Gabonese Republic (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
201-225 (469 Records)
Recent archaeological survey, excavation, ethnoarchaeological and palaeoenvironmental research conducted in northeastern Tigrai by the Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) has produced new insights into the Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite periods (>800 BCE-CE 700). The principal ETAP excavations thus far include the Pre-Aksumite site of Mezber (1600 BCE-1CE) and Ona Adi (c. early 1st millennium CE) which was inhabited during the Pre-Aksumite to Aksumite transition. Both sites were occupied...
Holocene Palaeoenvironmental Changes in Southeastern Mozambique: The Case of the Inhambane Bay (2018)
Geoarchaeological surveys were conducted in 2016 and 2017 to better understand the environmental history and landscape evolution of the Inhambane coastal area, Southeastern Mozambique, aiming to know the environmental context of human occupation of the Tofo, Praia da Rocha and Chibuene archaeological sites. To reach this aim, 4 cores were collected in a mangrove area of the Inhambane estuary, an area both influenced by sea-level and climate changes. All the boreholes were georeferenced and...
Hominin land use of and movement in the Koobi Fora Formation (Kenya) (2017)
The occurrence of large densities of lithic and fossil material in Early Pleistocene contexts have been the focus of much interest. Several hypotheses modeling hominin foraging strategies have been generated to explain their formation. Assemblage formation is often hypothesized to be the result of particular land use strategies that relate to the movement and discard of stone artifacts. These hypotheses are difficult to test because they rely on ethnographic models of human movement, yet they...
Households, Community, and Crafting at Kanono: The Creation of an Early 2nd Millennium Village in Western Zambia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Machile River in Western Zambia formed a significant locus of Iron Age life in Zambia and served as a conduit for the localized movements of people, things, and ideas in south-central Africa for much of the last two millennia. Within this dynamic corridor, the early second millennium Kanono site represents a relatively short-lived but well-defined...
How to Deal with Homogeneous Stratigraphies: Excavation, Sampling, and Analysis Strategies at Umhlatuzana Rockshelter, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To ensure proper context control for archaeological samples, it is crucial that excavations determine and, where possible, follow the natural stratigraphic subdivisions in a sedimentary sequence. In cases with a single, unchanging source of sedimentary input, this may pose challenges. We present our strategies to...
Human Agency and Theory in West Africa: Understanding Early Forest Agriculture Dynamics during the Neolithic (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. Despite the fact that the need to study early indigenous agricultural systems in Africa has long been recognized and reaffirmed in recent archaeological discussions, African agricultural practices are still being modeled using concepts, terminologies, questions, lines of evidence, and methods derived from research elsewhere in...
Human and Animal Foodways on the Afar Salt Route, North Ethiopia (2018)
Caravans form an important component of ancient trade routes world-wide. They were lifelines to settlements and connected diverse landscapes. They also encouraged complex transport networks. Our understanding of ancient ways of life along these trade routes is, however, hampered by an incomplete picture of the participants or caravaners themselves. This study uses quantitative and qualitative data from ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research on the Afar salt caravan route in northern...
Human Landscape Modification and Environmental Change in the Western Kenyan Highlands (2017)
Interpretive challenges involving issues of equifinality and causation can chronically hamper environmental reconstruction efforts, as numerous physical, environmental, or anthropogenic processes may potentially be responsible for creating observed raw data patterns. Nested multi- proxy and multiscalar analyses offer potential means of approaching these difficult conceptual issues which can plague interpretations reliant on single lines of proxy evidence. A dataset comprised of multiple...
Hunters in transition: Mesolithic societies of temperate Eurasia and their transition to farming (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...
An Ideology of Blood at the Root of Symbolic Culture (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At ~160ka, roughly at the end of our African speciation, archaeologists identify a change from sporadic to habitual use of red ochre. This has been interpreted as primarily a pigment for decorating performers’ bodies during...
The impact of experience and flake attributes on carcass processing time and efficiency during actualistic Early Stone Age butchery (2017)
Actualistic butchery often investigates the relationship between tool characteristics and butchery behavior but rarely considers individuals’ butchery skill. Therefore idiosyncratic behavioral differences may confound analyses of butchery time or efficiency. Here, two novice butchers used replicated Oldowan flakes on 40 domestic goat limbs to examine how tool attributes affected processing time and efficiency during defleshing and disarticulation, and whether a learning curve impacted butchery...
Impact of Prehistoric Cooking on Proxy Signatures in Shell Midden Constituents (2017)
The analysis of geochemical proxies in skeletal remains has become a standard tool in shell midden research. Sub-seasonally resolved proxy records provide information about environmental and anthropological aspects such as ancient climate conditions, fishing and foraging seasonality or site occupation pattern. However, as subsistence was the primary purpose for fishing activities in most prehistoric cultures, it is likely that many shell midden constituents were subjected to processing methods...
Imperial Mixtures and Paradoxes of Government in Colonial Senegal (2018)
This paper examines the travails of colonial government in Senegal, looking specifically at material histories in the rural region of Siin. One tenet of French colonial policy was to govern through the operation of commerce, specifically through the infrastructure of cash-cropping. If peanut agriculture would, in principle, create both wealth for the colony and ‘African subjects,’ on the ground, peanuts combined with a web of material entities that bent, diverted, or interrupted the flow of...
