AFRICA (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karl W. Butzer.

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 Alice Mullen.

Within the corpus of San rock art in the South African Drakensberg mountains is a category of highly embellished, oversized anthropomorphic figures termed Significantly Differentiated Figures (SDFs). Such images have previously been interpreted as San ritual specialists' conceptualisation of themselves, in metaphor, as a result of the arrivals of African farmers and European colonists. This paper, drawing on new data gathered during surveys of the Matatiele region in the Eastern Cape, South...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Mackay. Sam Lin. Lachlan Kenna. Alex Blackwood.

Heat treatment of silcrete in the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa has been taken to indicate cognitive complexity. This inference is based on the argument that silcretes require well-regulated heating and cooling rates to avoid thermal fracture. Alternative arguments have been made that silcrete can be heat treated with limited control over temperature gradients, and thus that heat treatment may have been a relatively simple process. These apparently contrasting positions elide the fact that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Lane.

Research on the archaeology of the last five hundred years around the Indian Ocean rim is distinctly patchy. This contrasts with the body of material now available concerning earlier periods, and especially concerning the ear between ca. 500 BCE and 1500 CE. Where research has been undertaken this has tended to have had either a fairly local or at best limited regional focus. This has meant that many of the interconnections between different areas of the Indian Ocean have been left unexplored....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Beasley. Ian Orland. John Valley. Margaret Schoeninger.

One goal of zooarchaeological inquiry is to reconstruct past environments. This presentation will highlight a new method to identify paleoprecipitation records from the stable oxygen isotope values (δ18Oen) recorded in tooth enamel. Seasonal rainfall patterns are reconstructed using a secondary ion mass spectrometer (SIMS) to generate high-resolution serial spot analyses (13 µm spots) of δ18Oen. Additionally, this presentation will address the specific issue of identifying diagenesis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Ziegler. Shannon Warren. Ssebuyungo Christopher. Silindokuhle Mavuso. Kathryn Ranhorn.

The Koobi Fora Formation (KF Fm.) of the Turkana Basin in Kenya is comprised of a Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary sequence that has produced unprecedented paleoanthropological discoveries. Previous work in the KF Fm. reported an archaeological locality, GaJj17, exhibiting in situ Middle Stone Age (MSA) material eroding from an indurated sandstone. Understanding the depositional context of this locality required further geologic study as few MSA localities are represented in the KF Fm. This is due...

DOCUMENT Citation Only G. Gaherty.

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 David Mensah Abrampah.

In 1803, Denmark and Norway abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which took effect on 1st January 1803. However, this did not end slavery itself in Africa. Intensification of cash-crop agriculture on the West African coast by the Danish colonists provoked an upsurge in the local slave trade. As the Danish plantation economy solidified, increasing numbers of enslaved people were engaged to labour in these plantations in Ghana. The research examines the documentary and the archaeological data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Wilson Marshall. Thomas Biginagwa.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Global Archaeologies of the Long Emancipation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the 1890s, the slave and ivory trader Rashid bin Masoud established the settlement Kikole deep in what is now southwestern Tanzania. Kikole was strategically located near Lake Nyasa, a major slaving region. Masoud’s followers residing at Kikole were typically referred to as his slaves by German colonists and missionaries. Local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roselyn Campbell.

Violence against the physical bodies of both the living and the dead provides a powerful way to create and reinforce power dynamics, modify and maintain social roles, and to structure identity groups. The human body has been used as a canvas for violent messages both in modern communities and in past societies. Throughout the long history of ancient Egypt, violence against foreigners and prisoners of war was regularly depicted in art that was intended to demonstrate the king’s dominance over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erendira Quintana Morales.

In the Swahili towns of the East African coast, fish have contributed a major source of protein consumed by coastal inhabitants, but the role of fish consumption in the construction of social meaning is rarely discussed. This paper addresses this gap by exploring spatial differences in fish consumption strategies around Songo Mnara, a 15th -16th century Swahili town in the Kilwa Archipelago, and links them to social patterns visible in the organization of the town. The spatial distribution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Morgan. Natalie Uomini. Luke Rendell. Ignacio de la Torre. Kevin Laland.

Flint flakes appear in the archaeological record from 2.5mya and the skill to produce them is believed to have been socially transmitted. However, how this occurred remains a mystery. In an experiment involving 184 participants, we investigated how effectively five different forms of transmission facilitate the acquisition of the ability to produce Oldowan flakes. We compared i) reverse engineering of discarded flakes, ii) observational learning, iii) basic "ape-like" teaching, iv) gestural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only H. S. Smith.

