AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)
426-450 (535 Records)
One of the most vexing problems in the archaeology of eastern Africa is the absence of burial evidence from deep antiquity. This issue is now moot with the documentation of multiple burials on the narrow rims of steep volcanic calderas in far western Uganda. Dating to the early first millennium CE, these cemeteries contain well preserved individuals who lived in a forested environment they modified by fire while subsisting on a mixed diet of fish, game, and agriculturally produced grains....
Sacred Spaces vs. Public "Billboards" in Saudi Arabian Rock Art Placement (2016)
Saudi Arabia has a rich cultural heritage that is amply represented in the extensive rock art from north to south along the western half of the Arabian Peninsula. Two petroglyph localities, Jubbah and Shuwaymis, were just awarded UNESCO World Heritage status. Representing a wide temporal range and diverse styles, it is clear that the art is concentrated adjacent to ancient lakes, along wadis, and around other sources of ephemeral pools of rainwater. This study examines the distribution of the...
A Saint Jude’s Box for Zooarchaeologists In the Making (2015)
Taking on graduate students and shepherding them through the harrowing process of becoming PhD’s is something few faculty take lightly. Within the rigorous methodological sub-discipline of Zooarchaeology, even fewer would commit to the requisite long and close apprenticeship with students whose backgrounds lay "outside of the box" of faunal-focused research. Yet, Diane populated her research cluster with a dynamic mixture of scholars from disparate backgrounds, just as she kept the famous...
Salvage Excavations on Greefswald: Leokwe Commoners and K2 Cattle (2015)
The relationship between Leokwe and Leopard’s Kopje people represents the first known ethnic interaction in pre-colonial southern Africa. As the subordinate partner, Leokwe had roles befitting their ‘first people’ status. Salvage excavations at the Leokwe Main Rest Camp uncovered ‘extra’ cattle kraals, while Leokwe faunal assemblages there and elsewhere contain high percentages of low-status cattle bones. Thus, Leokwe herdsmen were probably tending the cattle of K2 elite. Two sites on Schroda...
Scaling Food Practices: Contextual Comparison of Animal and Plant Remains from Banda, Ghana, during the Early Atlantic Era (2016)
In this paper, we examine food practices in Banda, Ghana, during the tumultuous 15th to 17th centuries AD, as global scale political economic shifts collided with local economies. In Banda, significant involvement in northward-looking Niger trade began to erode as attention shifted towards emerging Atlantic networks. At the same time, paleoenvironmental records indicate a severe, multi-century drought. How did people negotiate these pressures in their everyday food practices? To address this...
The Scatter between the Scatter between the Patches: A Tephrostratigraphic Approach to Low-density Archaeological Sites in the Eastern Lake Victoria Basin of Kenya (2017)
Among recent groups, foraging activities are unevenly distributed across the landscape. Archaeological traces of past foragers are also spatially variable as a result of multiple factors, including the redundancy of site use, a bias towards tasks that leave well-defined material traces likely to preserve into the present (e.g., stone tool manufacture), and local sedimentological factors that mediate site preservation through burial as well as subsequent recovery through erosion or excavation....
Scenic narratives of humans and animals in Namibian rock art (2017)
In prehistoric rock art the notion of ‘scene’ always played an important role but a clear and widely accepted definition of scene does not exist and little was written about what constitutes a scene. If informing context lacks, Gestalt features are often taken to identify what can be considered a meaningful scene. If we consider a scene as displaying a social animated configuration, then the Gestalt laws alone are an insufficient tool. Particularly in scenes including humans and animals...
Semiosis in the Pleistocene Scene (2017)
One of the distinctive aspects of human behavior is the ability to think symbolically. However, the ability to track this capacity archaeologically is complicated by debates on what makes an object symbolic. Rather than initially asking if materials are symbols/symbolic, we offer that it may be better to ask if and how they are signs. A more nuanced view of "symbol" in the archaeological record, combined with aspects of Peircean semiotics, can help to bridge the gap between the material record...
Settling Madagascar: When did People First Colonize the World's Largest Island? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Madagascar constitutes a major anomaly in the history of human colonization: 400 km from the African mainland, but with a population whose culture, language, and genes derive substantially from Indonesia, more than 7000 km away. Recently, the argument has gained ground that the island was settled (perhaps from Africa) significantly earlier...
Shaping Health: An Examination of Health, Social Identity and Burial Practices in the Egyptian Predynastic (2015)
Patterns of disease manifestation in individuals and within a community reveal how health is affected by social and economic identity. Differences in wealth and social status can lead to disparities in diet, living conditions and healthcare. This interaction is explored using data from skeletal remains and grave architecture from the Predynastic Cemetery N7000 at Naga-ed-Der, located in Upper Egypt. In his Ph.D. dissertation, Stephen Savage (1995) organized individuals into six spatial clusters...
A Short Historiography of David Killick (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. David Killick came to archaeology perhaps earlier in life and almost surely in a more unconventional way than did most of us: at a prestigious, all-boys boarding school in what was then colonial Rhodesia. Student trips to the nearby Matobo Hills, an extraordinary landscape of balancing granite...
Significance of Agricultural Dispersal into Europe and Northern Africa. In: Prehistoric Agriculture (1971)
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.
