Somalia (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
151-175 (509 Records)
Between 1855-59, the island of Mauritius, with a landmass of only 2040 km2, was producing 10% of the world’s sugar: a staggering testimony to the power of imperial influence on ecology. The transformations that this intensification in cane production resulted in were far reaching. One facet that remains poorly understood is the context of disease, despite a well-developed historical narrative . This paper presents details of a series of malaria epidemics that plagued the island from the 1850s...
Employing Bayesian Probability Theory to Diverse Applications Relevant to Archaeology (2018)
The principle of equifinality describes a system where an end state may be reached from a variety of conditions and in a variety of ways and has proved to be a confounding element in several areas in archaeology. Archaeological data commonly occur in both qualitative and quantitative form and Bayesian modeling, coupled with modern computational routines, permits multiple data types to be incorporated into a single synthetic probability model. The Bayesian approach makes probability statements...
Endangered Archaeology in Arid Lands: Remote Sensing and Heritage Management (2017)
The Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa Project (EAMENA) uses satellite imagery to record damage and threats to the heritage of the MENA region. We are recording these data in an open-access database to create a useful platform for the management and protection of heritage in these countries. A remote-sensing approach to heritage management has many advantages and is particularly effective in the arid MENA region due to limited vegetation and development. The availability...
Engaging Materiality: Archaeology of Craft Production in Igbo Ukwu (Ninth–Twelfth Century CE) (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. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of craft production in antiquity. It combines theoretical and methodological toolkits from archaeology, material science, studies of craft production, and ancient economies to investigate the organization...
Enslaved Christian Captives in Early Modern North Africa: Resolving Historical Contentions Through Archaeology (2017)
Establishing estimates of European Christians enslaved in North Africa during the Early Modern Period (1500-1800) is highly contested among scholars. On one hand, historian Robert Davis argues that more than a million Europeans were captured, enslaved, and left unransomed in North Africa in the Early Modern period. On the other hand, Nabil Matar suggests that both the historical accounts and Davis’ estimates are exaggerated, in part because of a lack of physical evidence and the ambiguous...
Entangled Lives: Intercultural Interactions in the Nubian Borderland (2017)
Anthropological theories of cultural interaction, in particular entanglement, can help shed light on how individual choices drove intercultural interaction between Egypts and Nubias in the context of a colonial borderland. This paper explores how recent archaeological work in Nubia is breaking the simple Egyptian-Nubian dichotomy that has characterized previous discussions of interactions between the two African cultures. Taking their cue from Egyptian ideology, Egyptologists have often depicted...
Equity, Access, and the Privilege of “Best Practice” in Archaeological Fieldwork (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. Technological advances in digital imagery, field recording, and mapping have transformed the ability of archaeologists to rapidly collect, store, and analyze large quantities of high-resolution field data. In spite of steadily lowering prices and broader consumer accessibility over the years, the costs associated...
Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology: Introduction (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. Archaeology throughout the African continent in the last few decades has provided important insights into questions that are relevant to archaeology worldwide. Yet, these new theoretical perspectives and datasets have not been widely incorporated into scholarship elsewhere in the world, perhaps a latent effect of lingering...
Establishing Baselines for Stone Tool Variation Across the Early Pleistocene: A Least Effort Approach (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of the evolution of human behavior is largely predicated on how stone tools vary through time and across space. Despite a long history of research, the behavioral processes associated with Early Pleistocene lithic technology remain debated. Some research suggests that lithic...
Estimating the Temporality of Iron Smelting sites in Africa by Coupling Radiocarbon and Archeomagnetism (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. The life of African iron smelting sites (duration and production rate) is poorly known because of the low number of dates per site and the dependence on radiocarbon. On two fields in Togo (Bandjeli district) and Benin (Aplahoué district), this methodological communication shows that coupling...
