AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan De Vynck. Kim Hill. Robert Anderson. Richard Cowling. Curtis Marean.

The south coast of South Africa has the oldest and best studied evidence for early use of coastal resources, and various researchers have argued that coastal resource use was significant for cognition, social complexity, and the maintenance of population refugia. To date there has been little consensus on the foraging returns and sustainability for inter-tidal resources in this coastal environment. Here we present the first net return and regeneration rate estimates for inter-tidal foraging in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Thompson. Alan Morris. Flora Schilt. Andrew Zipkin. Kendra Sirak.

In 1950, J. Desmond Clark led excavations at a Later Stone Age rock shelter at Hora Mountain, a large inselberg overlooking a modern floodplain in the Mzimba District of northern Malawi. At the Hora 1 site, he recovered two human skeletons, one male and one female, along with a rich – but superficially described and undated – cultural sequence. In 2016, our renewed excavations recovered a wealth of lithic, faunal, and other materials such as mollusk shell beads and ochre. Our re-examination of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Innocent Pikirayi.

Portuguese written sources mention ‘great stone buildings’ including state capitals and fortified hilltops and trading centres in their accounts of the Kingdom of ‘Monomotapa’ (Mutapa State) in northern Zimbabwe in the late 16th and 17th centuries. On the one hand, feiras, the trading centres frequented by the Portuguese, served primarily commercial functions, and only fortified themselves when confronted with external military threats. On the other, the monumental, stone- built structures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adria LaViolette.

During its lifespan from the mid-fifteenth to early sixteenth century AD, the fortified settlement of Pujini shared Pemba Island, Tanzania with numerous, undefended, more typical Swahili settlements ranging from earth-and-thatch hamlets to stone-built urban centers. The site expresses a unique combination of qualities on the Eastern African coast: complex ramparts around nearly two hectares of space, in which stood some dozen domestic and special-purpose features. Archaeological evidence from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Austin.

Intrusions into the burial chamber directly impact the mortuary assemblage, often erasing the purposeful placement of grave goods and destroying the peaceful preservation of the body. So what can these palimpsests of havoc actually tell us about original mortuary practices? In this talk, I answer this question through analysis of Theban Tomb 290, the ancient Egyptian tomb of Iry-Nefer. This tomb, studied in 2013-14 as part of the French Institute mission at Deir el-Medina, contains up to 70...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Mentzer. Christopher Miller.

Since the 1990’s, Paul Goldberg’s micromorphological analyses at Kebara and Hayonim Caves (Israel) as well as his collaborative efforts to understand chemical diagenesis in caves have served as benchmarks for the high-resolution study of Paleolithic combustion features. This paper highlights the results of micromorphology, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) microspectroscopy and microscopic x-ray diffraction measurements, which were employed together order to understand different diagenetic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Casey.

The city of Axum in northern Ethiopia is well known for its high quality, hand woven cloth. Sundays and festivals bring throngs of local people who, to the outside observer, appear to be uniformly dressed in beautiful white handspun clothing embellished with colourful woven borders and embroidery. This apparent uniformity belies a very complex set of activities that lead to the production, distribution and consumption of cloth in Axum. Each step in production is dominated by people of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Cohen. John Middleton.

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 Leon E. 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 Benjamin Schoville. Jayne Wilkins. Kyle Brown. Simen Oestmo. Terrence Ritzman.

MSA backed pieces are often thought to be components of projectile armaments, however our limited understanding of their functional characteristics as projectiles precludes understanding the adaptive problems they may have solved. Despite widespread acknowledgment of raw material differences and inter- and intra-assemblage morphological variability, whether backed piece morphology reflects functional, economic, or stylistic variation has a paucity of empirical support. Here, the functional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Nilsson.

Though long admired for its Pharaonic stelae, shrines, and Speos, the grand ancient site of Gebel el Silsila remains fairly unknown within mainstream Archaeology. A general idea is that the site operated merely as a sandstone quarry, but few are aware of its rich archaeology that incorporates evidence of millennia of human activity and cultural features that meet seven of UNESCO’s ten outstanding values. Since 2012 the Swedish-run archaeological project works towards changing previous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Boivin. Heidi Eager. Jeremy Searle. Greger Larson. Steve Goodman.