Significantly Differentiated Figures: understanding difference through the construction of personhood in the southern African San idiom (2017)
Within the corpus of San rock art in the South African Drakensberg mountains is a category of highly embellished, oversized anthropomorphic figures termed Significantly Differentiated Figures (SDFs). Such images have previously been interpreted as San ritual specialists' conceptualisation of themselves, in metaphor, as a result of the arrivals of African farmers and European colonists. This paper, drawing on new data gathered during surveys of the Matatiele region in the Eastern Cape, South...
Silcretes from Nearby Sources Display Different Responses to Rapid Heating: Implications for Models of Early Human Heat Treatment (2017)
Heat treatment of silcrete in the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa has been taken to indicate cognitive complexity. This inference is based on the argument that silcretes require well-regulated heating and cooling rates to avoid thermal fracture. Alternative arguments have been made that silcrete can be heat treated with limited control over temperature gradients, and thus that heat treatment may have been a relatively simple process. These apparently contrasting positions elide the fact that...
Silences and Mentions in the Historical Archaeology of the Indian Ocean: Themes for a New Research Agenda (2015)
Research on the archaeology of the last five hundred years around the Indian Ocean rim is distinctly patchy. This contrasts with the body of material now available concerning earlier periods, and especially concerning the ear between ca. 500 BCE and 1500 CE. Where research has been undertaken this has tended to have had either a fairly local or at best limited regional focus. This has meant that many of the interconnections between different areas of the Indian Ocean have been left unexplored....
SIMS reveals Diagenesis and Seasonal Paleoprecipitation: A New Method for Reconstructing Past Environments (2016)
One goal of zooarchaeological inquiry is to reconstruct past environments. This presentation will highlight a new method to identify paleoprecipitation records from the stable oxygen isotope values (δ18Oen) recorded in tooth enamel. Seasonal rainfall patterns are reconstructed using a secondary ion mass spectrometer (SIMS) to generate high-resolution serial spot analyses (13 µm spots) of δ18Oen. Additionally, this presentation will address the specific issue of identifying diagenesis...
Site Formation Analysis of Middle Stone Age Locality GaJj17 in the Koobi Fora Formation, Northern Kenya (2017)
The Koobi Fora Formation (KF Fm.) of the Turkana Basin in Kenya is comprised of a Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary sequence that has produced unprecedented paleoanthropological discoveries. Previous work in the KF Fm. reported an archaeological locality, GaJj17, exhibiting in situ Middle Stone Age (MSA) material eroding from an indurated sandstone. Understanding the depositional context of this locality required further geologic study as few MSA localities are represented in the KF Fm. This is due...
Skeletal Variation in Seven African Populations (1971)
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.
Slave Trade and Colonialism in African Islands from the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans (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. One key period of history involved the forced migration of millions of people due to slavery. Information on the origins of the enslaved individuals has been reconstructed from historical records and, more recently, through the use of paleogenomic techniques. However, all these ancient DNA studies have been performed on...
Slavery without Slaves: Archaeology of Frederikssted Plantation and Its Implications for Plantation Archaeology in Ghana (2018)
In 1803, Denmark and Norway abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which took effect on 1st January 1803. However, this did not end slavery itself in Africa. Intensification of cash-crop agriculture on the West African coast by the Danish colonists provoked an upsurge in the local slave trade. As the Danish plantation economy solidified, increasing numbers of enslaved people were engaged to labour in these plantations in Ghana. The research examines the documentary and the archaeological data...
Slaves or Soldiers? Status Ambiguity in Masoud’s Followers at Kikole, Tanzania (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Global Archaeologies of the Long Emancipation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the 1890s, the slave and ivory trader Rashid bin Masoud established the settlement Kikole deep in what is now southwestern Tanzania. Kikole was strategically located near Lake Nyasa, a major slaving region. Masoud’s followers residing at Kikole were typically referred to as his slaves by German colonists and missionaries. Local...
Smiting Pharaohs: Violence and Power in Ancient Egypt (2016)
Violence against the physical bodies of both the living and the dead provides a powerful way to create and reinforce power dynamics, modify and maintain social roles, and to structure identity groups. The human body has been used as a canvas for violent messages both in modern communities and in past societies. Throughout the long history of ancient Egypt, violence against foreigners and prisoners of war was regularly depicted in art that was intended to demonstrate the king’s dominance over...
A social topography of fishing: Exploring the spatial variability of fish consumption practices at Songo Mnara (2015)
In the Swahili towns of the East African coast, fish have contributed a major source of protein consumed by coastal inhabitants, but the role of fish consumption in the construction of social meaning is rarely discussed. This paper addresses this gap by exploring spatial differences in fish consumption strategies around Songo Mnara, a 15th -16th century Swahili town in the Kilwa Archipelago, and links them to social patterns visible in the organization of the town. The spatial distribution of...
The Social Transmission of Oldowan Lithic Technology (2015)
Flint flakes appear in the archaeological record from 2.5mya and the skill to produce them is believed to have been socially transmitted. However, how this occurred remains a mystery. In an experiment involving 184 participants, we investigated how effectively five different forms of transmission facilitate the acquisition of the ability to produce Oldowan flakes. We compared i) reverse engineering of discarded flakes, ii) observational learning, iii) basic "ape-like" teaching, iv) gestural...
Society and Settlement in Ancient Egypt. In: Man, Settlement and Urbanism (1972)
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.