Somalia (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (447 Records)
Multispectral imagery is a powerful tool for various disciplines that use landscape scale spatial patterning to understand and identify underlying geochemical variations. Paleontologists have used multispectral imagery in numerous locations; however, it has not been extensively applied in the study of archaeological sites associated with human fossil localities in East Africa. Extensive geological exposures combined with laterally expansive volcanic ashes in the Turkana basin make this an ideal...
Approaching Equifinality: Pollen and Non-pollen Palynomorphs as Complementary Paleoecological Proxies (2018)
In analyses of paleoenvironmental records, the specific effects of climate/precipitation patterns and human landscape impacts on ancient ecologies can be difficult to discern. As largely substrate-specific in nature, fungal spores may serve as proxy for a range of phenomena, such as soil erosion, landscape burning, vegetation clearance, moisture availability, and the existence of particular plant types in a given area. Microbotanicals, including pollen, fungal spores, phytoliths, and...
Archaeobotany of Food & Craft near Bono Manso, Ghana, during the Transition from Trans-Saharan to Atlantic Trade (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kranka Dada is a village site on the periphery of Bono Manso, a complex polity occupied between the 14th – 17th centuries AD, at the height of the trans-Saharan trade and the shift to early Atlantic trade. Questions remain about the degree and nature of the involvement of sites like Kranka Dada in these different trade networks. In this paper, we offer...
Archaeological and Biometric Perspectives on the Diversity and Origin of African Chickens (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. Early agricultural systems relied on plants and animals originally carried thousands of miles by land and sea. Due to a lack of data and a greater emphasis on domestication processes, early agricultural complexes are less investigated than their domestication counterparts. This paper examines the introduction and evolution of...
Archaeological Applications of Optimal Foraging Theory: Employing Bayesian probability modeling to estimate profitability parameters for rare and extinct prey (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconstructing the subsistence strategies of past hominin populations remains one of the most important endeavors of archaeological studies. However, the presence and relative frequency of species alone, recovered as faunal material in archaeological contexts, is insufficient to reconstruct the complex foraging decisions made...
Archaeological Research on the Ancient Iron Metallurgy in Côte d’Ivoire (2003-2016) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the year 2003, programmed research is carried out on the old iron metallurgy in Ivory Coast. Documentary research, field surveys and archaeological excavations have discovered ancient sites of iron metallurgy from 2003 to 2016. In a large part of the regions of Côte d'Ivoire, sites were discovered, studied then dated. The northern zones (Korhogo,...
Archaeological Science in Southern and Eastern Africa (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. African archaeology has a rich tradition of archaeological science. Sophisticated chronostratigraphies underpin our picture of human origins; archaeometric studies of provenance, trade, and exchange are reshaping our understanding of how societies developed; and my own field of bone chemistry and...
Archaeological Survey and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in African Archaeology: Perspectives from the Niger Valley, Benin (2018)
The Niger River Valley in the north of the Republic of Benin, West Africa, has abundant archaeology that until recently has been under researched. During a systematic field survey carried out for my doctoral research as part of the European Research Council-funded Crossroads of Empires project led by Prof Anne Haour, over 300 new archaeological sites were discovered and 50,000 material culture objects recorded. This paper will discuss the methodology used to systematically survey the landscape...
Archaeology and the End of Empire in Nigeria: Learning from the History of Late Colonial Archaeology at Ile-Ife (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the city of Ile-Ife (Nigeria) in 1953, three foreign archaeologists (Bernard Fagg, AJH Goodwin, and William Fagg), with the permission of the Oni of Ife, conducted several months of fieldwork in the old city. With the aim of uncovering evidence relating to Ile-Ife’s early industries (including exquisite brass and terracotta artworks), they...
Archaeology as Storytelling (2017)
The rise of open source publications has increasingly made archaeological research available to wider audiences and yet the knowledge we as archaeologists produce is not always freely accessible or available. It is fully understood within our discipline that archaeological sites have strong connections to the past; that they are embodied spaces and irreplaceable sources of knowledge. However, this view of sites does not always extend to the broader public or to communities with ties to those...
Archaeology by experiment (Japanese translation) (1977)
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...
Archaeology in the Age of the Anthropocene: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (2018)
The 2016 decision by the Working Group on the Anthropocene of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) to designate an Epoch based on a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) fixed at AD1950 is significant for managing global ecological systems moving forward. There is no serious scientific debate on whether humans have impacted the global ecology, but regardless of the ICS decision to anchor the so-called "Golden Spike" to the advent of the nuclear age, humans are known...
Archaeology, People and Identity in Cape Verde Islands (2018)
The geographical location of Cape Verde islands made them one of most important places in early Portuguese exploration of African coast. The first European settlers were favoured by the Portuguese monarchy in the relations with African coast. Since 1472, they were forced to carry out exchange with local goods. This encouraged the development of cotton and sugarcane crops with slaves from the "Guinea Rivers", as was common in other Atlantic islands and the American colonies. The excavations...
Arqueologia Experimental (translation of ”archaeology by experiment” by TORRINHA, Maria Fernanda) (1976)
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...
