Republic of South Africa (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
301-325 (502 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike some regions, Africa was not subject to massive and abrupt mammalian extinction events in the Late Quaternary, but some African regions were subject to abrupt extinctions of small numbers of species. The coast of South Africa records such an extinction event near the Pleistocene and Holocene boundary. These extinct species were all adapted to...
Modeling Human-Environment Interaction in Sub-Saharan Africa: Archaeological Data, Ecological Questions (2017)
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 Mobility and Lithic Raw Material Transport in the Late Pleistocene along the Southern Coast of South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how hunter-gatherer groups move around the landscape is essential for answering questions about human behavioral ecology and evolution of the social landscape. Lithic raw material proveniencing sheds light on how far people in the past were traveling for toolstone and...
More Than Just Pretty Things: Taphonomic and Behavioral Observations from the Unworked Ostrich Eggshell Assemblage Recovered from Grassridge Rockshelter, South Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Grassridge Rockshelter demonstrates one of the largest assemblages of ostrich eggshell beads and preforms in southern Africa that dates to the mid-Holocene. The site, located in the interior of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, therefore reflects an intensive use of ostrich eggshell as a raw material source for the production of...
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...
The Msikaba Red Sand Dunes: Middle Pleistocene Lithic Technological Variability in Pondoland, 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 Msikaba Red Sand Dunes along South Africa's Pondoland coast are a recently discovered open-air site complex that documents Middle Pleistocene lithic technological and morphological change. The deposit comprises ancient dune surfaces stacked over time with repeated sea-level highstand events. Initial excavations and...
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...
Multispectral Satellite Imagery for Mapping, Modeling, and Interpreting the Archaeological Landscape of Bandafassi, Senegal (2018)
The Bandafassi Plateau of southeastern Senegal today defines a landscape in which ethnic identities (Bedik, Peul, and Malinke) appear to be grounded in "traditional" patterns of settlement and land use, and yet oral histories speak largely of movement at multiple scales—from the fission and fusion of villages, to the migrations of hunters and merchants, to the arrival of foreign invaders and colonial powers. Seeking to better chart the interplay between natural environment and social history...
Métallurgies Africaines (1983)
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...
Namib IV: Assessing Acheulean Technology in Relation to Depositional Processes in an Arid Landscape (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Namib IV is an Earlier and Middle Stone Age interdunal pan site in the Namib Desert’s Sand Sea. New investigations of the this hyper-arid landscape are piecing together the hominin occupations in relation to dry/wet climatic cycles. Hominins at Namib IV occupied the site multiple times...
Narabeb Pan: Exploring Middle Stone Age Archaeology of the Namib Sand Sea (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The vast Sand Sea region of the Namib desert in western Namibia has begun to yield evidence of long-term human occupations. In the past decades, several Early Stone Age (ESA) sites have been identified and described but the Middle Stone Age (MSA) human presence remains poorly understood. Here we describe in detail the newly documented site of Narabeb Pan,...
Narabeb: Examining the Middle Stone Age of the Namib Sand Sea (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Namib Sand Sea (NSS) in Namibia is known to preserve a wide variety of Pleistocene-age archaeological sites. However, few Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites in this region have been systematically investigated and basic questions around chronology and technological organization remain open. Here we examine Narabeb Pan, an open air MSA surface site deep in...
Negotiating Local Tastes in Trade Networks: Reflections on Ann Stahl’s Contributions to West African Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. My research on local tastes and embodied practices during the Afro-European trade in Ghana is greatly influenced by Ann Stahl’s extensive theoretical work in West Africa. The 19th and early 20th centuries in West Africa witnessed a surge in the demand and export of...
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...
A Neurobiological Explanation for Spheroids as Embodied Cognition (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spheroids (i.e., intentionally shaped or gathered round rocks) first appeared about 1.8 million years ago. Sahnouni et al. (1997) proposed that they were by-products from core reduction knapping. Walker (2008) concluded they served as evidence of modern-like behavior in a belief system. Wilson et al. (2016) viewed them as throwing-affordances for killing...
New Excavations at Border Cave: Preliminary Reflections on Stratigraphy and Site Formation Processes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Border Cave rock shelter, formed in Early Jurassic fragmental rocks of the Jozini Formation on the western scarp of the Lebombo Mountains, KwaZulu-Natal, has a long history of archaeological investigation starting with Raymond Dart in 1934. Phases of informal and formal excavations have yielded remarkable archaeological assemblages including five hominin...
New Neighbors/Nearest Neighbors: Slavery, Displacement, and Belonging Along the West African Coast (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Atlantic Period, Kingdoms along the West African Coast swelled as traders, emissaries, and famers moved to palatial capitals. As these groups freely poured into West African cities, African kings added war captives and enslaved individuals to the urban mix. Elite Africans were reliant on enslaved and attached...
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...
North American Provincialism and Outdated Archaeological Curricula: The Bane of Global Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I was trained at Northwestern University by Stuart Struever, a student of L. Binford. I was nurtured on a positivist paradigm and force-fed like a goose on the 1960s New Archaeology. I was gratefully cured of these limitations by elders in East Africa who taught me deep respect for historical perspectives on the past. Because I...
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,...
Notes on a traditional Ainu vessel replica (2002)
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...
(Nut) Cracking the Code of Primate Cognition (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Old Technology, New Methodology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of percussive actions to access encased foods—e.g., nuts—has been proposed as a viable hypothesis to explain the emergence of stone tool technology in the hominin lineage. Observations of extant nonhuman primates such as chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) or black-striped capuchins (Sapajus libidinosus) nut-cracking have been used to support the...
Oceanische Rindenstoffe: mit 24 Zeichnungen von H. Nevermann (1926)
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...
Of Ostrich and Ochre: The application of pXRF to detect experimentally pigmented ostrich eggshell (2017)
Ostrich eggshell (OES) is a somewhat common occurrence in Middle and Later Stone Age archaeological contexts. Ethnographically, OES are known to be used as containers, raw material for bead production, and the egg itself as a valuable food source. Archaeologically, it is difficult to determine which of these potential functions the OES fulfilled. The application of mineral pigment powder to OES may suggest a non-subsistence function for that particular piece. For this study we experimentally...