AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)
76-100 (520 Records)
The term “microlith” has grown to include a range of small tool technologies beyond those for which it was originally intended (small retouched geometrics). This definitional dilemma has resulted in a loss of precision in studies of technological miniaturization. Miniaturization includes the production and use of small-unretouched flakes from small cores. This paper proposes a new term for this phenomenon, Cinci-liths (Cinci: isiXhosa for small) that solves the problem of distinguishing these...
'Clientship' Among the Mandari of the Southern Sudan. In: Comparatie Political Systems (1967)
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.
Climatic variability and hominin dispersal: the accumulated plasticity hypothesis (2015)
It has long been known that temporally unstable environments are likely to promote the evolution of plastic adaptations, whilst it is equally clear that such adaptations are characteristic of successful colonizers. These two established findings, however, are rarely related. This contribution bridges this gap using a very simple evolutionary algorithm that tracks the evolution of plasticity under various climatic regimes, allowing for the construction of an index of climate-mediated dispersal...
Co-Creating Digital Heritage Resources in Ghana: How Is It Going? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funded by a Canadian SSHRC-funded partnership development grant, our working group of collaborators is engaged in training and capacity building in digital heritage methods in Ghana. Project aims include fostering a community of practice inclusive of archaeologists, heritage practitioners, students...
Co-practice amongst Non-Western Peoples: Abandoning Theory at Center Stage (2015)
Theory as Western performance in archaeology has hogged center stage so long that other actors standing in the wings ready to play their roles are not included in the drama. Indigenous theories of knowledge have been relegated to permanent off-stage status. Yet those who have had the privilege to work with and collaborate with historically-minded counterparts in other cultures have incrementally accumulated local beliefs and have, both consciously and unconsciously, woven local epistemologies...
Coastal marine resource exploitation during the Late Pleistocene at Contrebandiers Cave (Temara, Morocco) (2016)
Increasingly, researchers have considered the role of coastal marine resource exploitation in influencing the trajectory of human behavioral and biological evolution, specifically relating to modern human origins. However, these models have focused almost exclusively on the relatively rich and well-documented record from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) of coastal South Africa. Here, we present data on coastal marine resource exploitation during the Late Pleistocene at Contrebandiers Cave [La Grotte...
Colonizing the Colonial: Viewing Influence through the Lens of Coarse Earthenware at the Dutch East India Company Cape of Good Hope, South Africa (2016)
Archaeological collections are more than a record of form and function. Historiographic analyses can assist in placing material remnants in their broader social context. Investigations of the production, producers, use and users of locally produced coarse earthenware at the 17th- and 18th-century Dutch East India Company Cape of Good Hope illustrate the complex fractals of cultural influence in this particular multi-cultural context. Here, like in many colonial situations, power was exerted not...
Comparison of Nubian and Egyptian patterns of physical activity at New Kingdom Tombos (2017)
Tombos, located at the Third Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, was established as an Egyptian colonial site in Nubia during the New Kingdom period. Burials provide evidence for high level Egyptian administrators and support staff as well as local community members. Previous investigations of the Tombos remains have indicated that individuals buried at Tombos participated in relatively low levels of strenuous physical activities, indicative of roles such as administrators, scribes, and...
A comparison of two African Mediterranean MSA adaptations: the Cape Floral Region and the Maghreb (2015)
Our lineage evolved in Africa when the earth was in the MIS 6 glacial phase, ~190 thousand years ago (kya). At the continent scale, it has been demonstrated that Africa became arid during glacial phases. However, Mediterranean climates within Africa offered humid refugia during past glacial phases. There are two regions within Africa that are characterized by Mediterranean climate: the Cape Floral Region (CFR) of South Africa and the Maghreb of northwest Africa. These two regions also have...
Concurrences and Discrepancies in Ancient Egypt (2015)
Studying ancient Egypt, with its rich textual, iconographic and archaeological records, requires an interdisciplinary approach. Any research along these lines will at some point find both concurrences and discrepancies in the information. Especially the latter require further analysis, involvement of yet other sources and lead to the realization that we need to theorize the fundamentally different types of information, audiences, purposes, and sometimes cross-purposes, of the things we...
Contested Images: Rock Art Heritage on and off the Rocks (2016)
In many countries, cultural and socio-political identity is still shaped, manipulated, and presented through rock art. Both on and off the rocks, pictographs and petroglyphs are powerful tools. In this poster, I present results from ten years of fieldwork in southern Africa, northern Australia, and west Texas. I focus on re-contextualised rock art images, in commercial settings, in academic publications, and as integral components of national symbols. I also consider innovative new visitor...
Contextualizing Ritual and Collapse in Eastern and Southern African Chiefdoms and States (2017)
The role of ritual in the rise of complex societies is well understood in many regions of the world. In contrast, the roles ritual may have played in state collapse, regeneration, and resilience remains inadequately theorized in archaeological studies of the political dynamics of complex societies. This paper will evaluate the role of ritual in the emergence, resilience, and collapse of chiefly and state societies in Eastern and Southeastern Africa. Social and symbolic factors especially the...
Corrosion concerns and metal soap formation in shea butter-containing Forawa brass vessels from Ghana (2015)
Twenty-three forowa metal vessels from Ghana, housed in the Fowler Museum at UCLA, were investigated with regard to manufacture and deterioration. Technical examination revealed that all vessels were manufactured from skillfully hammered brass sheets, and purpose-built for storing shea butter, a multi-purpose substance derived from shea nuts. Most vessels contain remnants of shea butter, which has become discolored: while shea butter extracted using native methods is off-white to yellow, the...
