AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)
351-375 (535 Records)
There is now a general consensus that the earliest Oldowan artifacts were made by skilled toolmakers with a clear understanding of the fracturing mechanics of different toolstone materials, thus leading several researchers to propose a simpler lithic reduction stage that occurred prior to 2.6 Ma. Three reduction techniques that are within the behavioral repertoire of the genus Pan are proposed as potential intermediate stages between the percussion behaviors of the LCA of chimpanzees and humans...
Ostrich Eggshell taphonomy and distribution at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (2017)
Analysis of ostrich eggshell (OES) fragment distribution at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (KEH-1) revealed taphonomic patterns. The variation of OES features and its distribution indicates that the OES was being used and processed differently in temporal and spatial context. KEH-1, a cave on the southern coast of South Africa, was inhabited by early modern humans throughout the Middle and Late Stone Age. Hearth features are prevalent throughout the sequence, providing evidence of occupational...
Out of Africa, or How Earlier Forms of African Governance Can Save the World (2023)
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. One of the consequences of European colonialism is the narrowing of the world’s political imagination. When colonists began to carve up Africa in the late nineteenth century, they were met with a dizzying range of governance systems—systems most famously pondered by academics in Fortes and Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) *African...
An outline of Dahomean religious belief (1933)
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Overview of two seasons in the Roman and Neo-Punic settlement of Zita (Zyan), southern Tunisia (2015)
After Carthage was destroyed by Scipio Africanus Minor (Aemilianus) in 146 BCE, the Punic settlements that it controlled were occupied by the Romans. Exporting wine, olive oil, garum (a sauce made of the fermented intestines of small fish), and purple dye (of Bolinus brandaris and Hexaplex trunculus shell-fish), the eastern Maghreb continued to flourish. Many of the ancient monuments in modern Tunisia date to the centuries following the Roman conquest, until the center of power shifted to the...
The Oyo Empire, ca. 1570–1840: The Art of Being a Compositional State (2024)
This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Yoruba sovereign states matured about the eleventh century in ideology, symbols of authority, and organizational structure. Governed by a system of monarchy comprising the divine king/palace officials and non-royal lords, theirs was a political arrangement that placed the king as first among equals with the...
The P5 project archaeological reconnaissance along the Pondoland Coast, South Africa (2015)
South African sea caves preserve evidence for early modern humans’ longstanding interest in coastal resources. However, changes in coastlines location throughout the Pleistocene prevented the development of long-term and continuous records of coastal foraging and there are still many outstanding questions about when, where, and how coastal foraging developed. Pondoland (Eastern Cape Province) is one of the few places where we may be able to fill in these gaps. An exceptionally narrow...
The Palace of Muweis and Its Medieval Necropolis (2017)
Muweis is located in the Shendi reach, about 300 kms north from the capital of Sudan, Khartoum. Its palace has been excavated by the Louvre Museum since 2007. It is part of the Meroitic Kingdom (350 BCE - 350 CE), which covered an area of 1500 kms on the Middle Nile Valley, making it the most important political structure known in Sub-Saharan Africa until the 19th century. In 2008 a medieval necropolis was discovered among the remains of the palace, under the debris of a small house situated at...
Paleoecological Assessment of the Douglas Korongo East and Bell's Korongo East Sites, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania (2017)
Current work at DKE and BKE in concert with The Olduvai Paleoanthropology and Paleoecology Project (TOPPP) has exposed Bed I and Bed II deposits, respectively. At DKE a series of tuffs and siltstones, including paleosols, indicates DKE hosted a series of productive landscapes through time. Paleosols have well-developed blocky structure and host large concentrations of fossils. At BKE sandy fluvial deposits adjacent to siliceous siltstones confirm previous descriptions of site materials. Cultural...
