AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)
301-325 (520 Records)
The African Iron Age transition is characterized by a shift from nomadic hunting and gathering societies to food-production, ferrous metallurgy, and centralized states and empires across most of the continent. Because of the magnitude and persistence of the change, understanding the African Iron Age is critical for assessing the present state and potential future of Africa’s ecosystems. Because the transition occurred episodically and at different times in different regions, and because large...
Modeling the formation of lithic surface assemblages through the application of aerial photography and photogrammetry (2016)
Previous research has demonstrated that surface artifacts provide insight into land-use patterns when the taphonomic processes influencing their distribution are understood. This understanding is derived from detailed field mapping of landscape topography and geomorphology. Aerial imagery, when combined with photogrammetry and geospatial analysis, produces datasets that can be used to characterize the erosional processes that actively influence the occurrence of surface material. Using unmanned...
"More field than habitation, and far more fallow than field": Settlement Patterns, Farming Practices, and Demographic Change on the Abomey Plateau, Republic of Bénin (2016)
Archaeologies of urbanism in West Africa have long focused on major cities associated with expansive kingdoms and empires of the second millennium AD. In recent decades, however, archaeologists have turned to the countryside for an alternative view on urban dynamics in this period. Yet, for most of the forested region this shift has been hampered by the problem of identifying sites, both large and small. This difficultly arises from the combined effects of dense vegetation, poor site...
More than a lexicon: Uncovering evidence of the events on the Rosetta Stone (2016)
The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous inscriptions in the world, yet few could actually tell you about its content. The topics on the stone relate to the reign of Ptolemy V and provide critical insight into the nature of Hellenism, imperial structure, indigenous relations, ideological assimilation, and process and consequences of the Great Rebellion of 204-185 BCE against Macedonian rule. While textual references to the rebellion abound there have been few archaeological correlates. At...
More than Mere Dots on a Map: Archaeological Sites among Venda-speaking Communities of the Soutpansberg (2015)
TThe presentation deals with fieldwork conducted between 1983 and 1985 to reconstruct the early history and political-economy of Venda-speaking communities in the Soutpansberg region of South Africa. In order to visit, locate, identify, map, excavate, and interpret ancestral stone-walled sites, the permission, guidance, background information, physical labor, and orally transmitted information of local Venda-speaking people were essential. In most instances permission and guidance to sites were...
Mortuary Archaeology of Burials from Two Swahili Stone Towns, Mtwapa and Manda, Dated to Circa 1600 CE. (2015)
Two ancient Kenyan Swahili sites were excavated over the course of five field seasons, from 2008-2012. Mtwapa (ca. 1000-1750 CE), located on the southern coast of Kenya, and Manda (ca. 800-1600 CE), located on the Northern coast, were once wealthy cosmopolitan polities involved in the Indian Ocean trade network. Both towns had populations of 5,000-10,000 at their height of occupation, and contained large central mosques. Mtwapa excavations occurred between 2008 and 2011 and produced a minimum...
Mortuary Practices Through Time at El Hibeh, Egypt (2015)
El Hibeh is an isolated urban site some three hours south of Cairo. The walled town was founded at the beginning of Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period, when it reached its greatest importance, and was occupied for approximately a millennia and a half--at least into Coptic/Early Islamic times. Hibeh was an important provincial town during Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period (early first millennium BCE) after which it lost much of its regional significance. The town mound is surrounded by burials cut...
Mortuary Variability and Identity Upstream of the Fourth Cataract (2017)
Fieldwork upstream of the Fourth Cataract in northern Sudan reveals substantial variation in mortuary practices among roughly contemporaneous sites on both local and regional levels. Cemeteries in the Bioarchaeology of Nubia Expedition (BONE) concession on the right (north) bank of the Nile River near el-Qinefab include intervisible clusters of graves from the Kerma period (c. 2500-1500 BC) and into the subsequent period of Egyptian colonization of Nubia. These sites constitute a mortuary...
Mozambican Maritime Landscapes of Slaving and Exchange: New Directions (2021)
This is an abstract from the "To Move Forward We Must Look Back: The Slave Wrecks Project at 10 Years" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper focuses on ongoing and emergent archaeological investigations that are opening new vistas on Mozambique Island’s global maritime interactions over the last millennium. Providing a brief overview of the program of collaboration between the Slave Wrecks Project and Eduardo Mondlane University that...
Multiple functions for an assemblage of Middle Stone Age Points: Use-Wear Evidence from Magubike Rockshelter, Tanzania. (2017)
Preliminary lithic use-wear evidence from Magubike Rockshelter, Tanzania, suggests a mixed function for an assemblage of Middle Stone Age points, including a possible projectile point role. The development of hafted hunting weapons during the Middle Stone Age is thought to have marked a major juncture in human behavioural evolution. Not only did the emergence of this technology likely have a major impact on the foraging strategies of hunting and gathering populations, many have speculated that...
: "My only equal [as sovereign of this land] is rice": The "technology" of rice production politically deployed and ideologically appropriated in early Merina "states" of central Madagascar. (2015)
Over past centuries the landscape of the central highlands of Madagascar has been dramatically transformed. Draining, diking and terracing have created vast expanses of irrigated rice fields where forests once stood. The employ of this transformative technology depended on collective social labor; unsurprisingly the dikes that rendered the land productive also served in the political organization and unification of territory and populations. Yet, the destruction of these dikes was also a ploy...
