Republic of Kenya (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
201-225 (560 Records)
Engaged archaeology and public anthropology depend on the goodwill, or at least tolerance, of numerous publics. This is frequently understood to mean local communities and nearby residents, but projects can live or die according to the will of groups less often discussed as part of the target public: authority structures such as permitting agencies or even national governments. How do such organizations figure into the "public" of public scholarship? What happens when research is pressured to...
From Bayira, the Earliest African Genome, to a Place of Refuge: Mota Cave’s History in Southwestern Ethiopia (2018)
Mota Cave located in southwest Ethiopia was found in 2011 in collaboration with local Gamo elders and partially excavated in 2012. The cave has exposed a long sequence of occupation (5295 Cal BP to 305 BP) revealing remarkable technological, subsistence, and cultural changes. We uncovered a burial of a male with the earliest complete ancient genome recovered from the African continent. We have named him Bayira, meaning "first born" in the Gamo language where the cave is located. Bayira begins to...
From Building to Connecting: Shifting Portraits of Complexity in Ancient Aksumite Monument Construction (50–400 AD) (2018)
This paper looks at how network theory and materiality may challenge progressive evolutionary models of complexity. Archaeologists working on the African continent have long argued against neoevolutionary models of complexity, advocating instead for understandings that promote dynamism and fluidity. However, the spectre of neoevolution still claims the public imagination: bigger still seems to be better even if we agree it really shouldn’t be. This paper aids in complicating these views by...
From Geophysics to Building a Predictive GIS Model of Archaeological Sites in the African Interior: Spatial Archaeometric Applications of the Bosutswe Landscapes Regional Survey, Botswana (2018)
Expanding trade in gold and ivory in the first millennium linked sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East and Asia through maritime and land-based exchange. This Indian Ocean trade supported the flow of exotic goods and ideas into the interior of southern Africa, where polities developed by the mid-13th century. The African experience has often focused on larger cities and coastal societies, or framed through viewpoints of those beyond the continent. In particular, landscape approaches, especially...
From Minerology to Monuments: Place-Making through Personal Ornamentation in mid-Holocene Turkana, Kenya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beads play a prominent role in personal ornamentation in life and death: desired, exploited, and widely traded throughout prehistory. Although manufacture and use provide important social context, evaluating the materials used and their source locations is a crucial component of understanding how these industries arise. This paper features an...
From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Trans-Regional Movements of Artifacts, Cereal Crops and Animals (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholarly interest has been growing in an episode of trans-Eurasian exchange of agricultural systems and tangible material goods in late prehistory. The trans-regional movement of a number of artifacts, cereal crops and animals occurred within a series of transformative process that...
From Tasmania to Tucson: new directions in ethnoarchaeology (1978)
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...
From the Field to the Festival: Reading the Landscape of Cloth in Axum, Ethiopia (2017)
The city of Axum in northern Ethiopia is well known for its high quality, hand woven cloth. Sundays and festivals bring throngs of local people who, to the outside observer, appear to be uniformly dressed in beautiful white handspun clothing embellished with colourful woven borders and embroidery. This apparent uniformity belies a very complex set of activities that lead to the production, distribution and consumption of cloth in Axum. Each step in production is dominated by people of...
Frühe Eisengewinnung in Zentralafrika (1988)
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...
Fun with Dick & Jane: Ethnoarchaeology, Circumpolar Toolkits, and Gender "Inequality" (2009)
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...
Functional Implications of Backed Piece Variability for Prehistoric Weaponry in the Middle Stone Age (2017)
MSA backed pieces are often thought to be components of projectile armaments, however our limited understanding of their functional characteristics as projectiles precludes understanding the adaptive problems they may have solved. Despite widespread acknowledgment of raw material differences and inter- and intra-assemblage morphological variability, whether backed piece morphology reflects functional, economic, or stylistic variation has a paucity of empirical support. Here, the functional...
Garvning med Mogoler och Massajer (2010)
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...
Geoarchaeological assessment of long-term site- and field-management characteristics at the pre-Aksumite site of Mezber, Tigrai Plateau. (2017)
The ancient polities of the Tigrai Plateau and this region’s pronounced climatic variations combine to create a research paradigm where social-environmental interactions can be considered over the long-term. Existing regional-scale indicators suggest that human responses to climate variability differed between peoples, polities and time-periods. Framed by an ongoing regional study designed to examine high-resolution climate and environmental markers at a broad-spatial scale, the study of the...
Geochemical and Sedimentary-Based Reconstruction of the Palaeoenvironment and Formation of the Late Stone Age Site of Txina-Txina (Massingir, Mozambique) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study aimed to reconstruct Txina-Txina site (located between the junction of Machampane and Chifati rivers, Southeastern Mozambique) paleoenvironment and site formation processes to better understand its occupation pattern, preservation of archaeological materials and the impact of palaeoenvironmental changes on human evolution. For this, we collected...
