AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)
276-300 (535 Records)
Although Greco-Roman Egypt has received more scholarly attention, the contemporaneous Meroitic civilization of Nubia deserves recognition as an important culture in the history of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean world. Examination of the archaeological evidence from the Meroitic civilization of Sudan (ca. 400 B.C.E. to ca. 400 C.E.) presents the opportunity to further current understandings of evolving cultural interaction on the fringes of several distinct world powers (namely Egypt,...
Living Systems of Raised-Field Agriculture in Africa: What Can They Tell Us About Pre-Columbian Systems in the Neotropics? (2015)
The study of pre-Columbian raised-field agriculture is marked by several unresolved questions: How did raised fields function as agroecosystems? Were they cultivated continuously or were fallow periods incorporated? What population densities did they support? Did making and managing raised-field landscapes require top-down control in a hierarchical society (or supervision by specialists)? Can raised-field agriculture play any role in reconciling food production and ecosystem services in...
Local Earthenware Ceramic Decoration and Cultural Transformation on Kenya’s Swahili Coast, AD700-1700 (2015)
Description of locally produced earthenware ceramic assemblages excavated from Swahili town sites on the Kenyan coast suggest that incised and impressed decoration became less common and less formally complex, particularly on cooking vessels, after AD 1200 (Chittick 1984; Horton 1996; Wilding 1989). This development appears to be contemporaneous with shifts in consumption practices, domestic architecture, religion, and the importance and expression of socio-economic identity within coast town...
Local extinctions and regional cultural diversification in time-averaged assemblages (2016)
Modern human behavior, including regional cultural differentiation, has traditionally been characterized as a relatively recent phenomenon despite evidence of modernity before 50,000 years ago from the Paleolithic record of Africa. Researchers interested in how demography might improve our interpretation of the archaeological record have shown that the rate of local group extinctions can affect neutral cultural diversity and the rate at which copy errors accumulate in structured populations....
The Location for the Origin of Domesticated Sorghum in Africa: A Brief Review of Some Cultures in the Sahara, Nile, and Sahel (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent analyses have established the location for the origin of domesticated sorghum occurring in the far eastern Sahel of Sudan during the fourth millennium BC associated with the Late Neolithic Butana Group. For over a half century, sorghum domestication has been hypothesized as occurring somewhere in the Sahelian...
Long and Continuous Record of Climate and Environmental Change from Speleothems of the Cape Floral Region of Southern South Africa (2015)
South African climate is determined by the alternating influence of subtropical trade-winds bringing rainfall to the east coast during summer and temperate westerlies causing rainfall in the south-west during winter. High growth season temperatures favor C4 grasses in the summer rainfall region whereas C3 grasses dominate the winter rainfall region. Pinnacle Point on the central south coast has mixed summer-winter rainfall and C3-C4 vegetation. Millennial and longer time-scale changes in...
Longevity and authority in a mobile world the megasites of the Ugandan grasslands (2017)
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)
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Malaria in the African Indian Ocean Islands: Prospects and Challenges for Biomolecular Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Malaria remains one of the most devastating infectious diseases affecting human populations, with over 200 million cases and 500,000 deaths annually worldwide, most of which focused on the mainlands of sub-Saharan Africa. While malaria is an “old” disease on the mainland dating back tens of thousands of years, its history on...
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...