Ethno-Archaeometry of Ochre Mineral Pigment Extraction, Transport, and Use in the Kenya Rift Valley (2018)
Ochre occurs in African archaeological sites from the later Middle Pleistocene to the ethnographic present. Ochre is used worldwide for symbolic and functional purposes, and is often considered to be evidence for symbolic behavior by cognitively modern Paleolithic humans. Geochemical provenience analysis, complemented by ethnographic studies of ochre source exploitation, transport, and use, can elucidate whether culturally mediated source exploitation differs significantly from a least-cost...
An Ethnoarchaeological Approach to Traditional Farmer Knowledge and Fire Ecology in Eastern Tigrai, Northern Ethiopia (2017)
This study will conduct ethnoarchaeological interviews of Eastern Tigrai rural consultants on traditional farmer knowledge, risk management and fire ecology. The data will enable the integration of farmer knowledge within an historical ecology framework to understand human-environment interactions taking place during the Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite periods (>800 BCE- CE 700). A previous palaeoenvironmental study examined extensive charcoalized wood and burned matter in the region, however an...
Ethnoarchaeological Pottery Traditions in North Wollo, Ethiopia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will review the ethnoarchaeological context of ceramic production in North Wollo, Ethiopia, and trace changes to ceramic traditions influenced by sociopolitical factors, with implications for archaeological reconnaissance and research. This research is a part of the broader Solomonic-Zagwe Encounters Project and its ongoing efforts to, in part,...
Ethnoarchaeological research in Asia (1989)
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...
Ethnoarchaeology in Africa (1983)
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...
Ethnographic analogues for interpreting modified bones: some case from East-Africa (1989)
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...
Evolution of Iron Age to Modern Landscapes in the Benoué River Valley, Cameroon (2017)
African landscapes have undergone radical ecological transformations since agriculture was introduced and spread across the continent. In some areas, it appears that grassland was encouraged at the expense of forests and woodlands, for agriculture and to provide fodder for livestock. To this point, most of the evidence for such practices has come secondarily from ocean or swamp cores, not directly from archaeological contexts. In this paper, we present a scenario for landscape evolution and...
Evolving Social Networks during the Late Pleistocene: An Interior Perspective from Grassridge Rockshelter, 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. Humans are social beings and being able to track social interactions and relationships across space and through time is a major focus of both anthropological and archaeological research. Within archaeology, the scale and intensity of social interactions has been...
Examining Dental Wear of Mongol Period Elites from Khövsgöl Province, Northern Mongolia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The purpose of this study is to explore the social status and daily lives of Mongol era (twelfth to fourteenth centuries CE) “common elites.” Common elite is a general term used in this region to describe a group of high-status people that were not in the immediate lineage of Chinggis Khan. We investigated whether cultural activities such as food...
Examining the Shift in Seed-Dispersal Mechanisms During Early Plant Domestication (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholarship is reframing the study of plant evolution under cultivation to focus on the effects of complex human harvesting practices (seed predation), increased human population size, and sedentism, while turning away from conscious human selection. Research has pointed out that parallelism in domestication is linked to seed-dispersal mechanisms, but...
An experimental and archaeological investigation of the role of edge angle in lithic artifact damage: Applications to the Koobi Fora Fm. Kenya. (2017)
The analysis of damage patterning on lithic artifacts has the potential to distinguish between pre-depositional use of artifacts and post-depositional taphonomic processes, providing important evidence for particular hominin behaviors. Previous study has suggested that damage accrues in a non-random fashion in archaeological assemblages. Limited work has been done using the quantified variable of edge angle to account for patterns of edge damage. This study focuses on assemblage-level patterns...
Experimental archaeology: replicas and reconstructions (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...
Experimental burning of traditional Nguni huts (1980)
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...
Experimental implement manufacture and use: A case study from Olduvai Gorge (1981)
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...
Experimental Iron Smelting at Meroe, Sudan (2017)
The Royal City of Meroe, situated 250km north of Khartoum in the Republic of Sudan, was a capital of the Kingdom of Kush from the 4th Century BC. Famed for its pyramids and other monumental architecture, Meroe was also home to extensive bloomery ironworks exemplified by numerous slag mounds scattered across the site. Superficial investigation of furnace and slag remains were undertaken in the 1980’s and raised numerous questions about the technology. New archaeometallurgical research was...