AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)
501-520 (520 Records)
Fluctuating sea levels during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS3) resulted in radically shifting environmental zones and shoreline position along the southern African coast. Investigation of the intensity of site use and find types relative to modeled coastline proximity provides insight into early human responses to such environmental perturbations. Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (KEH1), a coastal cave site in Western Cape Province, is the only documented locality along the modern coast that preserves a...
Variations on an Osirian Theme: Gendered Expressions of Identity in Osiris Funerary Shrouds from Roman Egypt (2015)
Throughout the Roman Period in Egypt, decorated shrouds with images of the god Osiris were used in mortuary rituals and wrapped around the mummified body of the deceased. Full-length painted images of the dead in the guise of Osiris, flanked by Egyptian funerary scenes, were effective modes of representation that reveal how gender was used to facilitate the transfiguration of the deceased and aid his or her journey in the afterlife. This paper examines gendered expressions of self-presentation...
Variety of Rain Forest Subsistence Strategies. A Comparative Overview (2016)
A large scale comparative research project on the state of the peoples living in the Rain Forests of Central Africa, the Guyana’s in South America and in Melanesia, has highlighted the anthropic character of tropical rain forests. It has particularly underlined the strong correlation between biodiversity and cultural diversity and how domesticated and wild resources interact in the various subsistence systems. Activities associated with shifting cultivation contribute to man-made biodiversity in...
A View from the Periphery. Bioarchaeology and Funerary Archaeology at Al Khiday, Central Sudan (2017)
Archaeological sites south of Khartoum are much scarcer compared to those further to the north and this presentation aims to report on a multi-phase cemetery that is situated at the periphery of our archaeological knowledge. At present, burials dating to three chronological periods have been recovered at Al Khiday. The site is located on the left bank of the White Nile, approximately 20 km south of Omdurman (Khartoum). Forty-two individuals are dated to the Classic/Late Meroitic period (end of...
The Weeping Eye Motif (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.
What Predicts Cut Mark Frequency and Intensity? (2017)
The presence and abundance of cut marks in zooarchaeological assemblages are often used to infer carcass acquisition strategies, butchery patterns and the general availability of prey. In this paper we analyze cut mark data derived from three hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeological assemblages (East African Hadza, Central African Bofi and Aka and Paraguayan Aché) to investigate how well carcass-size and distribution of meat predict cut mark frequencies as measured by conventional measures such as...
What’s an (Archaeological) Peasant? Notes on Rural Subjectivities in Atlantic Africa (2015)
This paper explores rural communities’ historical relationships to state authority in the Siin province (Senegal). I engage with classic literature to examine how the concept of ‘peasant’ might be relevant to archaeological realities in Senegal’s countryside during the Atlantic era, and how it might helpful to think about political identity among social actors chronically understudied (and under-documented) in the African past. I am interested in the term as one way to conceptualize the...
What’s in a Label? Archaeological Taxonomies and Social Processes Past and Present (2015)
The Banda area of west central Ghana is a quintessential example of what Igor Kopytoff (1987) long-ago dubbed the Internal African Frontier—an ‘interstitial’ region between ‘established societies’ that is home to a dynamic composition of people, languages and practice forged by newcomers and autochthones alike. In presumed contrast with their ‘established’ neighbors, frontier societies are ones in which processes of improvisation and the negotiation of social boundaries seem more apparent. While...
Where's your Mummy? The Business of Mummification in Late and Roman Period Egypt (2015)
It is often said that the practice of mummification became a veritable business during the Late and Roman periods, when it was extended to include not only the elite, but also those on the lower end of the status scale. The increase in the number of bodies being embalmed led to the widespread adoption of more expeditious techniques, sometimes resulting in mummies that, though outwardly pleasing in appearance, concealed nothing but a jumbled mess of bones beneath their wrappings. The non-elite...