Cosmopolitan to Different Degrees: Daily Engagement with Maritime Culture at Swahili Towns at the Turn of the 16th Century (2016)
One of the most important developments from the past couple of decades towards understanding the history of the East African coast has been an appreciation of diversity among Swahili communities. Those communities each experienced the broad trends and developments that have been used to characterize Swahili history, but their experience of those trends was not uniform. This paper explores such diversity towards the end of the Swahili florescence at the turn of the 16th century, drawing on recent...
Crafting the Fringes of French Imperialism: Ceramic Politics in Siin, Senegal (2015)
In this paper, we examine aspects of craft production in west-central Senegal between the 18th and 20th century. This period encompasses turbulent political times marked, in succession, by the apogee of African centralized polities, the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, the advent of formal colonial empires, and the establishment of the postcolonial state of Senegal. Using a perspective of the long-term blending archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence, we explore the dynamics of ceramic...
Creating the ‘Imagined Community’ of Mapungubwe (2017)
Mapungubwe’s influence spread deep into the regional hinterland, drawing in far-flung communities, trade networks and people. The traditional picture of a centripetal economy however has been challenged recently by work at these so called peripheries, indicating unexpected levels of autonomy and material wealth. While the place of these newly explored hinterlands need to be re-theorised and their agency acknowledged, there is danger in swinging the interpretive pendulum too far towards a...
Creativity of Power: Cosmology and Action in African Societies (1989)
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.
Cross-craft Overlaps in Materials and Symbolism: Insights from Legacy Crucibles from the Great Zimbabwe Archive (2017)
The legacy collections from Great Zimbabwe (CE1000-1700) emanated from uncontrolled treasure hunting expeditions of the late 19th and early 20th century and the sporadic professional digs conducted at various points throughout the twentieth century. As a result of this colorful history, most materials from the site are scattered in different archives where they are gathering dust with little or no research being performed. This contribution discusses a technological and typological analysis of...
Crosscurrents of Culture: Arts of Africa and the Americas in Alabama Collections (1997)
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.
Crossing Deserts and Seas in the Late Pleistocene: Implications of the Aduma MSA Assemblages, Middle Awash, Ethiopia (2016)
The ca. 3 km2 Aduma region of the Middle Awash region, Ethiopia, incorporates a number of stratified sites within a matrix of sands and silts dating to between 180 ka and ca 80 ka.(Yellen et al 2005). With the exception of one possibly earlier site with late Acheulean bifaces (A-14, Clark et al 2003), all sites yielded diagnostic Middle Stone Age cores and most also contained typical retouched bifacial and unifacial points. In contrast to the earlier assemblages of Gademotta (Sahle et al 2012)...
Crowd Sourcing archaeological and palaeontological survey (2016)
Fossilfinder.org is a citizen science project that enables the public to engage directly with palaeo/archaeological research. Data, in the form of images, was collected from research areas to the east of Lake Turkana. The regions studied are those well known as fossil bearing regions dating to periods of interest in human evolution studies (up to 4 million years old in parts). In the first two seasons of research 1 million images of the ground surface were captured at a resolution of 30 pixels...
Cryptotephra Discovered at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 May Correlate with the 74 ka Eruption of Toba in Indonesia: Implications for Resolving the Dating Controversy for Middle Stone Age Sites in Southern Africa. (2015)
Cryptotephra was identified in a sediment stack at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6, South Africa, and occur as small glass shards (less than 100 µm in size). Shards are found in sediment from the Shelly Ashy Dark Brown Sand (SADBS) and the Ashy Light Brown Sand (ALBS) layers with weighted mean OSL dates of 70.6 ± 2.3 and 71.1 ± 2.3 ka respectively. The shards are intimately mixed with sediment and are rare. A preliminary shard distribution profile shows that shards are distributed continuously through...
Cryptotephra Studies in Africa: A Tool for Precise Dating and Continental Correlation of Archaeological Sites (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Placing archaeological sites on the same timeline across the African continent is essential for determining the initial appearance of key human behaviors and cultural features. Analytical error associated with traditional dating techniques makes these determinations difficult. Cryptotephra, which are small (<80 micron)...
The cultural and historical connection between Tefinagh inscriptions and rock art sites in Tadrart Acacus (Southwest Libya) (2016)
This paper discusses what kind of cultural and historical correlation between Tefinagh inscriptions and rock art in the Tadrart Acacus. The Tuareg alphabet, Tefinagh is one of ancient African alphabet documented not only in Libya but also Algeria and Tunisia among other countries. It is traditionally taught by a mother to all her children. This alphabet, which dates back at least to the second half of the first millennium B.C.E, is used by approximately 50 percent of the Tuareg for short...
The Cultural and Historical Connection between Tefinagh Inscriptions and Rock Art Sites in Tadrart Acacus (Southwest Libya) (2017)
This paper discusses what kind of cultural and historical correlation between Tefinagh inscriptions and rock art in the Tadrart Acacus. The Tuareg alphabet, Tefinagh, is one of ancient African alphabets documented not only in Libya but also Algeria and Tunisia, among other countries. It is traditionally taught by a mother to all her children. This alphabet, which dates back at least to the second half of the first millennium B.C.E, is used by approximately 50 percent of the Tuareg for short...