AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Lubkemann. Paul Gardullo. Jaco Boshoff. Yolanda Pinto Duarte. David Morgan.

This is an abstract from the "To Move Forward We Must Look Back: The Slave Wrecks Project at 10 Years" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Drawing on work in Mozambique and South Africa undertaken over the last five years this paper examines how the Slave Wrecks Project’s field research program and its stakeholder engagement initiatives have come to inform each other in profoundly transformative ways. Our investigations of specific slaver shipwrecks...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Albert J. Ammerman. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez. Albertus Voorrips.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Diehl.

Ostrich eggs have been a valuable resource for Sub-Saharan populations for thousands of years, offering a rich nutritional source as well as a means of transporting water. While burned ostrich eggshell (OES) fragments are common at sites, it is difficult to determine whether they were subsistence refuse or the disposed remnants of canteens. Current tools for analyzing OES burning conditions involve expensive and time consuming isotopic analysis or scanning electron microscopy. This research aims...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Harrower. Joseph C. Mazzariello.

The Empire of Aksum was one of the earliest and most influential African complex polities, yet remains one of the world’s most scantly documented ancient civilizations. The Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) surveyed a 196-km2 area between the ancient capital city of Aksum and the Red Sea over four field seasons from 2005-2008. This work documented 137 archaeological sites, including 7 ancient towns larger than 6 hectares, and contributes a substantial body of data on geographies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorothea F. Bleek.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Cashdan.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacques Berque.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Lyons.

The transfer of pottery making skills and knowledge is well studied in Africa using the chaîne opératoire methodology. Chaîne opératoire is understood as a social practice in which technological choices are guided by social choices that potters learn as members of a potter community. The complement of technological choices of this group of potters creates a unique technological style. Africanists use technological styles to study the history of potter communities through time and space. But...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oliver Davies. K. Gordon-Gray.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimball Banks. Linda Scott Cummings. Signe Snortland. Maria Gatto.

Wadi Kubbaniya is the largest wadi extending from the Western Desert to the Nile in Upper Egypt. The Combined Prehistoric Expedition devoted four seasons in the late 1970s-early 1980s investigating Late Paleolithic (20,000-12,000 BP) settlement-subsistence in the wadi. The Expedition documented one of the most complete occupational sequences for this period in Upper Egypt. Because of excellent preservation, the Expedition was able to reconstruct the vegetation and identify floral resources...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodore Marks.

The shifts in land and site use strategies that occurred over the Middle to Later Stone Age (MSA to LSA) transition remain poorly understood across the full diversity of environments in Southern Africa. In the Central Namib Desert of Namibia, two rockshelters, Erb Tanks and Mirabib, provide insights into these dynamics within the context of a persistent arid to hyper-arid climate. Employing data from an ongoing lithic sourcing survey, we argue that groups equipped with MSA-type lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessika Akmenkalns.

Ceramics have played a central role in archaeological studies of ancient Nubia. They have been used to refine the regional chronology and to enhance our understanding of social, political, and economic processes. While many such studies have focused primarily on large, centralized polities, fewer attempts have been made to investigate how hinterland communities engaged with changing life ways throughout the region’s long cultural history. This paper examines a collection of ceramic samples taken...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourenco Pinto.

The use of style is in its infancy in southern African rock art studies with work on style originating with broad generalisations which linked modes of subsistence, material culture and lifeways to style. Recent studies have focused on regional art traditions. The author presents a research case study that advocated for the use of style as praxis. Looking at specific depictions of cross-cultural motifs from the Makgabeng plateau, South Africa, this paper explores the intricate spatio-temporal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Israel Hinojosa-Balino. Henrik Brahe.

In this presentation we will show the way we used an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) to reproduce an accurate map of Kom Wasit, an archaeological site of the Nile Delta located in the province of Beheira. An orthophoto was generated using photogrammetry and GIS, which combined layers of information such as the magnetometry results and the topography survey. It was therefore possible to recreate what can be dug in the future and to understand the settlement pattern of this Late Dynastic town. SAA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Zinsious. Jonathan Haws.

Any technological advance that can save archaeologists time, money and manpower should be explored thoroughly. This poster presents the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or Drones, as a supplemental tool to traditional archaeological survey. Examples from Portugal and Mozambique are included to give visual representations of the possible uses of drone technologies. We used a commercially-available Phantom 2 quadcopter with a GoPro camera for coastal survey in Praia Ray Cortico, Portugal....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erich Fisher. Jamie Hodgkins. Curtis Marean.

