Africa: Southern Africa (Geographic Keyword)
76-92 (92 Records)
This paper is an effort to create a predictive model for archaeological sites in an area of Eastern Botswana. With a rather arid climate, much of Botswana’s ground surface (and archaeology) is easily visible to airborne and spaceborne sensors. Without sufficient training data for supervised classification, an iterative spectral clustering method was used to group spectrally similar pixels from multispectral imagery into a large number of spectrally distinct but unknown classes. By visually...
Tracing Early Farming Communities in Southern Mozambique by Geophysical Prospection: Current State of Activities, Part 1 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In southern Africa, the appearance of pottery was first recognized in the context of Early Farming Communities (EFC) about 2000 BP. Increasingly, pottery can be linked to hunter-gatherers; therefore, southern Africa stands out as a place to investigate the contact between these two communities....
Tracing Early Farming Communities in Southern Mozambique by Geophysical Prospection: Current State of Activities, Part 2 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In southern Africa, the appearance of pottery was first recognized in the context of Early Farming Communities (EFC) about 2000 BP. Increasingly, pottery can be linked to hunter-gatherers, therefore southern Africa stands out as a place to investigate the contact between these two communities. In...
Tracing Late Quaternary Highland-Dryland Social Connectivity in Southern Africa with Ostrich Eggshell Bead Strontium Values: Preliminary Results (2018)
Humans have frequented southern Africa’s highest reaches – Lesotho’s Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains – for ≥90,000 years. As with many high mountain systems worldwide, the Maloti-Drakensberg cast a rainshadow over closely neighboring arid lowlands (the eastern Karoo Desert). Based on previous archaeological and paleoenvironmental work in highland Lesotho, researchers have posited that source populations for human dispersals into the mountain zone often originated in the Karoo, particularly during...
Tracking Paleoaridity through Multi-isotope Analyses of Ostrich Eggshells at Spitzkloof Rockshelter A, South Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotopes in ratite eggshells record information about the birds’ diet during shell formation, making them valuable proxies for paleoenvironmental reconstruction. Here we present the results of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen stable isotope analyses in ostrich (Struthio camelus australis) eggshell (OES) collected in excavation at Spitzkloof A, a rock...
Trade and Exchange in the Greater Mapungubwe Landscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of the trade and exchange networks systems in Southern Africa during AD 700 to AD 1300 has mostly been drawn from sites located in the Shashe Limpopo Confluence Area (SCLA); a drainage basin that is positioned on the borders of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. This has led to bias interpretations and conceptualisation on...
An Undisturbed Earlier Stone Age Locality on the Southern Coast of South Africa, Exposed by Fire (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Knysna Estuary and River Basin on the southern coast of South Africa provided attractive resources for Pleistocene foragers. Isolated Earlier Stone Age (ESA) finds, including large bifacially flaked core tools, are commonly found in upland areas around the basin, particularly during construction projects, but dense vegetation cover has thus far prevented...
Unmodified Cobbles and Boulders from the Middle Stone Age Occupation of Witberg 1, Southern Kalahari, South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Witberg 1 is an open-air Middle Stone Age (MSA) occupation within diatom-rich sediments in the southern Kalahari, suggestive of a small ancient lake system (~360,000–140,000 years-ago). The occupation horizon is dense with flakes, blades, cores, and MSA points, mostly less than 10 cm. However, there are numerous...
Update on Research at the Site of Waterfall Bluff, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at Waterfall Bluff, South Africa, document evidence of occupation in a persistent coastal context from MIS3 to the Middle Holocene. Remains of marine mollusks and fish show for the first time that coastal foraging was a component of some hunter-gatherer...
Using Modern Ostrich Eggshell to Establish a Color Alteration Index and Determine the Physical and Chemical Effects of Heat Exposure (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ostrich eggshell (OES) is common in archaeological sites throughout Africa and Asia and is often recovered with evidence of pre- and postdepositional burning. The physical nature of OES protects some isotopic data that remain locked away in the crystalline shell matrix, allowing researchers to use these data thousands of years later to...
Using Surface Roughness to Identify Heat Treatment in Lithic Technology (2018)
The heat treatment of stone to enhance flaking attributes was an important advancement in the adaptive toolkit of early humans. The earliest evidence for this is the heat treatment of silcrete 164 ka at the Middle Stone Age site Pinnacle Point 13B in South Africa. Heating stone prior to knapping alters the physical and chemical composition of the stone, and it has long been recognized that flaked heat-treated stone has a glossier surface. We expect this glossiness to result from a smoother...
Using the Present to Uncover the Past: Reconstructing the Ecology and Behaviour of Extinct Large Mammals on the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain (South Coast, South Africa) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding the ecological role of extinct large mammals is an ongoing challenging research problem. The use of species traits (physical and behavioral) to characterize functional communities is becoming common in ecological modelling and is key to understanding the ecological role that species would have filled under historic conditions. This...
Using Ungulate Bones to Retouch and (Re)Sharpen Middle Stone Age End-Scrapers at Bushman Rock Shelter, South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone retouchers were first recognized in European Paleolithic assemblages at the turn of the nineteenth century. They have since been documented from sites across Eurasia, from Lower Paleolithic to Neolithic contexts. Notwithstanding their abundance in the archaeological record, the association between the characteristics of the retouch on...
What Drives the Variability in MSA Lithic Assemblages from Sibhudu Cave, South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After over a decade of excavation and analysis at the Middle Stone Age site of Sibhudu in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the team from the University of Tübingen has established a uniquely complete and well-documented record of cultural change from the end or the Middle Pleistocene until...
What Makes a Forager Turn Coastal? An Agent-Based Approach to Coastal Foraging on the Dynamic South African Paleoscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gram for gram, coastal shellfish have significant benefits over many terrestrial resources. They are higher in calories, fats, and proteins than most plants and are available in denser and more predictable patches than mammals. However, there are costs to foraging coastal shellfish....
Whole Assemblage Behavioral Indicators: Expectations and Inferences from Surface and Excavated Records at Elandsfontein, South Africa (2018)
Large scale surface surveys represent singular insights into the landscape scale variation in behaviors. Detailed investigations of the spatial distribution of artifacts across large spatial extents allow archaeologists to investigate a landscape as a single site. Surface assemblages have the advantage of large sample sizes and large aerial extents. However, biases associated with the formation processes of surface assemblages often undermine our confidence in the behavioral inferences derived...
Zooarchaeological Analysis of a Late Pleistocene Interglacial-Glacial Transition at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6, South Africa (2018)
Understanding if and to what extent early anatomically modern humans adapted to dramatic climatic events is essential to human origins research. Pinnacle Point — a complex of cave sites and rockshelters along the southern coast of South Africa — offers a unique opportunity to study human adaptability through time. The long sequence at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 (PP5-6) spans 164 - 44 thousand years ago and encompasses two Interglacial to Glacial Marine Isotope Stage transitions (Stages 5-4-3)....