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 William Russell Bascom. American Anthropologist.

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 Susan Kus. Victor Raharijaoana.

This contribution involves a re-examination of assertions we have made in the past concerning "religion", "belief" and "ideology: jettisoning some, reasserting others, and offering "refinements" where appropriate. Often limited cultural exposure to a circumscript terrain of contemporary religions in service of the state contributes significantly to the initial framing of our questions (and attendant expectation of answers). One of our lives, embedded in context in rural and urban Madagascar,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodore Marks. Grant McCall. James Enloe. Andrew Schroll. James McGrath.

Under a technological organization perspective, archaeologists seek to understand how prehistoric societies organized their activities across landscapes and how variation at individual sites articulates with changes in large scale land use systems. Lithic sourcing offers a powerful tool for testing hypotheses about technological organization and land use, but its application across the globe has, until recently, been hindered by expense and methodological difficulties. In this paper, we use pXRF...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheila Nightingale. Marina Bravo Foster. Jessica Thompson. Jeong-Heon Choi. David Wright.

Alluvial fan deposition characterizes the geological setting of many Stone Age sites in the East African Rift System. In these settings, researchers must consider multiple origins of technological variability, such as chronology, spatial trends, and depositional history. Because of logistical constraints, deeply buried artifacts in alluvial fans can only be examined through small excavation windows or where deposits have been heavily eroded. Under both scenarios, variability in in situ artifact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Louise Iles.

Theories of the origin(s) of iron production and the spread of ferrous technology have provoked many decades of lively and enduring debate. The notion that iron production developed in one core location – from where knowledge of it spread – has been challenged by claims of early, independent inventions of iron production in Africa, India and China. However, it has proved problematic to verify the timing and contexts of these multi-origin hypotheses without placing undue emphasis on isolated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith C. Sealy. Andrew Sillen.

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 Judith Sealy. Navashni Naidoo. Julia Lee-Thorp. Emma Loftus. Tyler Faith.

The Pleistocene palaeoclimates and palaeoenvironments of southernmost Africa are important in both global climate studies and studies of human evolution, but remain poorly documented through time and space. In order to contribute to this project, we have analysed δ13C and δ18O in approximately 350 samples of faunal tooth enamel from Boomplaas Cave and Nelson Bay Cave, in the southern Cape, South Africa. The Boomplaas samples span the last ca. 70 kya, and show fluctuations in δ13C indicating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross Campbell. Russell Cutts. David Braun. Jack Harris.

Clarifying evidence for anthropogenic fire in the archaeological record has been subject to contention and vagueness. This uncertainty centers not on evidence for fire, rather what constitutes it being human-controlled. New research pursuing this question suggests that a peculiar angular fragment, termed thermal curved-fractures (TCF), are the byproduct of knapped materials (flakes, cores, bifaces) exposed at length to high heat. We present here results of experiments expanding our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Riccardo Bertolazzi.

Roman African provinces are characterized by an extraordinary number of epigraphic sources concerning the dynasty of the first African emperor, Septimius Severus. Among these are many statues dedicated to Severus’ Syrian wife Julia Domna, whose presence at the side of both her husband and her son Caracalla is recorded by the historical accounts on this period. A survey of the African inscriptions that commemorated the erection of statues in her honor leads to the conclusion that at least...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dil Basanti.

Aksum, the capital of an ancient northern Ethiopian kingdom (50-700 AD), is well known for its elaborate funerary stelae, the largest of which were carved in the impression of multi-storied “houses.” Prior to a widespread conversion to Christianity, the Aksumites buried their dead in kin-groups either in tombs or in shafts that cluster around the stelae. Human remains are often burned, fragmentary, disarticulated and jumbled, creating an impression of ephemeralness that contrasts with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Boyce N. Driskell. Jeffery C. Motz.

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 Terrah Jones. Rachel Moy. Hans Banard.

This paper outlines the preliminary investigation of a collection of diagnostic and undiagnostic ceramics recovered from the site of Mai Adrasha, located in the Shire region of Ethiopia. Mai Adrasha is one of the largest and arguably most significant early town sites west of Aksum dating to the pre-Aksumite to Early Aksumite periods (12th century BCE-2nd century CE) located in the Western Tigray. The site consists of a cemetery and a domestic area characterized by a collection of stone walls and...