Artifact Density and Population Density in Bronze Age China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A common method of estimating population is to multiply a settlement area by an occupational density. Empirical studies show that occupational density generally increases with settlement size but estimating occupational density when structural remains are not...
Assessing Edge Damage in MSA Lithic Assemblages: Experimental Proxies for the Analysis of Use and Post-Depositional Damage (2017)
Given the low frequency of retouched stone tools in many Middle Stone Age (MSA) assemblages, the analysis of edge damage on unretouched artifacts offers a promising depth of insight into tool-use behavior. Taphonomic process such as trampling, however, can also cause edge damage on lithic artifacts. As part of the investigation of GaJj17, an MSA site in the Koobi Fora region (Kenya), we conducted an experiment designed to investigate differences between edge damage resulting from use and that...
Assessing the Suitability of Southern Africa for Archaeological Provenance Studies with Lead Isotopes (2018)
Evidence for trade between southern Africa and the Muslim world dates back to the 8th century CE. However, it is not until the 12th and 13th centuries, with the discovery of alluvial gold in southern Africa, that entanglement between the two regions intensified. As a result, state-level societies emerged and began incorporating aspects of the Muslim identity into their own culture. With the intensification of these trade relations, craftsmen began expanding their repertoire of iron and copper...
At Risk Cultural Heritage and the Power of Communities (2018)
In the years of willful destruction of cultural heritage as part of an extremist obliteration of the past, there have been several instances in the news of local populations taking stance against these destructive forces. In some cases protection of cultural heritage has become a voice against suppression and the reconstruction of destroyed monuments, e.g. through 3D printing and resurrecting lost parts, an act of defiance. Most destruction of cultural heritage, however, takes place much more...
Back to Basics: Analyzing knapped stone recovered during survey in southeastern Senegal (2017)
Archaeological ethics require all sites identified on survey to be reported and described in such a manner as to allow for the archaeological community to understand their research potential. This can present a challenge in regions without a significant body of previous research to aid in the interpretation of finds. The Bandafassi Regional Archaeological Project in southeastern Senegal faces just such a situation. A research question driven survey strategy, directed at the archaeological record...
A Bayesian Solution to the Controversy over the Identification of Bone Surface Modification in Paleoanthropology (2017)
Bone surface modification (BSM) remains a primary source of taphonomic inference in paleontological and archaeological contexts. However long-standing debates in BSM studies have undermined the utility of this approach. We use an objective machine-based learning algorithm rooted in Bayesian probability theory designed to quantify the level of uncertainty associated with a formal assignment of agent to individual BSM. Our multivariate Bayesian model, trained on large assemblages of...
Beer and Feasts in the Highlands of Southern Ethiopia: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Perspectives (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Exploration of the Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Feasting and drinking beer by the Gamo Boreda, who live in the highlands of southern Ethiopia, represent status and seniority and have a long tradition of connecting the living with the ancestors. This paper focuses on the archaeological site of Ochollo Mulato (AD 1270–1950), incorporating oral traditions in...
Beer in the Desert: Archaeological, Ethnohistoric, and Experimental Perspectives on Early Beer Brewing in the Central Namib Desert, Namibia (2018)
For the better part of a century, archaeologists have surmised that beer brewing played a significant role in a range of major social and economic changes having to do with origins of agriculture. This paper examines an unusual case of early beer brewing, which likely originated during the Middle Holocene among the Later Stone Age (LSA) populations of the hyper-arid Central Namib Desert of western Namibia. In this paper, I discuss practices of modern traditional beer brewing in the region and I...
Beer, Porridges, and Feasting in the Gamo Region of southern Ethiopia (2017)
Porridges and beer make up a majority of the household diet throughout much of rural Africa and could possibly be some of the earliest foods produced. In Africa, pottery is one of the primary culinary tools used to make both porridges and beer. This ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research explores pottery using use-alteration and morphological analyses from the Gamo of southern Ethiopia to indicate the use of pottery as a culinary tool. Beer and porridges are considered luxury foods...
Beer, Pots, and Caste: A Tale of Two Sites in the Gamo Highlands of Southwestern Ethiopia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: A Global Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beer is an essential culinary food for many African societies today and in the past for daily meals, economic compensation, and ritual feasting. This paper focuses on the ethnoarchaeology and archaeology in the Gamo region of southwest Ethiopia located on the western escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. Today, a unique...
Behavior Change in Hunter-Gatherers of the Namib: A Re-Analysis of the Terminal Pleistocene Lithic Technology at the Mirabib Hill Rockshelter, Western Namibia (2017)
Originally excavated in the early 1970s by Beatrice Sandelowsky, the Mirabib Hill Rockshelter is located roughly 250km southwest of Windhoek, Namibia, in the Namib-Naukluft National Park. This poster describes our re-analysis of the lithic technology recovered from Mirabib during the Sandelowsky excavations. The lithics examined in this poster were recovered from the lowest levels of the Sandelowsky excavation, just above bedrock, and date to around 19.5ka. This poster discusses the knapping...