Implications of Efe Ethnoarchaeology for Recognizing Human-Derived Faunal Assemblages and Carcass Processing Decisions (2018)
Archaeological analyses of faunal remains frequently rely on observations derived from ethnoarchaeological studies to identify bone surface modifications that were the result of animal capture, butchery, and consumption by humans. In addition to the accurate identification of human-derived modifications, ethnoarchaeological studies in which carcass processing and consumption were observed and documented can provide a more precise means to recognizing specific human behavioral choices, such as...
Implications of Ostrich Eggshell Diagenesis Experiments and Observations for Isoscape Analyses (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ostrich eggshell (OES) is widely used for environmental reconstruction with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen isotopes, and radiocarbon dating. Strontium isotope ratios of OES artifacts can be used to reconstruct object biography, human mobility, and interaction networks. OES can provide an isotopic baseline for reconstructing past environments and provenience of...
In Search of King Tona’s Palace: The Politics of Archaeology and Memory in Southern Ethiopia (2017)
In 1896 Emperor Menelik II of Abyssinia engaged in one of the bloodiest battles of his military campaigns, attempting to unseat King Tona of Wolaita. After two weeks of fighting, King Tona was captured and the royal court devastated. The last palace of the Wolaita Kingdom stood in Dalbo just 10 kilometers northeast of the current city of Soddo. While the general location of King Tona’s palace is known, contesting narratives situate the exact location at different sites. This paper reports on...
Indigenous Hermeneutics and the Contribution of Africa to Skyscape 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. Since the discoveries of the astronomical orientation of Stonehenge in the 1960s, several scholarships have employed skyscape archaeology to answer questions about state formation and consolidation of complex societies. The majority of these works have focused outside Africa, particularly on cultures in Latin America, China,...
Initial Results from Magnetometer Survey at the Sacred Site of Dakajalan, Mali (2018)
In the spring of 2017 geophysical remote sensing surveys were conducted across three locations at and around the Dakajalan sacred site, Commune Rurale de Sanankoroba, Mali in order to detect anomalies associated with archaeological features. This site has been described in oral tradition as the location where the battle that proceeded the formation of the Mali Empire took place, and also where the village that acted as the first capital of the newly formed empire was located. Surface survey of...
Integrated People, Practices and Knowledge in the Archaeology of Southwest Madagascar (2018)
Since 2011 the Morombe Archaeological Project has undertaken archaeological survey, excavation and oral history recording in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area of southwest Madagascar. The project’s aims are to investigate diachronic human-environment dynamics and refine our understanding of the region’s settlement history by leveraging multiple scientific techniques and the collective historical and socio-ecological knowledge base of Velondriake’s living communities. The project is run by a...
Inter- and intra-individual dietary variation among the agro-pastoralist Sai Island Meroitic population (2017)
We examine inter- and intra-individual variation in diet among high-status individuals from an agro-pastoralist Meroitic burial population interred on Sai Island in modern Sudan. We use stable isotope data (δ13C and δ15N) from dentinal collagen, extracted from serial micro-sections of third molars, to reconstruct the diet of 10 individuals. We employ MixSIAR, a hierarchical Bayesian model for estimating isotopic mixing, along with a previously constructed isotopic food-web to reconstruct human...
Interpreting Small-Scale, Intra-site Spatial Variation of Finds from the MSA Deposits at Sibudu Cave, South Africa (2018)
Sibudu Cave in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa is a key Middle Stone Age site that provides a high-resolution stratigraphic record of cultural change. The sequence from Sibudu is well-dated and has been the focus of intense geoarchaeological research. This paper examines the spatial distribution of lithic artifacts, faunal remains, worked ochre, burnt materials and botanical finds to see if these distributions provide meaningful information on the changing use of space at the site. The study will...
Introducing "Project Piedemonte": Between the Maloti-Drakensberg and the Great Escarpment in the Eastern Cape Province, 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. This new project aims to map mobility patterns and social networks from prehistory to historical times in the western piedmont of the Maloti-Drakensberg, South Africa. It also considers the relationships between archaeological and rock art sites, and how rock art...
Investigating Human Origins in the Kalahari Basin: New Results from Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter (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. Investigations of the southern African Middle Stone Age archaeological record are transforming our understanding of Homo sapiens origins and evolution, however, the intensity of research on coastal and near-coastal Middle Stone Age (MSA) records has outweighed that on the deep interior record. The North of Kuruman...
Investigating Other Causes for Stone Flake Features Attributed to Handedness (2016)
Homo sapiens is the only primate species that currently displays a population level preference for right hand dominance. Previous studies have attempted to establish methodologies to determine handedness from stone tool debris because of the link between handedness and brain lateralization of the classic language centers, and its implications for the evolution of language. However, these experimental studies have produced varied results, and it is questionable whether handedness can be...
Investigating site formation processes in Blombos Cave, South-Africa – a geoarchaeological and micro-contextual approach. (2017)
Archaeological material, for example engraved ochre and bone, shell beads, bone tools, and bifacial points recovered from the Middle Stone Age levels (c. 101–70 ka BP) at Blombos Cave (BBC), South Africa, is central to our current understanding of the technological and cultural development of early modern humans in southern Africa during the Late Pleistocene. While these artefacts have attracted much attention for their behavioral implications, the sedimentary context in which they were...