Paleoenvironmental implications of Stable Isotope analyses of Micromammal teeth from Pinnacle Point (Mossel Bay, South Africa) (2015)
Paleoenvironmental proxies sample past environments at a number of geographic scales including regional, sub-regional, and local. Given species’ small home ranges and often-specific habitat requirements, isotopic data from micromammal fossil teeth are increasingly recognized as abundant potential reservoirs of local-scale paleoenvironmental proxy data. Elucidating differences between local and regional vegetation provides a context for understanding landscape-scale environmental variation,...
Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction using Fossil Phytolith Assemblages at Pinnacle Point caves 13B and 5/6 during Middle Stone Age, Mossel Bay, South Africa (2015)
Climatic conditions played a key role in the evolution of modern human linage and South Africa has been considered, based on genetics and fossil evidence, a suitable area. South Africa hosts the smallest of all-known biomes (Fynbos), characterized by hyper diversity with high species richness and large presence of edible plants. We present the phytolith record from the archaeological sites Pinnacle Point caves 13B and 5/6 spanning from ∼160 to ∼50 ka. This study aims at reconstructing the past...
Paleolithic Survey on the Upper Luangwa Valley, Zambia (2017)
The northern half of the Luangwa Valley, Zambia, a southern branch of the East African rift system, is archaeologically unexplored territory in an area that may have served as an important biogeographic corridor between eastern and southern Africa during the Plio-Pleistocene. This paper summarizes the first systematic survey in this region. Paleontological reconnaissance in 2013 incidentally revealed multiple Paleolithic sites which may range from the Acheulian through the MSA. Representative...
Parting the Late Pleistocene Red Sea : An Introduction to the Session and Region (2016)
The Late Pleistocene dispersal of Homo sapiens and “modern human behaviour” through and out of Africa has become a key issue in human evolutionary studies, largely as a result of intensive archaeological research in southern, and to a lesser extent east and northern Africa. In spite of its remarkably diverse environments, earliest Homo sapiens fossils and strategic location straddling the postulated “Northern” and “Southern” dispersal routes, the Horn of Africa...
Pastoral pathways to plant domestication: current evidence for African pearl millet and sorghum in comparative perspective (2015)
Recent archaeobotanical evidence has provided important, although limited evidence, for the steps on the domestication trajectory for Pearl Millet in western Africa (Mali, Mauretania) and Sorghum in eastern Africa (Sudan), during the middle Holocene (3000-1000 BC). Both were exploited by and domesticated by societies that in the Sahelian and northern Savannas, and practiced mobile herding alongside hunting and low-level cultivation, but full-scale agricultural dependence may not have emerged...
A Pathway to Attain Sustainable Development in Africa (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Initiative for Sustainable Development in Africa (ISDAf) was conceived in 2020 to raise awareness of the need to engage local indigenous and descendent (LID) communities as equal partners in Strategic Environmental and Social Assessments (SESA) and Environmental and Social Impact Assessments (ESIAs) for development and conservation projects at the...
Patterns in Amino Acid Delta 15N Values of Lemurs Are Inconsistent with Aridity Driving Megafaunal Extinction in Southwestern Madagascar (2017)
Early human colonists of Madagascar encountered a diverse endemic fauna during the late Holocene that included elephant birds, pygmy hippos, and giant lemurs. All fauna >10 kg went extinct in the past 1,000-2,000 years. Direct human predation and anthropogenic landscape change help explain aspects of the extinction pattern. Increasing aridity may have also played a role in some regions, but its contribution remains controversial. We track changes in aridity during the past 4,000 years in...
Patterns of Hominin Land Use and Raw Material Procurement in the Paleo-Olduvai Basin, Tanzania (2017)
Suitable toolstone was a key affordance for Early Stone Age (ESA) populations across Africa. Northern Tanzania’s Olduvai Basin, because it contains numerous ESA archaeological localities and a variety of quartzitic outcrops, offers an excellent opportunity to evaluate the effect of raw material distribution on hominin landuse. While the lithology and mineralogy of these outcrops have been well described, their macroscopic similarities confound efforts to reliably determine the exact source of...
