of the 12th century and in the 13th century, especially to the historical context of the damage to the monastery by the Bohemian army in 1213.
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Regenholz is a deserted medieval village existing approximately between the 13th and 15th centuries. It originated in the colonisation period when the villages were usually founded in upland regions of Central Europe in the High Middle Ages. The study presents the results of a research based on geochemical and spatial analyses of one of the village’s field areas. The aim of the study was to reveal the spatial characteristics of the elemental composition of the previously ploughed soils which are now covered by forest. The analysed field area comprised bundles of 13 strip plots, which were approximately from 30 to 40 meters (up to 60 meters in two cases) wide and 300 meters long. The village and its fields were adjacent to the village Lovětín, which was analysed and published earlier. This made it possible to compare the geochemistry of the deserted fields of both villages with the same natural conditions and historical development. The soil samples were measured for elemental composition by portable XRF. The composition was dominated by elements generally interpreted as past human activity indicators: P, Zn, Mn, and Sr. Past human presence was represented mainly by Cu and partially by Mn content (P and Sr showed similar trends). The obtained results were compared with the data from the adjacent village Lovětín: the results were similar just by comparing the PCA data. The past human activity indicators reached less spatial diversity than those of natural factors.
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Techno-typological analysis of two chipped stone assemblages from Šenov-Salaš 1 and 4 in the Moravian Gate (Czech Republic) indicates they belong to the Aurignacian. The two assemblages, preferentially made of Baltic (erratic) flints, comprise few distinctive tool types, though. A statistical analysis was conducted to compare their raw material strategy, tool typology, and topography with other Moravian Aurignacian sites. It transpired that they answer to other Aurignacian sites in their specific topography, raw material strategy, and (a few) Aurignacian endscrapers, but both assemblages comprise few carinated burins. The altitude here is somewhat higher than that for most Moravian Aurignacian sites, but it is still probable that the two assemblages belong to the Aurignacian and that their rather atypical aspect (the small dimensions of artefacts, simple core preparation, few distinctive tools) are due to the small size of the processed flint nodules, which did not allow for thorough core preparation. Predominant plain butts, the virtual absence of archaic, or other distinctive tool types speak for either Evolved Aurignacian or some specific Aurignacian facies of the Moravian Gate. The assemblages cannot be linked with the young AMS 14C date 14 270 ± 40 uncal BP, acquired from a bone from the surface at Salaš 1, just slightly preceding the Moravian Magdalenian, as such a date would be too young not only for any Aurignacian but also for Epiaurignacian sites. Still, the Aurignacian estimation of the assemblages is interesting as the Moravian Gate comprises relatively few sites attributed to this Upper Palaeolithic culture.
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The Animalistic Style differs in different phases with its own and different characteristics. There is also a 'hybrid' Animalistic Style, in which different phases of this decorative style are juxtaposed or even merged. This variant of the Animalistic Style has been analyzed here with the aim of clarifying the key moments of the evolution between the different phases. Three artifacts from the Regnum Langobardorum were considered, in particular from Cividale San Mauro, Torino Lingotto and San Lorenzo in Vaccoli in Lucca. Comparing the three artifacts, some conclusions were reached. The presence of artifacts decorated in a 'hybrid' Animalistic Style reaffirms an apparently banal concept: the use of a decorative style does not cease with the appearance of a new one. Furthermore, the coexistence in the Italian context of the different phases of the Animalistic Style on the same artifact indicates that the evolution towards the II Animalistic Style may have occurred in Italy.
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