AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Innocent Pikirayi. Federica Sulas. Tendai Treddah Musindo. Elton Munyaradzi Sagiya.

In southern Africa, Great Zimbabwe has long been the focus of research, debates and preservation as the remains of what was once the urban centre of a vast state system. As new research findings are reframing the development of the Zimbabwe civilization in the region, local environmental settings and natural resources at Great Zimbabwe remain poorly understood. Using approaches in geoarchaeology, this paper presents Great Zimbabwe as a living landscape. New soil sequences from within and around...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Smith.

Ground stone technology is an early component of the African Middle and Late Pleistocene hominin behavioral package. However, very little attention has been paid to quantifying Pleistocene ground stone variation in Africa. This paper describes a ground stone assemblage from the site of Mochena Borago in Southwest Ethiopia. The site plays a key role in testing the hypothesis that the highlands of Southwestern Ethiopia acted as a refugium for hunter-gatherer populations looking to escape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Walz.

In this paper, I discuss alternative interpretations of findings from an interdisciplinary archaeology project in East Africa. I share the way in which my experiences as an archaeologist among people and on landscapes enriched and altered my original understanding of communities and the region's history. Interactions with Zigua healer-historians alerted me to indigenous concepts of time and space and the role and significance of ancestors and healing, which inevitably offered more robust and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Cleghorn. Ximena Villagran. Benjamin Schoville. Daniel Peart. Hannah May Keller.

The Agulhas Bank Paleoscape (ABP), a broad coastal plain that is now a submerged continental shelf off the south coast of Africa, would have presented early modern humans with a variety of potential foraging options. A rich Middle Stone Age record documents the presence of early coastal foragers as well as terrestrial hunter-gatherers in the ABP. At Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1, both strategies are represented in a sequence spanning the end of the Middle Stone Age (about 40 ka) through to the end...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Goldstein. Michael Storozum. Fiona Marshall. Rachel Reid. Stanley Ambrose.

Mobile herding societies are often considered to leave behind few traces in the archaeological record, however pastoral settlements may have helped shape the broader landscape. Herders relying on domesticated cattle, sheep and goat arrived in the most productive grasslands of East Africa >3600 calBP years ago. Our collaborative research investigates the legacies of their land-use through geoarchaeological analyses. We present results of analyses of five Pastoral Neolithic era archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maurice Bloch.

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 Jayne Wilkins. Kyle S. Brown. Simen Oestmo. Telmo Pereira. Kathryn L. Ranhorn.

The Pinnacle Point sites on the south coast of South Africa preserve a long, high-resolution sequence of human occupation spanning 162-51 ka. The lithic assemblages provide a unique opportunity for examining Pleistocene technological change because they are linked to robust age estimates and multiple proxies for paleoenvironmental change. Recent lithic technological investigations aim to standardize analytical procedures across the complex of Pinnacle Point sites, and maximize comparability to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frederick Coolidge.

Bruner and his colleagues (Bruner et al. 2013) have demonstrated that the parietal lobes in Homo sapiens are expanded in comparison to Neandertals and Homo heidelbergensis. The traditional parietal lobe function of the brain, somatosensory integration, is thought to be among the phylogenetically oldest functions of the brain. However, recent research has shown that the parietal lobes may be critical to many of the higher cognitive functions of modern Homo sapiens. There are two regions appear to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Chia.

When the Tiv, a Bantu language speaking group migrated into the Benue Valley of Nigeria from southwestern Cameroon over five hundred years ago, they faced hostilities from different groups in the valley. Hilltops readily served as important settlement locales to protect the Tiv from violence and conflict. As they migrated from one hilltop to another they eventually settled over much of the Middle Benue Valley. Archaeological research in the valley has investigated these ancient hilltop sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Catherine D'Andrea. Valery Terwilliger.

Recent archaeological survey, excavation, ethnoarchaeological and palaeoenvironmental research conducted in northeastern Tigrai by the Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) has produced new insights into the Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite periods (>800 BCE-CE 700). The principal ETAP excavations thus far include the Pre-Aksumite site of Mezber (1600 BCE-1CE) and Ona Adi (c. early 1st millennium CE) which was inhabited during the Pre-Aksumite to Aksumite transition. Both sites were occupied...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoë Crossland.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Drawing on work by Alexander G. Weheliye and Achille Mbembe this paper considers the ways in which Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s notions of biopower and biopolitics have been theorized in relation to Western European modernity and forms of sovereignty over life. What kind of challenge is posed to these genealogies when we consider...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ahmed Alsherif.