Patterns of Lithic Edge Damage from the Open-air Middle Stone Age Assemblages at Vleesbaai and Oyster Bay, South Africa (2015)
Much of our understanding of the South African Middle Stone Age (MSA) comes from deep sequences recovered from caves and rockshelters. These discreet, enclosed contexts represent one aspect of a foraging continuum; where many other activities take place on the continuous, open landscape. A different suite of taphonomic processes are also more likely to occur on open landscapes, complicating comparisons between site contexts. Developing meaningful inferences regarding past human behaviors...
Peering into the past Cape vegetation during the Last Glacial Maximum using species distribution modelling and dynamic global vegetation modelling (2015)
The Cape has a rich archaeological record that spans the Quaternary. Understanding shifts and changes of vegetation across this landscape will help to contextualise this record and understand the prehistoric resource paleoscape. In order to do this we couple high-resolution regionally downscaled climate simulations of the Last Glacial Maximum, landscape features (e.g. geology, aspect, slope) and two different approaches to modelling vegetation: species distribution modelling (SDM) and dynamic...
People and Palaeoclimates at the Diallowali Site Complex: Changing patterns along the Middle Senegal Valley throughout the 1st millennium BC (2017)
The first millennium BC was a time of considerable social, technological, and environmental change for the peoples of West Africa. Despite the growing number and distribution of archaeological projects throughout the region, very little is known about this critical period. Likewise, many of the climate models currently in use lack the sufficient temporal or spatial resolution needed to provide context for the variety of changes occurring at a localized level. Recent research at the Diallowali...
Petrography of "Nderit" pottery from Pastoral Neolithic sites surrounding Lake Turkana in Kenya (2015)
"Nderit" pottery is associated with the earliest pastoralists in eastern Africa, c. 4000-4500 bp. and is found at both settlement sites and ritual "pillar sites" surrounding Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya. Several of the known megalithic "pillar sites" are large communal cemeteries and contain very large numbers of Nderit sherds, yet little research has been carried out on these ceramics in terms of their technology or provenance. Primary research questions concerning the early pastoralists...
The Petrology and Geochemistry of Ballast Stones- Evidence of Voyaging and Identity (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 discusses novel techniques of geochemical analysis applied to ballast stones from the Ile de Mozambique Shipwreck (IDM-013) by Dr. Richard Palin of the Department of Geochemistry at Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences. Techniques, and implications for the presumed...
Pharaonic Power and Architectural Labor Investment at the Karnak Temple Complex, Egypt (2016)
Labor investment studies, based on the notion that the energy of people is quantifiable, give an invaluable and unique insight into the architectural pursuits of past societies. This labor study of ancient Egypt provides a better understanding of authority among Egyptian pharaohs as represented by their legacy of monumental architecture. A site of profound importance to Egyptian society was the Karnak Temple Complex, specifically the precinct of Amun, which was aggrandized by pharaonic...
Phytolith Processing Methods and the Affects upon Results (2015)
Biological microremains such as pollen, diatoms, starches, and phytoliths are invaluable data sources for reconstructing paleoenvironments and subsistence practices among human populations during times of technological transition. A primary goal of archaeological research is to use these remains to reconstruct the relationship between environment and technology. Phytoliths in particular allow us to reconstruct the specific flora that comprises the biome in a particular place and time....
Pinnacle Point 5-6 and Diepkloof Rockshelter (South Africa): Testing the OSL ages and constructing a standardised MSA chronology (2015)
Single grain optically stimulated luminescence (SG-OSL) dating has made a major contribution to our understanding of the chronology of the Middle Stone Age of Africa. The accuracy of many of the SG-OSL chronologies has been verified by other independent dating techniques. Diepkloof Rockshelter (DRS), however, has produced disparate chronologies that have resulted in a dating controversy. Criticisms raised have been used to cast doubt on and, in some cases, dismiss the chronology for the...