AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)
276-300 (520 Records)
Much of the recent past of Great Lakes Africa is characterised by short-lived settlements and mobile societies, that produced ephemeral occupation sites. In part because of this, attention has long been drawn to sites like Bigo and Ntuusi which seem to offer much more substantive archaeological remains. Yet, notwithstanding the longevity of the latter and the extent of both, this is clearly not a simple occupation site featuring a large population. Rather it is much more effective to understand...
Looking into the Dark: Investigating Four Holocene Shelter Sites in Southwest Ethiopia (2015)
Preliminary excavations from the Gamo Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Research project in southwest Ethiopia include three caves and one rockshelter, located on the western escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. The analyses of these four mid-altitude (average 2135 meters) sites will add to our understanding of the cultural, ecological, and technological transitions occurring within the last 6000 years. The cave and rockshelter sites indicate the use of a classic Later Stone Age lithic...
Macroecological analysis of recent Kalahari site structure (2016)
In the 1980s, Lewis Binford (1931-2011) started an analysis of hunter-gatherer site structure that was later put on hold in order to organize ethnographic and environmental data to use in the analysis (Binford 2001). Although the frames of reference were constructed, Binford never completed his analysis of site structure. This poster represents an initial attempt to realize Binford’s vision of a controlled analysis of site structure at a large regional scale using data he organized for this...
Mai Adrasha and Its Neighbors (2017)
A team from UCLA in cooperation with the Tigrai Culture and Tourism Agency and the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage of Ethiopia has completed two excavation seasons at the site of Mai Adrasha located about 70 kilometers west of the ancient capital of Aksum. With the information gathered in these excavations, we can now begin to compare Mai Adrasha to neighboring sites and place it within its regional framework. Radiocarbon dates from the first season of excavation...
Majolica Escudillas of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: a Typological Analysis of Fifty-Five Examples from Qsar Es-Seghir (1984)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Mapping Abydos: Bridging the Gap Between Legacy Data and Modern GPS Survey Methods in Egypt (2015)
The Greater-Abydos Mapping Project began with the goal of creating a highly accurate, integrated GIS system for the entire 35km² site. This included incorporating all topographic and modern features, the translation and importation of previously utilized site coordinate systems, and all known archaeological data, including legacy data from historic excavations which started in the 1920s. Constraints in past cartographic and surveying methods, compounded by the scale of the Abydos site, over time...
Mapping MSA Deposits: Regional Geological Investigation of Upper Chari Member Sediments in the Ileret Region, East Turkana, Kenya (2017)
The Ileret region of the Koobi Fora Formation (KF Fm.), located in Kenya’s Turkana Basin, has historically been the focus of extensive archaeological research. Mid-Late Pleistocene units have previously lacked defined sedimentary beds due to an understudied unconformity of the upper Chari Member (1.34 Ma to 10 Ka). This represents a substantial limit to Middle Stone Age (MSA) research. Recent fieldwork (2016) incorporated a geoarchaeological survey of the upper Chari Member. Here we describe and...
MAPPING THE STONE AGE IN MOZAMBIQUE: PRELIMINARY RESULTS (2015)
Under the auspices of the Portuguese colonial government, Lereno Barradas and Santos Junior (within the Anthropological Mission of Mozambique) carried out field surveys that resulted in a data set that includes a total of more than 100 sites, mostly attributed to the Stone Age. This early research added to the previous work of Van Riet Lowe in the Limpopo Valley, in southern Mozambique. Recently, Mozambique has emerged as a crucial geographic area to understand human evolution. Specifically, its...
Marine geophysics reveals the character of the now submerged Paleo-Agulhas Plain (2015)
This work was undertaken to understand the evolution of the terrestrial landscape now submerged by high sea levels offshore of Mossel Bay. Two marine geophysical surveys and scuba diving were used to examine evidence of past sea-level fluctuations and interpret seafloor geological deposits. Eight seismic sequences characterise the shelf, extending from the Mid-Cretaceous to the Holocene time. Geological mapping dating by Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) revealed that the most prominent...
Maritime adaptations and Indian Ocean trade in East Africa: The role of small offshore islands (2015)
Decades of pioneering archaeological research have firmly established East Africa’s offshore islands as important localities for understanding the region’s pre-Swahili maritime adaptations and early Indian Ocean trade connections. While the importance of the sea and small offshore islands to the development of urbanized and mercantile Swahili societies long been recognized, the formative stages of island colonisation – and in particular the processes by which migrating Iron Age groups...
Material complexities in dispersed communities: archaeology of 2nd millennium CE southeastern Burkina Faso (West Africa) (2015)
In several regions of the West African savanna, the pre-colonial complex polities described in oral and written histories have left a minimal archaeological signature on the landscape. One such region is the Gobnangou escarpment of southeastern Burkina Faso, where from the early second millennium CE, the archaeological record consists almost entirely of small, ephemeral sites, likely resulting from short term occupations of household compounds. Broadly dispersed on the landscape, and almost...
Material elaboration and monumentality: Mortuary beads, pastoralists, and social innovation in northwest Kenya (2017)
Megalithic architecture appeared suddenly in northwest Kenya 5000 years ago in tandem with the earliest pastoralists in the region. As Lake Turkana’s levels dropped, these people built "pillar sites" – massive feats of labor and coordination that represent one of the earliest instances of monumentality in Africa – in a brief explosion of material and architectural elaboration. The burials associated with these pillar sites are highly ornamented, with thousands of beads made from stone, bone, and...
