AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)
151-175 (520 Records)
Given that red ochre is a ubiquitous artefact in Middle Stone Age (MSA) contexts throughout southern Africa, the habitual exploitation of ochre has been widely interpreted as evidence for symbolism, a proxy for the origin of language and as a key element of ‘symbolic’ and modern human behaviour. Although evolutionary explanations generally agree that ochre and the products of its processing played a significant role in the adaptive strategies of early modern humans, they differ substantially in...
Ethnoarchaeology plus a theory of behavior: Jim O’Connell’s Hadza work (2015)
O’Connell’s Hadza work shows how combining behavioral ecology with ethnoarchaeology magnifies the power of ethnography to help interpret the past. O’Connell’s systematic observations and analyses of Hadza hunting and treatment of big game gave us robust falsification of received notions about our ancestral past, including ideas about scavenging, variation in faunal assemblages, and prey transport. His vision as both an archaeologist and ethnographer extracted the richest kind of evolutionary...
Ethnography and archaeometry of red ochre use by the Maasai and Samburu in Kenya (2016)
Red ochre occurs in African archaeological sites spanning more than 250,000 years. It is usually considered to be evidence of the evolving capacity for symbolic behavior. If geological outcrops have distinctive geochemical fingerprints then it may be possible to determine the sources of pigments in archaeological sites and rock art, and reconstruct source preferences, transport distances and perhaps exchange network patterns. Although ochre is almost universally used in Africa, ethnographic...
Ethnography of Pottery: a Fulani Case Seen in Archeological Perspective (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.
Evidence of early fire? Spatial patterning and stratigraphic anomalies at FxJj20Main-Extension-0 (2016)
Recent reviews have identified the control of fire as a important innovation in the history of human adaptation. The FxJj20 Main-Extension-0 locality, an oxidized sediment feature, may be associated with hominin-controlled fire. This locality was recovered from sediments in the Okote Member, of the Koobi Fora Formation, Kenya. Radiometric age estimates on associated tephra indicate that the locality is likely 1.5-1.64 Ma. This locality is associated with multiple sedimentary anomalies that were...
The evolution of a distinctive human niche: assessing and describing the development of wisdom in the Pleistocene the archeological record (2015)
How can anthropologists assess the pattern of complex decision-making that early humans undertook when navigating social networks and what role does this ability, which we might call wisdom, play in the origin & development of the cultural human experience? While it is clear that there are behaviors unique to humans such as the creation of complex lithic artifacts, unaddressed for the most part has been how behaviors such as collaboration, land use patterns/long-distance raw material transport,...
Evolution of Iron Age to Modern Landscapes in the Benoué River Valley, Cameroon (2017)
African landscapes have undergone radical ecological transformations since agriculture was introduced and spread across the continent. In some areas, it appears that grassland was encouraged at the expense of forests and woodlands, for agriculture and to provide fodder for livestock. To this point, most of the evidence for such practices has come secondarily from ocean or swamp cores, not directly from archaeological contexts. In this paper, we present a scenario for landscape evolution and...
Excavating Slow Violence Across the Modern/Premodern Divide (2015)
Archaeology as a technique allows us to make visible processes of "slow violence" (Nixon 2011) that unfold over time, providing a critical temporal dimension to understanding how and why modern inequalities come to be. In this paper I attempt to reconcile why "prehistory" matters to understanding structural violence in recent times. While archaeologists of the contemporary and recent past have long used archaeology to make visible the experiences of structural violence among subaltern groups,...
Excavations at FxJj20Main-Extension-0, a possible fire feature associated with Oldowan artifacts at Koobi Fora, Kenya (2016)
Clear evidence of hominin-controlled fire in the Earlier Stone Age archaeological record is sparse. Many indicators used to identify anthropogenic control of fire are not present or do not preserve from Early Pleistocene sediments (e.g. hearthstones, charcoal, ash). The 1972-4 excavations at FxJj20Main and FxJj20East localities of the Okote Mbr. (1.5-1.64 Ma) of the Koobi Fora Fm. recovered sediment features that appear to be reddened by an anomalous oxidation process. These are among the...
An experimental and archaeological investigation of the role of edge angle in lithic artifact damage: Applications to the Koobi Fora Fm. Kenya. (2017)
The analysis of damage patterning on lithic artifacts has the potential to distinguish between pre-depositional use of artifacts and post-depositional taphonomic processes, providing important evidence for particular hominin behaviors. Previous study has suggested that damage accrues in a non-random fashion in archaeological assemblages. Limited work has been done using the quantified variable of edge angle to account for patterns of edge damage. This study focuses on assemblage-level patterns...
Experimental Iron Smelting at Meroe, Sudan (2017)
The Royal City of Meroe, situated 250km north of Khartoum in the Republic of Sudan, was a capital of the Kingdom of Kush from the 4th Century BC. Famed for its pyramids and other monumental architecture, Meroe was also home to extensive bloomery ironworks exemplified by numerous slag mounds scattered across the site. Superficial investigation of furnace and slag remains were undertaken in the 1980’s and raised numerous questions about the technology. New archaeometallurgical research was...
Experiments in Stone-Flaking Design Space and Implications for Social Learning Models (2018)
Social learning by modern humans led to the repetition and persistence of stone tool forms we see in the recent archaeological record. The emergence of similar patterning in early hominin assemblages is often assumed to track the beginnings of social learning. Less clear is what was being socially transmitted during this early period. One possibility is that hominins learned how to make objects according to a shared ‘mental template’. A second possibility is that specific sequences were learned,...
