United Republic of Tanzania (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
476-500 (559 Records)
Despite more than a century of scholarship, our knowledge about the use of stone artifacts remains relatively sparse. Major advances in the analysis of microscopic wear have been the primary focus of much previous research. However, post-depositional processes and the logistics of microscopic analysis limit sample sizes in these studies. New approaches that quantify macroscopic damage patterns on the assemblage scale provide a robust basis for drawing behavioral inferences about hominin tool...
The spread of iron metallurgy: the African continent (2017)
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...
Starch Remains from Human Teeth Reveal the Bronze and Early Iron Ages Vegetal Diet of Xinjiang, Northwest China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has long been a vital link between Europe and eastern Asia. In the past, understanding prehistoric diets in Xinjiang was based mainly on carbonized plant remains unearthed from archaeological sites and isotopic analyses of excavated human bones. Here, we report on our analysis of human dental residues preserved on...
Statistical Evidence For a New Method of Identifying Anthropogenic Fire in the Archaeological Record (2017)
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...
The Stimuli of Technological Inventions (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. Technology transfer is a popular concept in the studies of pyro-technologies globally. This concept has been used uncritically in discourses on the origins and development of sophisticated technologies in sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of continuous patronage of this inherently derogatory concept in sub-Saharan African archaeology,...
Stone Age Archaeology in the Elephant River Valley, Southwestern Mozambique (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located between modern-day South Africa and Tanzania, both of which have well-known and extensive Stone Age records, Mozambique and its Stone Age sequence remain largely unknown in the broader context of African Pleistocene prehistory. This is despite the country’s critical position linking...
Stone Age Archaeology in the Lower Save River Valley, Southern Mozambique (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. Southern Mozambique, with extensive Quaternary-aged deposits, shows great potential to inform on early modern human behavior. Despite its geographic proximity to well-known southern African hotspots of Stone Age archaeology, southern Mozambique represents a major...
Stone implements: how they were made and used (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...
Stone Tool Debitage Fails to Reliably Identify a Toolmaker’s Handedness (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The classification of stone tool debitage features as right- or left-oriented has become an increasingly common method for assessing knapper handedness in experimental and archaeological lithic assemblages. Replication attempts using these published methodologies, however, have been unsuccessful. We tested the validity of eight flake feature categories, from...
Storage, Cooking, and Transport. A Preliminary Residue Analysis of Ceramics from Mai Adrasha (2017)
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...
Strengthening the inferential link between cutmark frequency data and Oldowan hominid behavior: results from modern butchery experiments (2005)
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...
‘Stuck like Glue’: A Multi-method Analysis of Hafting Adhesives from Later Stone Age Assemblages in Southern Africa (2017)
The characterization of hafting adhesives, the glue of composite tools, by chemical analysis and microscopy provides a means by which we may evaluate the organic components of technologies. In southern Africa, the well-preserved assemblages of the Later Stone Age (LSA) present a unique opportunity to evaluate the procured raw materials related to tool manufacture, with a focus on the ingredients of these plastic components. This paper presents the findings of a multi-site study of hafting...
A study of cut marks on small-sized carcasses and its application to the study of cut-marked bones from small mammals at the FLK Zinj site (2005)
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...
Subsistence Technology in Early Iron Age Botswana (2018)
Analysis of the faunal assemblage from Thabadimasego, an Early Iron Age site in northeastern Botswana, contributes to the growing notion that hunting played a larger-than-expected role in the subsistence pattern of the area’s communities. Beyond understanding what they ate, what do the faunal remains tell us about the subsistence technology of Botswana’s Early Iron Age? Recent studies have focused on metallurgy and ceramic technology, but faunal patterns can provide information on the use of...
A Survey of Hilltop Settlement in Northern Jos Plateau, Nigeria: A Preliminary Report (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A reconnaissance of Dutsen Kura hill was carried out in June 2022. It is claimed that former occupants of the hill had ancestral links with Dutsen Kongba, a sixth millennium BC Later Stone Age hill settlement located in the same region. In addition, the present-day Bace group living in the plains in Dutsen Kura claims an ancestral link with former...
