AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (520 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early agricultural systems relied on plants and animals originally carried thousands of miles by land and sea. Due to a lack of data and a greater emphasis on domestication processes, early agricultural complexes are less investigated than their domestication counterparts. This paper examines the introduction and evolution of...
Archaeological Applications of Optimal Foraging Theory: Employing Bayesian probability modeling to estimate profitability parameters for rare and extinct prey (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconstructing the subsistence strategies of past hominin populations remains one of the most important endeavors of archaeological studies. However, the presence and relative frequency of species alone, recovered as faunal material in archaeological contexts, is insufficient to reconstruct the complex foraging decisions made...
Archaeological Science in Southern and Eastern Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. African archaeology has a rich tradition of archaeological science. Sophisticated chronostratigraphies underpin our picture of human origins; archaeometric studies of provenance, trade, and exchange are reshaping our understanding of how societies developed; and my own field of bone chemistry and...
Archaeological Shellfish Size and Later Human Evolution in Africa (2015)
About 50,000 years ago, modern humans expanded from Africa to Eurasia. Significant behavioral change accompanied this expansion, and archaeologists commonly seek its roots in the African Middle Stone Age (MSA) before 50,000 years ago. Easily recognizable art objects and "jewelry" become common only in sites that postdate the MSA in Africa and Eurasia, but some MSA sites contain possible precursors. Population growth is the most popular explanation for these precursors and for the post-MSA...
Archaeology as Storytelling (2017)
The rise of open source publications has increasingly made archaeological research available to wider audiences and yet the knowledge we as archaeologists produce is not always freely accessible or available. It is fully understood within our discipline that archaeological sites have strong connections to the past; that they are embodied spaces and irreplaceable sources of knowledge. However, this view of sites does not always extend to the broader public or to communities with ties to those...
Archaeology in the Age of the Anthropocene: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (2018)
The 2016 decision by the Working Group on the Anthropocene of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) to designate an Epoch based on a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) fixed at AD1950 is significant for managing global ecological systems moving forward. There is no serious scientific debate on whether humans have impacted the global ecology, but regardless of the ICS decision to anchor the so-called "Golden Spike" to the advent of the nuclear age, humans are known...
Archaeology, People and Identity in Cape Verde Islands (2018)
The geographical location of Cape Verde islands made them one of most important places in early Portuguese exploration of African coast. The first European settlers were favoured by the Portuguese monarchy in the relations with African coast. Since 1472, they were forced to carry out exchange with local goods. This encouraged the development of cotton and sugarcane crops with slaves from the "Guinea Rivers", as was common in other Atlantic islands and the American colonies. The excavations...
The Archeological and Historical Evidence for the Wreck of L'Aurore- Summary and Implications (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Underwater Archeology of a French Slave Ship In Northern Mozambique- L'Aurore", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper summarizes the session, highlighting evidence, drawing implications and proposing directions for future research on the IDNM-013 shipwreck site in Mozambique.
Assessing Edge Damage in MSA Lithic Assemblages: Experimental Proxies for the Analysis of Use and Post-Depositional Damage (2017)
Given the low frequency of retouched stone tools in many Middle Stone Age (MSA) assemblages, the analysis of edge damage on unretouched artifacts offers a promising depth of insight into tool-use behavior. Taphonomic process such as trampling, however, can also cause edge damage on lithic artifacts. As part of the investigation of GaJj17, an MSA site in the Koobi Fora region (Kenya), we conducted an experiment designed to investigate differences between edge damage resulting from use and that...
Assessing hominin involvement with the faunal assemblages from Bundu Farm and Pniel 6, Northern Cape, South Africa (2015)
The transition from the Early Stone Age (ESA) to the Middle Stone Age (MSA) represents an important technological shift in hominin behavioral evolution in southern Africa. Subsistence behaviors during this transition, however, are relatively unknown due to a lack of faunal preservation or insecure associations between lithic and faunal accumulations. Often, these sites originate from riverine, lakeshore, and spring deposits, locations that likely attracted hominin hunters and other carnivores in...
Assessment of projectile use at Aduma (Middle Awash, Ethiopia) (2015)
There is not yet clear evidence for the beginning of complex projectile technologies (propulsion via mechanical aid). Morphological attributes and miniaturization of stone points at Aduma have been used to suggest early complex projectile use ~100,000-80,000 years ago. Hafting traces on stone segments and geometric pieces were presented as better indications of early complex projectile use at Sibudu Cave, South Africa, ca. 64,000 years ago. However, neither point shape/size nor evidence for...
Back to Basics: Analyzing knapped stone recovered during survey in southeastern Senegal (2017)
Archaeological ethics require all sites identified on survey to be reported and described in such a manner as to allow for the archaeological community to understand their research potential. This can present a challenge in regions without a significant body of previous research to aid in the interpretation of finds. The Bandafassi Regional Archaeological Project in southeastern Senegal faces just such a situation. A research question driven survey strategy, directed at the archaeological record...
Barbed Bone Points: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Perspectives on Selective Fishing on the Shores of Lake Turkana. (2016)
As riverine and lacustrine environments expanded across north tropical Africa at various times in prehistory, humans developed special methods for fishing or "aquatic hunting." Barbed bone "harpoon" points, used across much of Africa north of the equator during early Holocene times, represent an especially compelling innovation. Studying barbed bone points from Turkana Basin, NW Kenya can shed light on hunter-gatherer technology, tool use, and resource acquisition in a context of environmental...
