Republic of South Africa (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
251-275 (502 Records)
The Gamo, who live in the highlands on the edge of the southern Ethiopian rift valley, are known for their unique and beautiful household architecture. Tourists ogle their oval basket-like grass houses and peer inside for mere minutes hoping to observe some secret moment or practice previously unknown to them. Similarly many archaeologists long to feel beneath their trowels a widespread hard surface indicative of a house floor. We remove the tangible aspects of the home, bit by bit, hoping to...
Knysna Eastern Heads 1 Mineral Pigment Artifact Analysis Data (2018)
The artifact analysis data set for the Knysna Eastern Heads 1 (KEH1) mineral pigment assemblage. The first page (KEH1 Data Notes) provides information on the coding fields, while the second page (KEH1 Data) provides the complete data set.
Kon-Tiki ein Floß treibt über den Pazifik (1949)
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 EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these 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 using the...
The Kon-Tiki expedition: by raft across the South Seas (1950)
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 EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these 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 using the...
La Metallurgie Ancienne du Fer de la Zone 4000 de Siola (Kanisasso, Zone d’Odienne, Nord-ouest de la Cote D’Ivoire) (2018)
Près de Kaniasso dans la zone d’Odiénné, sur les sites de Siola, zones 1000 et 2000, et Doumbala, une séquence chrono-technologique en trois phases a été mise en évidence, caractérisées par trois traditions techniques différentes : KAN 1 (1300 – 1450 AD), KAN 2 (1450 – 1650 AD) et KAN 3 (1650 - 1900 AD). Des vestiges présentant de grandes similitudes ont été identifiés sur de nombreux sites dans la région. Par contre, le site de la zone 4000 de Siola, dont l’étude sur le terrain a été reprise en...
Landscape Survey of Potential Combustion Features at FxJj20 Site Complex in Koobi Fora, Kenya (2017)
Previous research in the Koobi Fora Formation, Marsabit District, Kenya identified nine delineated areas where the sediment was lithified and rubefied. These features derived from the excavation of the archaeological site of FxJj20-Main in the Lower Okote Member, which dates between 1.5 and 1.64 Ma. Previously, similar features in archaeological sites have been recovered with material that exhibit evidence of having been exposed to high temperatures. These features are discrete, isolated,...
Landscape Technological Strategies in the Southern Kalahari Basin: North of Kuruman Archaeological Survey, South Africa (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. The southern Kalahari Basin in the northern interior of South Africa has provided evidence for early use of fire, Mode 3 technological developments, early stone-tipped spears and pigment use. Innovations seen in the southern Kalahari Basin early in the Middle Stone Age may represent changes in how human populations...
Landscape Use in Southeastern Ethiopia (2017)
The widespread availability of satellite data has opened up parts of the world that have long been inaccessible for archaeological research. One such area is the border between Ethiopia and Somalia, which has been embroiled in civil conflicts for the past 30 years. As such, little is known about the cultural heritage of southeastern Ethiopia and the greater Somalia region. This project shows how using geographic information systems (GIS) as a form of initial survey can reveal substantial results...
Large Mammal Fauna from Klasies River Main Site: Changing Environmental Conditions during the Late Pleistocene of South Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Klasies River is one of the most significant Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites in Africa with a sequence spanning from c. 120,000 to c. 50,000 years ago (ka). Because it yields one of the largest collections of human remains dated to the Late Pleistocene associated with an abundance of MSA cultural remains, it is an important site for understanding the development...
Late Pleistocene Occupation in the Southern Kalahari: New Results from the North of Kuruman Palaeoarchaeology Project (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations of the southern African Late Pleistocene archaeological record have transformed our understanding of the biocultural evolution of our species. Although the intensity of research on coastal and near-coastal records is greater than in the...
A Late Pleistocene Palaeoenvironmental Record for Northern Namaqualand, South Africa: Geoarchaeology, Geochronology, and Stable Isotopes from Spitzkloof A Rockshelter (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at Spitzkloof A Rockshelter, northern Namaqualand, South Africa, identified a deep stratified sequence with pulsed occupation dating to the Last Glacial Maximum (23–17 kcal. BP) and Marine Isotope Stage 3 (>51 ka BP), while the lowest layers are candidates for U-series dating. Importantly, this period encompasses a time of marked climate...
The Later Stone Age in the 4th Cataract Region, Sudan: Lithic Assemblage Features at ASU 09-02 (2017)
Later Stone Age (LSA) foragers in the Middle Nile Valley had relatively mobile lifeways that included use of pottery. Distinguishing LSA from Neolithic ceramics is difficult due to continuity in styles, an issue that extends to lithic assemblages. Lunate microliths and scaled pieces and use of flint and quartz as main lithic raw materials span both periods. We examine the lithic assemblage at ASU 09-02, a LSA site in the 4th Cataract region of northern Sudan. Situated on a terrace north of the...
Learning From Scratch What The Environments Were Like As The Complexities Of Societies Changed In Eastern Tigrai (2017)
Home to Aksum and other highly-developed polities, the Tigrai Plateau is a leading contender for sub-Saharan Africa's richest center of ancient state formation. This and its susceptibility to environmental (climate and land cover) variation make the region compelling for evaluating whether environmental changes affected the trajectories of polities. Soils exposed by gullying are the longest continuous archives of environmental proxies in the region. Many proxies are affected by both climate and...