Mylohyoid Bridge in the Khosian of Southern Africa and Its Unsuitability As a Mongoloid Genetic Marker (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.
NANU, NANU: NABTA AND NEW AGERS (2015)
Over a span of some 30 years, the Combined Prehistoric Expedition conducted investigations of Neolithic occupations at Nabta Playa in Egypt’s Western Desert. The most startling discovery was an elaborate expression of Late and Final Neolithic ceremonialism unprecedented in Africa. The expression included a "sacred mountain", tumuli burials, ceremonial burials, stellae and megaliths, and an astronomical calendar circle. The publication of the results has had unintended consequences: it not only...
Naron: a Bushman Tribe of the Central Kalahari (1928)
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.
Negative and "Natural" Monumental Spaces: Ditches and Sacred Groves in Pre-Colonial West Africa (2015)
This paper builds on recent archaeological efforts to theorize the active role landscape features had in framing social relations, delineating zones of safety and inclusion/danger and exile, and marking spaces where cosmological actors tend to reside. In the coastal forests of pre-Colonial West Africa, ditch features and sacred groves did such social work, and as such; these powerful and liminal features held prominent positions within the kingdoms of West Africa. This paper explores massive...
Neighborhood to National Network: Pyramid Settlements of Giza (2015)
A twenty hectare swath of Old Kingdom 4th Dynasty settlement that began with the building of the Pyramids at the low southeastern base of the Giza Plateau shows distinct components that must have functioned as neighborhoods in the sense of geographically localized social networks within the larger conurbation. Correlation between architectural patterns and builders’ graffiti with district signs suggests links to larger national networks. Flanking the major Nile port of its time, community...
Neolithic vs. Late Stone Age: The Neolithic Revolution in the Horn of Africa Reconsidered (2015)
This poster assesses the applicability of the term "Neolithic" to describe the beginning of sedentism and agriculture in Ethiopia, and whether we can compare it to similar periods in other regions. The use of the term "Neolithic" has been criticized in recent years (Finlayson 2011; Zeder 2009) both for the implication that the period was one of revolution and its associated package of characteristics. This designation originally derived from the definition of the term as including the birth of...
Nested Proxies: Multi-scalar Approaches to Interpreting Human-Landscape Interactions (2015)
Interpretive challenges involving issues of equifinality and causation can chronically hamper environmental reconstruction efforts, as numerous physical, environmental, or anthropogenic processes may potentially be responsible for creating observed raw data patterns. Nested multi-proxy and multi-scalar analyses offer potential means of approaching these difficult conceptual issues which can plague interpretations reliant on single lines of proxy evidence. A dataset comprised of multiple...
Network Approaches to Cosmopolitanism in Ancient Ethiopia (50-700 AD) (2017)
This paper looks at how ideas of cosmopolitanism can be applied to the African context using Aksum (50-700 AD) in northern Ethiopia as case study. While there is much interest in issues of cosmopolitanism, or the making of a "world citizen" or a "world community" as drawn from 18th-19th century conceptualizations, such issues become difficult to study on the African continent given the strong emphasis on personhoods configured around local, corporate contexts. Burial practices from ancient Aksum...
New Data from Old Stones: A Technological Pilot Study of Lithics from Kokiselei 6 (1.8 mya) in West Turkana, Kenya (2015)
Behavioral variability is a cornerstone characteristic of Homo sapiens that evolved among earlier hominins. Archaeological lithic evidence records changes in hominin behavior and knowledge systems over time. Major changes are evident among lithic assemblages ~1.76 mya in Africa, with the emergence of large, bifacial, core tools (e.g., handaxes). This technology shows marked change from earlier assemblages, conforming to different reduction strategies. The behavioral and cognitive implications of...
A New Semi-quantitative Method for Identifying Carnivore-Specific Chewing Damage Patterns (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating 20 Years of Support: Current Work by Recipients of the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship for Zooarchaeologists" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hypotheses of hominin scavenging from different felid species have been proposed, but the ability to distinguish between the taphonomic patterns inflicted by different felid species in the fossil record is currently underdeveloped. Previous efforts to identify...
The Nile vs. the Rift: Exploring contrasts in the spread of food production in Africa ~4200 bp (2015)
Characterizing the patterns and processes of early food production across Africa is difficult because the continent’s large landmass, diverse physiography, and regionally specific environments and crops hinder generalization. Due to these challenges, accounts of early food production in Africa tend to be narrative syntheses: they either present a detailed sequence of developments in one specific region, or ‘follow’ the spread of food production from the earliest herding in the eastern Sahara...
Not All Who Wander Are Lost (or, the Awkward Adolescence of a Retiring Giant . . .) (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. It is hard to hold a candle to the career of David Killick and catch a reflection that adequately reflects the scope and breadth of his contributions to the discipline of archaeology. Those of us who know him well undoubtedly have seen his commitment to separate fact from fiction in the human past,...
Not Always Shiny and Pretty: The Darker Side of Obsidian in Symbolizing Power, Ethnicity and Inequality in Contemporary Ethiopia (2015)
This paper builds upon previous research among craftspeople of Southwestern Ethiopia who still procure obsidian on a regular basis to manufacture scrapers for the production of leather products. Previous ethnoarchaeological studies of these male and female hide workers of multiple ethnicities have provided a wealth of information on the role of lithics in past and present societies, and have been especially important in helping to debunk the idea that men were largely, if not exclusively...
Notes Concerning New Collections (1910)
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.