Measuring the complexity of lithic technology (2015)
Assessments of the complexity of lithic technologies coming from different time periods, regions, or hominid species are recurrent features of the literature on Paleolithic archaeology. Yet the notion of lithic complexity is often defined intuitively and qualitatively, which can easily lead to circular arguments and makes difficult the comparison of assemblages across different regions and time periods. Here we propose, in the spirit of Oswalt’s techno-units, that the complexity of lithic...
The Medieval Necropolis of Mouweis (Shendi Area, Sudan): Bioarchaeological Insights (2017)
The site of Mouweis is a Nilotic city of the Meroitic period excavated by the Louvre Museum since 2007. This settlement includes a 1st century AD palace, later destroyed and reduced to a hill-shaped ruin. During the medieval period, a cemetery was created in the demolition level of this palace. Radiocarbon dating reveals a funerary occupation between of the 8th to the 14th century. Burials were mainly individual with a uniform typology and follow the same orientation as the structure of the...
Micromorphology of Middle to Later Stone Age sites at Mwanganda's Village, northern Malawi (2015)
The Mwanganda's Village site, northern Malawi, was first excavated in 1965-1966 under the direction of J. D. Clark, who reported the recovery of early Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone tools in possible association with the remains of an elephant. New work in 2009-2012 revealed that the elephant and the artifacts were not likely to have been behaviorally associated. The site lies within a series of river terraces dating from the Middle Pleistocene to the Holocene. Near the top of the sequence an in...
Micromorphology reveals changing levels of site occupation intensity at Pinnacle Point 5-6 (2015)
Using simultaneously fine and coarse resolution sedimentary studies of the deposits of the MSA site of PP5-6 at Pinnacle Point, Mossel Bay, South Africa, it was able to reveal different patterns of anthropogenic input and behavior and how these changed through time. Through the microfacies approach using micromorphology it was documented that the PP5-6 sequence shows occupations characterized by small groups and short visits during MIS5. This part of the sediments is dominated by numerous...
Microremains on Stone (Tools): Discriminating Function-Related from Natural Residues (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plant microremains from stone tools speak to ancient hominin behaviour if genuinely related to usage. Residues, however, attach to rock surfaces naturally. My objectives are to identify pathways for microremain adherence prior to and after burial; study residue abundance in relation to petrography, microstructure, and...
Middle and Late Stone Age of the Niassa Region, Northern Mozambique. Preliminary results (2015)
Located between modern-day South Africa and Tanzania, both of which have well-known and extensive Stone Age records, Mozambique and its Stone Age sequence remain largely unknown in the broader context of African Pleistocene prehistory. This is in spite of the country’s critical position linking southern and eastern Africa, and of its clear potential to inform various models about recent human evolution. Specifically, the geography of Mozambique makes its sea coast a natural area of interest to...
A Middle and Later Stone Age sequence from Iringa, southern Tanzania (2017)
Magubike rockshelter in the southern Highlands of Tanzania contains a long archaeological sequence ranging from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) through historic times. This paper describes the lithic sequence from test pit 5, which contains a 2.5 m thick cultural deposit composed of recent / historic remains, an Iron Age, a microlithic Later Stone Age (LSA), a macrolithic LSA, a transitional sequence from the MSA to the LSA and 90 cm of MSA artifacts. The later part of the sequence replicates the...
The Middle Stone Age at Gona, Afar, Ethiopia: Implications for Regionalization and Migrations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tentatively dated to MIS 5/4, the YAS-1 (Ya’alu South 1) site at Gona, Ethiopia is a high-density open-air archaeological site preserving classic Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone tools such as Levallois cores, Nubian cores, points, and blades in addition to a variety of fossil fauna, some with bone modifications including...
Middle Stone Age Man-Animal Relationships in Southern Africa: Evidence from Die Kelders and Klasies River (1975)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
A Middle Stone Age Paleoscape near the Pinnacle Point caves, Vleesbaai, South Africa (2015)
MSA caves/rock shelters can provide long sequences of early human residential activities in circumscribed contexts, but most resource procurement activities occurred on the landscape in uncircumscribed space. We have a limited understanding of these resource procurement activities at present, making studies of open-air sites crucial. To alleviate this bias, we report on a series of MSA open-air assemblages that are exposed on ancient land surfaces suggestive of intact paleosols at Vleesbaai and...
Migrations and Exchange: Early Pastoral Mobility in Kenya Assessed Through Stable Isotope Analysis (2015)
Specialized pastoralism emerged in Kenya around 3000 years ago and has adapted with changes in the social and ecological landscape to this day. Ethnographic research has documented significant changes in herding strategies among pastoral groups throughout colonial and post-colonial periods. Stable isotope analysis sheds light on how crucial mobility was in maintaining herds before the appearance of iron-using and –producing peoples in the region. Intra-tooth sequential sampling of livestock...
(Mis-) Reading Land: Early Portuguese Settlement on Cape Verde (2017)
This paper considers the early Portuguese settlement on Santiago Island, Cape Verde. Particularly focussing upon the towns of Cidade Velha and Alcatrazes, their immediate topographic settings clearly contributed to the long-term success of the former and the failure of the latter. Nonetheless, the results of a decade of excavation at Cidade Velha demonstrates how long it took for the colonisers to actually understand the landscape’s environmental dynamics, especially the impact of seasonal...
MODELING CARE IN PREHISTORY THROUGH AN ANALYSIS OF HUNTER-GATHERERS SOCIAL SYSTEMS. (2015)
Questions about the timing and modalities of the evolution of care-giving behaviors have a direct impact on our understanding of human cultural evolution and early social dynamics. Hypotheses on care-giving behaviors in Prehistory are usually developed on skeletal evidences documenting survival to seriously debilitating conditions. However, a theoretical framework to test these hypotheses is still missing. Therefore, we propose a model for care-giving behaviors in Prehistory starting from data...