A Bayesian Solution to the Controversy over the Identification of Bone Surface Modification in Paleoanthropology (2017)
Bone surface modification (BSM) remains a primary source of taphonomic inference in paleontological and archaeological contexts. However long-standing debates in BSM studies have undermined the utility of this approach. We use an objective machine-based learning algorithm rooted in Bayesian probability theory designed to quantify the level of uncertainty associated with a formal assignment of agent to individual BSM. Our multivariate Bayesian model, trained on large assemblages of...
Bee Connection: the Symbolism of a Cyclical Order in an East African Age System (1985)
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Beer, Porridges, and Feasting in the Gamo Region of southern Ethiopia (2017)
Porridges and beer make up a majority of the household diet throughout much of rural Africa and could possibly be some of the earliest foods produced. In Africa, pottery is one of the primary culinary tools used to make both porridges and beer. This ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research explores pottery using use-alteration and morphological analyses from the Gamo of southern Ethiopia to indicate the use of pottery as a culinary tool. Beer and porridges are considered luxury foods...
Behavior Change in Hunter-Gatherers of the Namib: A Re-Analysis of the Terminal Pleistocene Lithic Technology at the Mirabib Hill Rockshelter, Western Namibia (2017)
Originally excavated in the early 1970s by Beatrice Sandelowsky, the Mirabib Hill Rockshelter is located roughly 250km southwest of Windhoek, Namibia, in the Namib-Naukluft National Park. This poster describes our re-analysis of the lithic technology recovered from Mirabib during the Sandelowsky excavations. The lithics examined in this poster were recovered from the lowest levels of the Sandelowsky excavation, just above bedrock, and date to around 19.5ka. This poster discusses the knapping...
Behavioral Ecology and Evolutionary Approaches to Human-Environment Dynamics on Southwest Madagascar (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Madagascar’s southwestern coast has been inhabited by coastal foraging and fishing populations for over a millennium. Despite significant environmental changes in southwest Madagascar’s environment following human settlement, little is known about the scale, pace, and nature of human settlement and subsequent landscape modification. Recent...
Behavioral Inferences from Early Stone Age Sites: A View from the Koobi Fora Formation (2017)
The Early Stone Age record is a spatially continuous palimpsest representing thousands of years of artifact discard. The record thus reflects a long-term pattern of hominin movement at a landscape scale. Despite this, most recent research continues to employ interpretive perspectives suited for finer temporal grains and relies on targeted excavation of dense concentrations of artifacts. Here ‘sites’ are investigated as discrete functionally organized places and analytically interpreted based on...
Behavioral Metallurgy of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Neo-Punic Peoples (2015)
Some cultures do not just adopt or develop innovative technologies, but actually define themselves based on their technological acumen. The Phoenicians were such a culture, whose economic reliance on metallurgical and maritime knowledge went further in defining their long-term communal cohesion than did other factors. Lacking historical texts written by Phoenicians, it is only through archaeology and archaeometric analyses that such a resource-based ideology can be reconstructed. Compositional...
Beyond the Grave: Regional Interaction in the Senegambian Megalith Zone (2015)
Over the past century, archaeological reconnaissance and survey in the Senegambia region of West Africa has identified more than 2000 megalithic cemetery sites dating to the Iron Age (circa 500 BC – AD 1500). Although a number of research programs have explored the histories of individual sites, it remains unclear how these related to one another within a regional tradition of mortuary practice and monument construction. This paper begins to address this issue through integrated geospatial and...
Beyond the Shadow of a Desert: Illuminating Southern Africa’s Foraging Spectra (2015)
There is arguably nowhere more susceptible to the tyranny of the ethnographic record than southern Africa. From Man the Hunter’s quintessential foragers to the revisionists’ marginalized proletariat, Kalahari hunter-gatherers cast shadows far longer than those created by the desert sun. There is no denying that this extraordinary record – central to both economic and social approaches to southern African prehistory – has greatly enriched our picture of the past. Unsurprisingly, however, the...
A Bioarchaeological Assessment of Diet and Dental Health During the New Kingdom/Napatan Transition in Ancient Nubia (Tombos, Sudan) (2015)
Nubia, once colonized by the Egyptian Empire during the New Kingdom Period (ca. 1550-1070 BCE), became increasingly independent and powerful with the rise of the Napatan State during the Third Intermediate and Napatan Periods (ca. 1070-664 BCE). This research addresses the social impacts of the New Kingdom/Napatan political and economic transition via the bioarchaeological examination of diet (carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis) and dental health (ante-mortem tooth loss, caries). We...
Bioarchaeology and Looting: A Case Study from Sudan (2015)
Disturbing the dead has been considered a criminal activity in the Nile Valley since the trial of Egyptian tomb robbers in 1100 BCE. Looting is one of the most destructive forces at archaeological sites; grave robbing, in particular, leaves human remains and cultural heritage irreparably damaged. During 2007-2008, the Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition (OINE) worked to identify, record, and preserve important archaeological sites that have since been destroyed by the Merowe Dam. Al-Widay, a...
Biological exchange in the Swahili world: archaeofaunal and biomolecular evidence (2016)
The Swahili coast, stretching from Somalia to Mozambique, has a long history of engagement in western Indian Ocean trade, from at least the first century CE according to documentary evidence. One result is the widespread use of animals of Asian origin – particularly zebu cattle (Bos indicus) and chicken (Gallus gallus) – in African subsistence systems today. However, tracing these animals’ arrival and spread is complicated by their osteological similarities to indigenous taxa and by poor...