Davide Marco Zori

• PhD, MA, BA
• Professor (Associate) at Baylor University

The Norse discovery and settlement of Iceland in the late ninth century AD offers a test case for the study of human impacts on previously unoccupied landscapes and the formation of new societies under challenging conditions. The Norse Viking Age settlement of the island serves as a cautionary tale about the anthropogenic destruction of fragile env...

The authors show that the principal correlates of feasting in Viking Age Iceland were beef and barley, while feasting itself is here the primary instrument of social action. Documentary references, ethnographic analogies, archaeological excavation and biological analyses are woven together to present an exemplary procedure for the recognition of fe...

Employing anthropological perspectives on gift giving, I analyze exchanges between Icelandic saints and their devotees in the miracle stories of Saints Jón and Þórlákr. Norms of reciprocal gift giving offered a framework for seeking saintly assistance that involved predictable stages, including vows, counterpledges, and pledge-confirmations, follow...

In this article, we report on a noteworthy early Etruscan trench tomb of a young child, most likely a girl, found intact within the cemetery of San Simone at the San Giuliano necropolis (Viterbo Province). The richly appointed grave contained the remains of a toddler aged 2–3 years, inhumed with wealth befitting an elite adult woman. Typically, the...

Compositional analysis of glass from the medieval castle of San Giuliano (Lazio, Italy), occupied from approximately CE 1050–1250, sheds light on the financial wherewithal and integration of the castle’s elite inhabitants into wider economic networks. Portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) of 261 shards was used to select 32 for further analysis using...

The burial of unbaptized fetuses and infants, as seen through texts and archaeology, exposes friction between the institutional Church and medieval Italy's laity. The Church's theology of Original Sin, baptism, and salvation left the youngest children especially vulnerable to dying unbaptized and subsequently being denied a Christian burial in cons...

Utilising a multi-profile palynological approach and a rapid scanning technique, this paper examines whether or not cereal cultivation is representative of a medieval Icelandic farmstead’s social status; first as a correlate by confirming that cereals were grown in association with the archaeological features characteristic of high status and secon...

Ongoing excavations at San Giuliano in central Italy are providing detailed evidence for testing explanatory models of cyclical shifts in settlements and socio-economic organisation from the Etruscan to medieval periods ( c . 800 BC–AD 1300). Download free here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/4822C8FC7248063...

The harbor town of Jaffa (Tel Yafo) was vital for the medieval Crusader States, functioning as a place where reinforcements, pilgrims, and communications entered the Latin East. An assemblage of five ship nails from Jaffa that were removed for reuse in the 13th century AD are examined and shown to be informative for understanding Crusader iron prod...

The San Giuliano Archaeological Research Project (SGARP) is a new international project launched as a collaborative initiative of Baylor University in cooperation with Italian partners from the Municipality of Barbarano Romano, Virgil Academy, the Province of Viterbo, and the Italian Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per l’Area Met...

Icelandic settlement (Landnám) period farmsteads offer opportunities to explore the nature and timing of anthropogenic activities and environmental impacts of the first Holocene farming communities. We employ Bayesian statistical modelling of archaeological, paleoenvironmental and documentary datasets to present a framework for improving chronologi...

Icelandic settlement (Landnám) period farmsteads offer opportunities to explore the nature and timing of anthropogenic activities and environmental impacts of the first Holocene farming communities. We employ Bayesian statistical modelling of archaeological, paleoenvironmental and documentary datasets to present a framework for improving chronologi...

Structures in Iceland were traditionally built of turf, earth and, to a lesser extent, stone. As turf was the primary construction material, the contrast in geophysical parameters between building ruins and surrounding soil is expected to be low. To investigate the extent to which the remains of turf buildings can be detected by geophysical measure...

The Leiruvogur Harbor Research Project (LHRP) is a multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort to locate and excavate the Viking Age harbors in the Leiruvogur Bay of southwestern Iceland. These harbors are among the most-mentioned landing sites in early Icelandic sources, but their location had not been determined prior to this project. Leiruvogur is...

Egill's Grave? Archaeology and Egils Saga at Kirkjuhóll, Hrísbrú by Jon Erlandson, Jesse Byock, and Davide Zori describes the excavation of a grave shaft beneath the floor under the place of the altar of the conversion era (ca. 1000 AD) church at Kirkjuhóll (Church Knoll) at Hrísbrú in the Mosfell Valley ). One of the goals of the Mosfell Archaeolo...

The metalworking, metal import, and use of metal in medieval Iceland is still little understood. When the Scandinavian settlers colonized Iceland in the 9th c. AD, the island was found to contain no useful metal deposits save for bog iron, and the deforestation that followed the settlement resulted in a scarcity of wood. Only in the last decades ha...

THIS is an account of both the history and the recent findings of the Mosfell Archaeological Project. Excavation is part of an interdisciplinary research approach that uses archaeology, history, anthropology, forensics, environmental sciences and saga studies to construct a picture of human habitation, power relationships, religious and mortuary pr...

The skeletal remains of 17 people buried in the Eaton Ferry Cemetery in northern North Carolina provide a means of examining health and infectious disease experience in the XIX century South. The cemetery appears to contain the remains of African Americans enslaved on the Eaton family estate from approximately 1830-1850, and thus offers a window in...