Gabonese Republic (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
376-400 (469 Records)
Within the corpus of San rock art in the South African Drakensberg mountains is a category of highly embellished, oversized anthropomorphic figures termed Significantly Differentiated Figures (SDFs). Such images have previously been interpreted as San ritual specialists' conceptualisation of themselves, in metaphor, as a result of the arrivals of African farmers and European colonists. This paper, drawing on new data gathered during surveys of the Matatiele region in the Eastern Cape, South...
Silcrete Heat Treatment Technology during the MIS 5/4 Transition at Pinnacle Point 5-6 and Vleesbaai, South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The heat treatment of silcrete is an important technological strategy during the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in South Africa. Heat-treating silcrete improves its quality for tool making and use. Although it is found as early as ~162,000 years ago (ka) at Pinnacle Point 13B, heat-treated silcrete does not become common in South African MSA assemblages until...
Silcretes from Nearby Sources Display Different Responses to Rapid Heating: Implications for Models of Early Human Heat Treatment (2017)
Heat treatment of silcrete in the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa has been taken to indicate cognitive complexity. This inference is based on the argument that silcretes require well-regulated heating and cooling rates to avoid thermal fracture. Alternative arguments have been made that silcrete can be heat treated with limited control over temperature gradients, and thus that heat treatment may have been a relatively simple process. These apparently contrasting positions elide the fact that...
Site Formation Analysis of Middle Stone Age Locality GaJj17 in the Koobi Fora Formation, Northern Kenya (2017)
The Koobi Fora Formation (KF Fm.) of the Turkana Basin in Kenya is comprised of a Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary sequence that has produced unprecedented paleoanthropological discoveries. Previous work in the KF Fm. reported an archaeological locality, GaJj17, exhibiting in situ Middle Stone Age (MSA) material eroding from an indurated sandstone. Understanding the depositional context of this locality required further geologic study as few MSA localities are represented in the KF Fm. This is due...
Slave Trade and Colonialism in African Islands from the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One key period of history involved the forced migration of millions of people due to slavery. Information on the origins of the enslaved individuals has been reconstructed from historical records and, more recently, through the use of paleogenomic techniques. However, all these ancient DNA studies have been performed on...
Slavery and Colonialism: Selectively Embracing and Erasing the Past in The Gambia (2018)
Banjul was founded in 1816 as part of the British efforts to block the slave trade on the Gambia River. A planned urban center, the city developed around a series of neighborhoods designated as colonial, merchant, and African laborer spaces. Amongst the most prominent settlers were the Aku (Liberated Africans) from Sierra Leone and French traders from Goree who were instrumental in the growth of the colonial economy. The Banjul Heritage Project seeks to highlight contributions of the different...
Slavery and Freedom from the West Indies to West Africa (2018)
"Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you" is a phrase attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre. While the French philosopher was concerned with political freedom rather than freedom in the context of slavery, Sartre’s words offer lessons for analyzing a vast spectrum of how individuals experienced the conditions of slavery and freedom. This paper explores an ambitious project of freedom and future-making initiated by a group of Barbadians one generation after emancipation in the English...
Slavery without Slaves: Archaeology of Frederikssted Plantation and Its Implications for Plantation Archaeology in Ghana (2018)
In 1803, Denmark and Norway abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which took effect on 1st January 1803. However, this did not end slavery itself in Africa. Intensification of cash-crop agriculture on the West African coast by the Danish colonists provoked an upsurge in the local slave trade. As the Danish plantation economy solidified, increasing numbers of enslaved people were engaged to labour in these plantations in Ghana. The research examines the documentary and the archaeological data...
Social Learning Among recent Hunter-Gatherers: Jun/wasi Examples (2018)
While interest in the role of social learning in the Paleolithic has focused extensively on stone artifacts, very little attention has been paid to social learning in living forager populations. In this paper we report on many years of fieldwork among the Jun/wasi of northwestern Botswana and Namibia. We argue that most cultural transmission in relation to domains such as technology, language and food acquisition was informal, and was acquired in the context of close daily relationships between...
Social Life and Social Death among Cape Slaves (2018)
A central imperative in historical archaeology is to produce original information and insights that cannot be derived from historical records. Sophisticated analyses of slave burials that combine the physical elements of burial grounds, coffins, and grave goods, with the biology and chemical signatures of the human remains, can identify and source first-generation slaves, and help to infer the social bonds reflected in their burial. Orlando Patterson has defined slavery as "social death" to...
Sourcing Etendeka Dolerites in the Stone Age of Namibia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Basalts and dolomites, associated with the Etendeka Large Igneous Province (ELIP), in northwestern Namibia, often make up the bulk of lithic raw materials present in archaeological assemblages from the region. Different igneous formations within the ELIP can readily be distinguished...
Sourcing Lithic Raw Materials in the Namib Desert: Exploring land use and technological organization (2017)
Under a technological organization perspective, archaeologists seek to understand how prehistoric societies organized their activities across landscapes and how variation at individual sites articulates with changes in large scale land use systems. Lithic sourcing offers a powerful tool for testing hypotheses about technological organization and land use, but its application across the globe has, until recently, been hindered by expense and methodological difficulties. In this paper, we use pXRF...
The Span of ‘Slavery’: Considering Systems of Domination and Labour in the Lake Chad Basin (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. "The kings of the Sudan sell their people for no reason, and quite apart from any wars…" (Ahmad al-Ya’kūbī). The Lake Chad Basin was one of the anchor points of the trans-Saharan slave trade, through the millennium after al-Ya’kūbī wrote about the rulers of Kanem in the 9th century AD. This region had no equivalent to...
Spatial Variation in Tool Use: Acheulean Forager Patterning at Elandsfontein, South Africa (2018)
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...
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...
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...
‘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...
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 Supplemental Approach: The Influence of Ann Stahl’s Interdisciplinarity to 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. There is a long history of interdisciplinary research on the precolonial African past, with historians, archaeologists, and historical linguists seeking out and drawing on insights from their allied disciplines. These scholars often seek to integrate different types...
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...