Zooarchaeology continues to suffer methodological problems in that analysts use methods for calculating skeletal element and surface modification abundance that vary widely, are non-transparent, and almost certainly produce data that is not comparable across analysts. In 2001, Marean, Abe, Nilssen, and Stone presented a method to overcome these problems by using a GIS-based approach to calculate minimum numbers of skeletal elements (MNE) and surface modification frequencies corrected for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leonor Pena-Chocarro. Guillem Pérez Jordà.

This presentation focuses on the various examples collected from northern Morocco during ethnographic fieldwork on the use of dung. Apart from the most known use of dung as fuel, traditional communities in the Moroccan Rif used dung for other purposes such as flooring, tempering, manuring, making containers for storage, etc. This paper will discuss the various uses of this important material and results will be compared to other examples from other Mediterranean areas.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Merritt.

Assemblage-scale proportions of modified specimens are difficult to link with hominins’ early versus late carcass access because fragmentation and other taphonomic processes affect assemblage composition and taphonomic trace visibility. This work advocates butchered specimen interpretation and describes the skeletal location of butchery traces inflicted during the sequence of carcass consumption behaviors. Tool-assisted carcass consumption is divided into early (defleshing limbs), middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Niespolo. Warren Sharp. Christian Tryon. J. Tyler Faith. Todd Dawson.

The Middle to Later Stone Age transition in East Africa ~30-60 ka has been hypothesized as a response to increased resource risk due to cooler, drier Late Pleistocene environments with greater short-term variability. Local paleoenvironmental records are needed to test such hypotheses. Ostrich eggshell (OES) fragments are common in African archaeological sequences, are amenable to 14C and U-series dating, and their δ13C and δ15N values are known to correspond to the C isotopes of vegetation and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip De Barros.

Philip de Barros, Palomar College. A 2013 study of the ethnoarchaeology of the blacksmithing village of Upper Bidjomambe in the ironworking region of Bassar in northern Togo provided invaluable data to help archaeologists interpret archaeological smithing sites. Oral traditions document the village's occupation from ca. 1870 to 1970 when it was abandoned leaving it virtually intact with little disturbance or tool recycling. An 80+-year-old informant formerly from Upper Bidjomambe, who was a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celia Goncalves. João Cascalheira. Jonathan Haws. Mussa Raja. Nuno Bicho.

The central topic of this poster focus on the conversion of archaeological survey data to a GIS format for the identification of settlement patterns by communities that inhabited the Elephant river region, a tributary of the Limpopo River (southern Mozambique), from c. 300 to c. 20 thousand years ago. Specifically, we tried to identify and characterize the settlement dynamics of each cultural phase (MSA and LSA), in order to understand the choices related to the selection of site location in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raghda El-Behaedi. Douglas Gamble. Eman Ghoneim. Eleanora Reber.

The Abu Simbel temples, commissioned by Ramesses II in Upper Egypt, are vulnerable to inundation due to the ancient structure’s proximity to the Nile River. Because of the rapid rise of water in the Lake Nasser reservoir, large swaths of land are becoming submerged. In order to monitor the recession of the peninsula in which the structure is located on, remote sensing techniques were employed. Using Landsat 5, 7, and 8 multispectral images coupled with SRTM data, change detection and risk maps...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anneke Janzen. Patrick Roberts. Nicole Boivin.

The spread of pastoralism through Kenya may have been slowed by novel disease challenges presented to livestock by wild taxa. In particular, wildebeest-derived malignant catarrhal fever (WD-MCF), which is extremely fatal to cattle, would have been encountered by pastoralists for the first time as they moved south of the Lake Turkana Basin into the native range of East African wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus). Today, migratory wildebeest have well-known annual migration patterns. However, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice LEPLONGEON. Erella Hovers. David Pleurdeau.

The Middle Stone Age (MSA) is traditionally defined by flake, point and elongated blank production associated with retouched tools (e.g. scrapers and retouched points). However, a great cultural variability is observed, whether it is linked with spatial (e.g. Brandt 1986, Clark 1988), or temporal (Early vs Late MSA, e.g. Douze 2011) variability. Here we present results from a comparative analysis of the lithic assemblages from Porc-Epic Cave (e.g. Clark and Williamson 1984, Pleurdeau, 2005) and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Hodgkins.

The archaeological assemblage and long stratigraphic sequence at the site of Pinnacle Point 5-6 in Western Cape, South Africa affords the opportunity to explore temporal (and possibly environmentally-mediated) changes in human behavioral regimes in the late Pleistocene. Here, examination of butchering intensity is used as a preliminary test of the hypothesis that humans would have intensified the processing of terrestrial prey in times of cooler, dryer climates, when sea levels were low and the...