Swahili Agriculture and Power Dynamics in Regional Perspective (2017)
Urbanization along the Swahili coast coincided with an increasing importance of Islam, stone architecture, and materials traded through connections built inland as well as with Indian Ocean merchants. Archaeobotanical data from the town of Chwaka on Pemba Island, Tanzania (AD 1100-1500) suggest that foodways turned towards Asian crops, including rice and legumes, during the urbanization process. Beyond subsistence, crops held political power. Jeffrey Fleisher (2010) has suggested that feasting...
Swahili Urban Foodways and Feasts: From Village to Town (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Agropastoralists settled along eastern Africa’s coast in the first millennium, bringing with them domesticated sorghum and millets, cattle and ovi-caprids. The opportunities of the coastal environment led to marine resource exploitation and the adoption of rice and...
Systematic butchery by Plio/Pleistocene hominids at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania (1986)
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...
Systematic Differences in Sieved and Point-Provenienced Fauna Ecofacts from PP5-6, South Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research Consortium Poster Symposium" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In zooarchaeological analysis, there is a tendency to give point-provenienced ecofacts analytical priority over ecofacts found in sieved material. To test for the effects of this bias, we conducted a zooarchaeological and taphonomic analysis of faunal ecofacts (n = 841) found in the 10 mm sieved material from...
A Tale of Three Substrates: Effects of Trampling on Ostrich Eggshell and Applicability to the Archaeological Record (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Few taphonomic experiments have considered Ostrich eggshell, despite its ubiquity at archaeological sites in Africa and Asia. This experiment seeks to fill some of the gaps in taphonomic knowledge by determining the effect of trampling on ostrich eggshell. Ostrich eggshell fragments were photographed, distributed across the surface of sand, soil, or gravel,...
Taphonomic and geological approaches to the identification of in situ versus ex situ archaeological material: a case study from BK East, Bed II, Olduvai Gorge (2017)
A variety of post-depositional processes can add to, subtract from, and/or spatially reconfigure archaeological deposits. The challenge for archaeologists, then, is to unravel these processes in order to assess the fidelity with which a given deposit reflects hominin behavior. BK East, an early Pleistocene locality in Olduvai Gorge’s middle/upper Bed II, preserves stone tools, butchered animal bones, and hominin remains. This rich archaeo-paleontological collection rests within an interbedded...
A Taphonomic Comparison of Two Late Pleistocene Zooarchaeological Assemblages in Northwest Italy and South Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research Consortium Poster Symposium" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A driving question in paleoanthropology is the extent of behavioral divergence in hominin species, particularly Anatomically Modern Homo sapiens (AMH) and Neanderthals. Generally, direct comparisons are restricted to Europe, where both hominin species were interacting within the same environmental constraints....
Taphonomic Comparisons of Stone Tool Transport: Surface vs. Excavated Collections (2018)
It has been argued that surface assemblages may provide insights into questions regarding large scale patterns of human behavior such as mobility and stone tool transport. However, excavated material is often preferred over surface assemblages due to concerns of potential biases introduced by the process of exposure. Here, we examine this claim by comparing measures of stone tool transport between surface and excavated assemblages. Surface and excavated lithic assemblages were collected from the...
Taphonomy of a modern landscape bone assemblage in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania (2017)
Bone assemblages from modern landscapes can help address a variety of issues, from the degree to which bone scatters accurately reflect local habitats to what variables condition the deposition, preservation, and spatial distribution of faunal material. In 2015, systematic pedestrian survey recovered ~350 bone specimens within a 200m x 200m area of open grassland about two kilometers north of Olduvai Gorge in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA). Weathering profiles suggest an exposure,...
Technological Organization on the Paleo-Agulhas Plain: Robberg Lithic Technology from Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (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. Lithic technological organization is based on the landscape-scale distribution and availability of resources. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the landscape off the southern coast of South Africa was a different world than it is today. At its most extreme, the...