The Tuareg speak the Berber language, which is called Tamajaq/Tamasheq/Tamahaq. The language is known as Tamasheq by western Tuareg in Mali, Tamahaq among Algerian and Libyan Tuaregs, and Tamajaq in the Azawagh and Aïr regions, Niger. Generally, the Tuaregs are Muslim, semi nomadic, and traditionally stratified group of people who has lived in the Saharan and Sahelian regions of Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Libya, and Algeria. The word Tuareg which is plural comes from Tarqi or Tarki that is the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Schoeman.

Stonewalled enclosures and associated terraces embody the intersection of Bokoni gorge biographies and broader social history. The complex biographies of the gorges include being ritual spaces marked by rock art, iron smelting sites, refugia and strongholds. Many of the uses did not substantially alter the gorges, but in the troubled times of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in southern Africa pre-colonial farmers used stonewalling to reconfigure several gorges in Bokoni. The stonewalled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sidney Reynolds. Jonathan Reeves. Matthew Douglass. David R. Braun.

The occurrence of large densities of lithic and fossil material in Early Pleistocene contexts have been the focus of much interest. Several hypotheses modeling hominin foraging strategies have been generated to explain their formation. Assemblage formation is often hypothesized to be the result of particular land use strategies that relate to the movement and discard of stone artifacts. These hypotheses are difficult to test because they rely on ethnographic models of human movement, yet they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Walter Crist.

Egypt has long been the focus of research on ancient board games, as it provides the longest history and greatest variety of games in the ancient world. Despite this, limitations on archaeological interpretation exist because of the unprovenanced nature of the material, as well as a focus on games from tombs of the nobility and pharaohs. Increasingly, evidence from within Egypt in the form of graffiti games on monuments and on ostraca, as well as Egyptian games found in the Levant where...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Wilson Marshall.

In 19th-century coastal Kenya, runaway slaves were known as watoro. This paper uses an expanding analytical framework to investigate watoro identity and interaction at three scales. First, I use artifact concentrations and domestic spatial dynamics to illustrate the daily lifeways and material preferences of individual households in two watoro villages, Koromio and Makoroboi. I then compare multiple households within each watoro community in order to investigate how these households interacted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lewis R. Binford.

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 Helina Woldekiros.

Caravans form an important component of ancient trade routes world-wide. They were lifelines to settlements and connected diverse landscapes. They also encouraged complex transport networks. Our understanding of ancient ways of life along these trade routes is, however, hampered by an incomplete picture of the participants or caravaners themselves. This study uses quantitative and qualitative data from ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research on the Afar salt caravan route in northern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Desmond Clark.

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 Ryan Szymanski.

Interpretive challenges involving issues of equifinality and causation can chronically hamper environmental reconstruction efforts, as numerous physical, environmental, or anthropogenic processes may potentially be responsible for creating observed raw data patterns. Nested multi- proxy and multi­scalar analyses offer potential means of approaching these difficult conceptual issues which can plague interpretations reliant on single lines of proxy evidence. A dataset comprised of multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Yohe.

, considerable data regarding the human remains, both from human skeletal remains and mummies has been garnered from controlled excavation of Byzantine (Coptic) burials and surface collections of disturbed graves dating to as early as the Third Intermediate Period. This paper summarizes those data and compare with similar osteometric information from other areas of Middle Egypt. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. K. Brain.

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 Rudolf Cesaretti.

Ever since the falsification of Wittfogel’s thesis on the role of centralized irrigation construction and administration in ancient Near Eastern states, most scholars of Pharaonic Egypt have found it taboo to theorize a relationship between irrigation-based productive systems and the Pharaonic political economy. A wealth of geoarchaeological and paleoclimatological proxy data has enabled the reconstruction of long term trends in Nile flood levels, highlighting not only the considerable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only G. Berlin. J. Ambler. R. Helvy. G. Schaber.

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 Abigail Fisher.

Applying stable carbon isotopic analyses to discern anthropogenic and natural deforestation events is both useful and important to current deforestation and landscape modification research. The goal of this project is to identify a shift in δ13C content of mammalian teeth caused by the thinning of canopied forests using the "canopy effect" hypothesis. This pilot study tests the merits of the canopy effect hypothesis as applied to deforestation signatures using two extant village sites on the...