Explaining intraregional assemblage variability in southern Africa during MIS 2: Different strokes or different folks? (2015)
In southern Africa Marine Isotope Stage 2 was a period of intense cold, and palaeoenvironment and geoarchaeological data indicate inverse moisture availability in the different rainfall zones. Sea levels fell rapidly, exposing the continental shelf while the number of archaeological sites across the subcontinent decreased, likely a result of populations concentrating along the now-submerged coastline. There were, however, pockets of inland ‘refugia’. People contracted into centres of occupation...
The Explanation of Ceramic Variation in East African Prehistory: New LA-ICP-MS Results from Gogo Falls, Kenya (2015)
Two of Frannie Berdan’s abiding research interests are the concept of ethnic identity and the application of scientific analyses to archaeological problems. These two topics intersect in research on pottery in East Africa. Pioneering work in the 1970s by Simiyu Wandibba led to the recognition of several ceramic ‘wares’ represented among Neolithic and later assemblages from Kenya and northern Tanzania. The occurrence on some sites of more than one ware in the same occupation horizon challenged...
Exploration of Exchange Networks in Nineteenth Century Guinea (2015)
For centuries, European traders of human capital have impacted the African cultural landscape, resulting in significant consequences that have played a major role in shaping new identities, group memory, and trade relations. This influence did not end with the abolition of the slave trade by European and North American countries in the early nineteenth century; rather it simply prompted traders to explore new networks and more secluded trading establishments. This pattern is exemplified in...
Exploring fire use at Sibudu Cave using the kernel density tool in ArcGIS (2015)
This project utilized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in an attempt to better understand fire use at the Middle Stone Age site of Sibudu Cave, South Africa. Our project focused on the Howiesons Poort deposits (HP; ~65-62 ka). Hand drawn maps of layers/features were digitized by S. Bentsen; these maps were combined with faunal data from each feature and 50 x50 cm quadrant. Using the kernel density tool, density maps were created which allowed for an assessment of the relationship of calcined...
Exploring regionality: a chaîne opératoire approach to ‘style’ in the rock art of the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa (2015)
Regional differences in southern African hunter-gatherer rock art have long been noted, but methods towards a rigorous definition of these regions have not been developed. Addressing a recent call for the use of style in defining rock art regions I propose a chaîne opératoire approach. Rather than focusing only on the finished product I will consider multiple factors in the production and consumption of rock art images. Instead of relying on vague notions of style, the component parts and...
An extant example of warm-climate forager gastrophagy and its implications for extinct hominin diets. (2015)
Accounts of gastrophagy (consumption of prey stomach material) are widespread in ethnography. The practice is recorded from different latitudes, subsistence strategies and with a wide variety of prey; however, many such reports are anecdotal. Conversely, where recent authors mention gastrophagy it is typically marginal to their main research. Little is therefore known about the frequency, seasonality, demographic factors, species composition, and relative dietary contribution of gastrophagy and...
Extending Paleoanthropology with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discerning the patterns and processes of human origins has been mostly centered on a gene-eye’s view of fitness landscapes. This interpretive structure is partiality undermined by modern biological thought that emphasizes a more holistic approach to evolution. We suggest that the broader framework of the...
'Feudalism' in the Interlacustrine Kingdoms. In: East African Chiefs: a Study of Political Development In Some Uganda and Tanganyika Tribes (1959)
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.
Fieldwork on Iron Age sites of the Benoué Valley, Cameroon, in 2014 (2016)
Iron Age settlements in the Benoué River Valley around Garoua in northern Cameroon were dispersed across the landscape, taking advantage of different eco-climatic zones to exploit a variety of natural resources. Fieldwork undertaken in 2014 located numerous mound sites in the area around Garoua, with occupation histories spanning multiple centuries. In particular, the site of Langui Tcheboua displays evidence for rapid accumulation of sediments approximately 700 years ago, which may have been a...
Finding the Cognitive Neurocognitive Core of Paleolithic Stoneknapping: an ALE meta-analysis (2015)
Pioneering neuroimaging studies have allowed the analysis of the cognitive basis of stoneknapping and lithic technology to develop rapidly over the past 40 years. While these studies have helped identify the neuroanatomy of stoneknapping, interpretation of the cognitive significance of these results is still in its early days. To provide a comparative baseline between brain activity in stoneknapping and the rest of cognitive neuroscience, I performed an Activation Likelihood Estimate (ALE)...
Fluid Spaces and Fluid Objects: Nocturnal Material Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa with Special Reference to southern Africa (2016)
The transition of time from day into night is a fundamental pivot through which human existence revolves. And yet, as if ‘afraid of the dark’, few archaeological reconstructions have attempted to explore nightly practices. In the anthropology of southern Africa, particularly amongst groups such as the Shona, the dawn of the night opened the door to a host of nocturnal activities, which included learning, reproduction, relaxation, and ritual. For example, witches used mundane winnowing baskets as...
Flux Among the Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Forest: An Ecological Interpretation. In: Beyond the Myths of Culture: Essays in Cultural Materialism (1980)
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.
Foraging for bulbs in the Cape Floristic Region (2015)
Underground storage organs (USOs) serve as a staple source of carbohydrates for many hunter-gatherer societies. While the way of life of hunter-gatherers in South Africa’s Cape is no longer in existence, there is extensive historical and archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherers’ use of such plants as foodstuffs. This is to be expected, given that the Cape supports the largest concentration of plants with USOs globally. To meet the goals of the Paleoscape project, the importance of...