Who Wants to Live Forever? The Practice of Mass Human Sacrifice During Early State Formation in the Nubian Classic Kerma Period (2015)
As the ancient Nubian Classic Kerma kings undertook military campaigns into Egyptian territory (1700-1550 BCE), their mortuary practices grew to include mass inhumation of their subjects within their burial tumuli. The tumulus of the second Classic Kerma king (KX) contains over 300 human sacrifices and is the largest group found at the site. The sacrificed Kermans were arranged in the tumulus corridor alongside Egyptian statues taken as spoils of war, emphasizing the king’s control of internal...
Who Works in African Archaeology? (2018)
There are shortages of professional archaeologists in many African countries. It is a widely held view that there just aren’t enough professional experts in Africa to carry out the work needed in projects, both large and small, that are affecting African cultural heritage and landscapes. And these views are relevant, and important, and true – but they are often anecdotal rather than evidence-based. The first step in building capacity is to measure current capacity, then to use the results to...
Whose Donkey? Domestication and Variability (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Morphological, genetic, ethnographic and behavioral research on domestication has provided a basis for understanding variability in the process of donkey domestication. It is clear that the lack of herd-based sociality among wild relatives of the donkey and people’s reliance on donkeys for transport create distinctive...
Womenafu's Bonafu: a Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Community (1977)
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.
Wood Analysis from the IDM-013 Shipwreck (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. In 2020 a tam of archeologists from the Slave Wrecks Project recovered several samples of wood from the !DM-013 shipwreck in Mozambique. This paper discusses scientific results and implications for possible origin and identity of the shipwreck. Implications for future research will also be...
Wood foraging in the tree-limited environment of the Cape Floral Region of South Africa (2015)
Wood is an essential resource for hunter-gatherers. It is necessary for cooking fuel, heat, and potentially safety, and hence influences site location choice and group size. Due to a low diversity and abundance of trees, wood may have been a limited resource for early humans in the Cape Floral Region (CFR) of South Africa. Drawing from behavior ecology foraging models, experiments with modern wood foragers were conducted to test this hypothesis. Foragers were observed collecting indigenous wood...
Wooden and Bone Artifacts: Pomongwe Cave, Matabo District, Zimbabwe (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.
Worked Bone Harpoon Technological Persistance and Variation Through Time and Geography (Turkana/Omo Basin, Kenya/Ethiopia) (2015)
A detailed study of the variation in Holocene worked bone harpoons from the Lake Turkana/Omo Basin (Northern Kenya/Southwest Ethiopia) has been conducted. Bone harpoon sites in this basin span a more than 6,000 year period (approximately 9,000 or 10,000 bp through 3,000 bp). A review of the dates associated with these archaeological assemblages (and the dating of sedimentary features correlated with the changing lake levels in the basin) is presented along with new dates 00000000and new material...
The World Bank’s Approaches To Valuing Cultural Heritage (2016)
The World Bank provides loans, credits and technical assistance to governments of its client countries. The importance and value of cultural heritage on international, national and local levels are reflected in the Bank’s investment operations as well as in its Operational Policy 4.11 – Physical Cultural Resources. Investment for cultural heritage has totaled over four billion U.S. dollars in the past two decades. The Bank’s safeguard policy requires that an Environmental Impact Assessment...
The YAS-1 Middle Stone Age site at Gona, Afar, Ethiopia (2016)
Tentatively dated to MIS 5/4, the YAS-1 (Ya’alu South 1) site at Gona, Ethiopia is a high-density open-air archaeological site preserving classic Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone tools such as Levallois cores, points, and blades in addition to a variety of fossil fauna, some with bone modifications including cut marks. While most of the archaeological material has been found on the surface over the last ten years, recent excavations have documented both lithics and fauna in situ. Though the...
Ye Olde Fishing Hole: A Late Paleolithic Fishing Camp, Wadi Kubbaniya, Egypt (2016)
WK26 is a Late Paleolithic occupation consisting of a sparse lithic scatter, hearths, postholes, storage features, a possible living floor, and faunal remains in which fish predominate. The site lies on the west side of Wadi Kubbaniya, north of Aswan, Egypt, and opposite the Late Paleolithic dune field the Combined Prehistoric Expedition investigated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Radiocarbon dates and stratigraphic position indicate that WK26 dates to the end of the Late Paleolithic. Few...