The Legacy of the Foraging Spectrum and Mikea Ethnography: Do We Need Hunter-Gatherer Studies Anymore? (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Three Sides of a Career: Papers in Honor of Robert L. Kelly" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One way to view the twentieth-century history of hunter-gatherer studies is as a long attempt to evaluate Victorian notions of foragers as primitive relics with actual data from real foraging peoples. This history came to a fiery climax during the Kalahari history debate of the 1990s, when researchers argued whether...
Levallois, Learning, and Lithic Variation: Results from Porcelain Flintknapping Experiments (2018)
The ability to transmit cultural information with high-fidelity across generations is a defining trait of modern humans. It is unclear, however, how and when this adaptation emerged in the human lineage. The earliest forms of human technology—stone artifacts—required knappers to understand raw material mechanics, as well as geometry (volume reduction, angles), and physics. Thus, it is often assumed that the spread of lithic technologies involved some degree of information transmission. However,...
Life in the Margins: The Pre-Still Bay Deposits from Varsche Rivier 003, Southern Namaqualand, South Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Varsche Rivier (VR) 003 is located in the Knersvlakte, the quartz-gravel plains of southern Namaqualand, South Africa. While currently a marginal, low-rainfall region within the Succulent Karoo Biome, conditions were more favorable during the Late Pleistocene....
Life in times of change – A bioarchaeological perspective on health and living conditions in Upper Nubia in the late 2nd and early 1st millennium BC (2017)
With the end of the Pharaonic Egyptian colonial occupation c. 1070BC and the increasing deterioration of climatic conditions, communities in Upper Nubia faced significant changes, both to the political structure (which may have affected trade networks), and to the agricultural potential of the region (e.g. availability of arable land). This presentation aims to elucidate if, and in what ways, these alterations impacted upon the living conditions of the people in the area, using the skeletal...
Lithic Analysis of an Early Later Stone Assemblage at Malony’s Kloof, a Rock Shelter in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Temporal organization systems which separate lithic artifacts into designations based on age, geographic area and technology are vital in order to operationalize archaeological information and allow for researchers to make their findings transferable and reproducible. Each Stone Age has characteristics that allow researchers to designate technologies...
Lithic Analysis of GaJj17: a Middle Stone Age Locality in Koobi Fora, northern Kenya (2017)
The Koobi Fora region in eastern Turkana, northern Kenya, is known for its preservation of Plio-Pleistocene hominin fossils. However very little is known about the Middle Stone Age (MSA) from this region. Fossil and genetic evidence suggest modern humans originated in eastern Africa ~200ka, adding to the significance of this time period and region. In 2016, we excavated site GaJj17, an MSA site located in Area 104 of Koobi Fora. Here we present lithic analysis of recovered in situ and surface...
Lithic artifact production at the Large-scale Pharaonic chert quarries of Wadi el-Sheikh, Egypt (2017)
Recent research into quarrying and lithic production in Wadi el-Sheikh, Egypt by the University of Vienna has identified activities extending from the Middle Paleolithic to modern times. These include Middle Paleolithic use of surface materials, Neolithic chert quarrying, Pharaonic gypsum extraction, quarrying and production of groundstone, ochre collection, and small-scale independent modern salt quarrying. However, the most striking activities are the large-scale Pharaonic period chert...
Lithic Attribute Analysis for Blydefontein Backed Blades and Endscrapers (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Attribute analyses are common in the field of archaeology for categorizing and analyzing artifacts. In this study, the Later Stone Age end scrapers and backed blades from Blydefontein Rock Shelter in South Africa undergo an attribute analysis using an objective attribute guide. The guide combines common terms from previous studies along with new terms for...
Lithic Miniaturization and Behavioral Variability in Southernmost Africa 18–11 kcal. BP (2018)
Lithic miniaturization, the systematic production of small stone artifacts by controlled fracture, was a pervasive feature of late Pleistocene lithic technology. Smaller toolkits enabled humans to exploit raw materials more efficiently, to produce composite tools more effectively, to reduce a wider range of rocks, and to increase mobility by lightening toolkits. These benefits allowed humans to occupy a wider range of ecological niches. Archaeologists working in southern Africa have long...
Lithic Taphonomy and Digital Hydrogeologic Models: A GIS Based Approach to Understanding the Formational History of Surface Assemblages (2018)
Surface assemblages play an important role in understanding human behavior. However, modern erosional processes—specifically flowing water—can limit the behavioral inferences that can be gained from surface assemblages by transporting materials from their original discard sites. The influence of these processes can be observed in the size distribution and condition of surface lithic assemblages. The topography and geomorphology of the landscape heavily dictates the degree to which fluvial...
The Location for the Origin of Domesticated Sorghum in Africa: A Brief Review of Some Cultures in the Sahara, Nile, and Sahel (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent analyses have established the location for the origin of domesticated sorghum occurring in the far eastern Sahel of Sudan during the fourth millennium BC associated with the Late Neolithic Butana Group. For over a half century, sorghum domestication has been hypothesized as occurring somewhere in the Sahelian...
Longevity and authority in a mobile world the megasites of the Ugandan grasslands (2017)
Much of the recent past of Great Lakes Africa is characterised by short-lived settlements and mobile societies, that produced ephemeral occupation sites. In part because of this, attention has long been drawn to sites like Bigo and Ntuusi which seem to offer much more substantive archaeological remains. Yet, notwithstanding the longevity of the latter and the extent of both, this is clearly not a simple occupation site featuring a large population. Rather it is much more effective to understand...