Geochemical Insights on Earth Mineral Pigment Provisioning and Use in Stone Age Eswatini (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Material Sourcing and Provenience Studies in Africa" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present results of a multi-method, regional-scale iron and manganese-oxide provenance study centered on five Middle and Late Stone Age sites and raw material sources in Eswatini. Earth mineral pigment artifacts are abundant at MSA and LSA sites and the variation observed in their typologies shows changes over time...
Getting to Know the Neighbors: Commensal Insights into Human-Ecosystem Dynamics (2018)
Advances in zooarchaeological method and theory, increased attention to the recovery and analysis of microfaunal remains, and multidisciplinary collaborative research have generated increasingly nuanced understandings of past human-animal relationships. This paper provides a brief introduction to archaeological investigations of commensal fauna, highlighting the myriad ways that research focused on the commensal niche sheds new light on past societies and ecosystems. A case study from Makangale...
GIS-Based Approaches to Obsidian Studies in Eastern Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Material Sourcing and Provenience Studies in Africa" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of obsidian transport during the Late Pleistocene of eastern Africa have been largely productive for reconstructing raw material procurement patterns and movement across landscapes. Due to a limited sample, however, these studies are often descriptive of particular sites and related explicitly to material...
Glass Beads from Bumbusi in Northwest Zimbabwe: Intersection of History and Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The northwestern parts of Zimbabwe lie at a critical junction between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and—during the late Iron Age—witnessed major cultural changes. This includes possible migrations historically tied to the decline of major states to the south. Beads lubricated these transformations, making it possible to connect...
The Glass Beads of Songo Mnara, Tanzania (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Songo Mnara lies on a small island of the same name just to the south of Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania. It was occupied mainly in the fifteenth century CE and its assemblage of 7,444 glass beads provides us with a unique view into Indian Ocean trade to East Africa in this period. A comprehensive study of...
Great Zimbabwe's Water (2017)
In southern Africa, Great Zimbabwe has long been the focus of research, debates and preservation as the remains of what was once the urban centre of a vast state system. As new research findings are reframing the development of the Zimbabwe civilization in the region, local environmental settings and natural resources at Great Zimbabwe remain poorly understood. Using approaches in geoarchaeology, this paper presents Great Zimbabwe as a living landscape. New soil sequences from within and around...
Ground Stone Technology in the Late Pleistocene Horn of Africa: An Assemblage from Mochena Borago Rockshelter, Southwest Ethiopia. (2017)
Ground stone technology is an early component of the African Middle and Late Pleistocene hominin behavioral package. However, very little attention has been paid to quantifying Pleistocene ground stone variation in Africa. This paper describes a ground stone assemblage from the site of Mochena Borago in Southwest Ethiopia. The site plays a key role in testing the hypothesis that the highlands of Southwestern Ethiopia acted as a refugium for hunter-gatherer populations looking to escape...
Habitat Preferences in Early Hominins and the Origin of the Human Lineage (2018)
Early hominins, such as australopithecines, are characterized by bipedality and enlarged posterior teeth. Originally, these traits were thought to be adaptations to an open environment. However, discoveries of older hominins, such as Ardipithecus that were possibly only occasionally bipedal and did not have enlarged teeth, have refocused the origins of early hominins within a much more closed, wooded setting. Even the later australopithecines are currently cast as inhabitants of mosaic...
The Harare Style: Digitally-enhanced photography in pursuit of a San rock art regional variant, Zimbabwe, Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The painted parietal art of prehistoric San Bushmen of southern Africa has been in the public eye since the 1920s. Iconographic and stylistic differences within the San artistic corpus have been attributed to distinctions of time and space within and among the many centers of image concentration. Rock art found in the ravines...
Hearth Features at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1, Southern Coast of South Africa (2017)
The Agulhas Bank Paleoscape (ABP), a broad coastal plain that is now a submerged continental shelf off the south coast of Africa, would have presented early modern humans with a variety of potential foraging options. A rich Middle Stone Age record documents the presence of early coastal foragers as well as terrestrial hunter-gatherers in the ABP. At Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1, both strategies are represented in a sequence spanning the end of the Middle Stone Age (about 40 ka) through to the end...
Herder land use and nutrient hotspots in southern Kenya: geochemical analysis of anthropogenic soil enrichment. (2017)
Mobile herding societies are often considered to leave behind few traces in the archaeological record, however pastoral settlements may have helped shape the broader landscape. Herders relying on domesticated cattle, sheep and goat arrived in the most productive grasslands of East Africa >3600 calBP years ago. Our collaborative research investigates the legacies of their land-use through geoarchaeological analyses. We present results of analyses of five Pastoral Neolithic era archaeological...