A number of invasive small mammal species, including various commensal rodents, have achieved significant range expansion as a result of accidental transportation by humans. In the Indian Ocean, this is true of the black rat, Rattus rattus, the house mouse, Mus musculus, and the Asian house shrew, Suncus murinus. The spread of these species across the Indian Ocean appears to have been facilitated by the emergence of trading networks beginning thousands of years ago. We conducted molecular...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Adderley. Mitchell Power. Valery Terwilliger.

The ancient polities of the Tigrai Plateau and this region’s pronounced climatic variations combine to create a research paradigm where social-environmental interactions can be considered over the long-term. Existing regional-scale indicators suggest that human responses to climate variability differed between peoples, polities and time-periods. Framed by an ongoing regional study designed to examine high-resolution climate and environmental markers at a broad-spatial scale, the study of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curran Fitzgerald. Charles Egeland. Ryan Byerly. Cynthia Fadem. Audax Mabulla.

The study of raw materials has traditionally been deeply embedded in analyses of the Early Stone Age, and the impact of source rock characteristics on early human ranging behavior and technological variation is now widely acknowledged. Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, apart from being one of the most well-known paleoanthropological sites in the world, is also home to a great diversity of potential sources for the production of stone tools. While the lithology and mineralogy of these sources have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Parcak.

This paper will focus on the use of innovative new tools and technologies for the mapping of archaeological site destruction. Post Arab Spring, the Middle East has seen an increasing amount of looting and general site destruction, yet how is it possible to locate, map, and quantify these activities to save the sites? The author used a series of high resolution satellites images as well as Google Earth to map looting in Egypt from 2002-2013. The methodology is one that can easily be replicated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Almansa-Sanchez.

Literature in heritage and tourism usually addresses the multiple benefits of visitors, their threats and the controversial concept of ‘return’. As heritage managers we usually focus our efforts on these visitors, as the panacea for everything. In the context of postcolonial theory and public archaeology, there are two factors of this equation that we usually forget; local communities and the real recipients of the money. Working in Gondar (Ethiopia) I have come to define the concept of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stuart Smith.

The Greek historian Herodotus, cribbing from Hecataeus of Miletus, famously wrote, "Any sensible person sees at once… that the Egypt to which the Greeks sail is land acquired by the Egyptians and a gift of the river…." Scholars today see the same basic landscape as Herodotus did before them in Egypt and northern Sudan, a narrow strip of green fed by the Nile and surrounded by an absolute desert. This distinctive ecology thus continues to play a central role in models for the origins of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diego Calaon.

Between 2010 and 2013 an archaeological excavation was carried out in the warehouse where the Beekrumsing Ramlallah Interpretation Centre on Indenture Labour (BRIC) has been set up. In the 19th century, the warehouse was located in the proximity of the "Hospital Block" and nearby the "Immigrants’ sheds" of the Immigration Depot. The excavation represented an exceptional opportunity to investigate the topography and the industrial development of a key area of Port Louis. The ceramic, glass and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only W. G. Deuser. E. H. Ross. L. S. Waterman.

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 Abidemi Babalola. Laure Dussubieux. Susan McIntosh.

The site of Igbo Olokun in the city of Ife, in southwestern Nigeria has been identified as a primary glass and glass beads production center dating to the "Classic" period (12th-15th c.), but glass from well-recorded contexts has been rare. Excavations in 2011-2012 produced over twelve thousand drawn glass beads. LA-ICP-MS analysis of 49 glass bead samples revealed two main compositional groups: High Lime, High Alumina (HLHA); and Low Lime, High Alumina (LLHA). While the occurrence of HLHA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Susak Pitzer.

This multi-disciplinary study of glass from Karanis, Egypt combines archaeological, chemical compositional data, ethnoarchaeology, and historical insights to assess how objects were valued in the ancient world. The the selection of raw materials is investigated through onsite portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) spectrometry analysis of recently excavated Karanis glass dating primarily to the late Roman period (4th-6th centuries CE). Quantitative analysis of these data informed by pXRF and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian M. Fagan.

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 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...