State of Eritrea (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
551-575 (810 Records)
Mobile pastoralism was the earliest form of food production in eastern Africa. The spread of pastoralism in Kenya c. 5000-1200 BP involved peoples with diverse subsistence patterns and material culture repertoires. However, little is known about the social landscapes and mortuary practices in southern Kenya. The mosaic of Pastoral Neolithic burial traditions across Kenya is diverse, ranging from monumental pillar sites to the north to cairns and rockshelter cremations to the south. In 2016,...
Pastoral Societies, Holocene Climate and Technology: Perspectives from Iron Age Southern Jordan (Session 4400) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How did pastoral societies evolve into more complex social organizations in what is today a hyper-arid desert zone? This paper examines the Iron Age (ca 1200 - 500 BC) data from southern Jordan that indicates relatively little climate change from today, yet the rise of complex pastoral nomadic societies.
Pastoral Territoriality as a Dynamic Coupled Human-Natural System (2018)
Despite research indicating that contemporary pastoral societies are more dynamic than previously assumed, there is a tendency to view South Arabian pastoralists as timeless heirs of a stable, ancient system or along a historical continuum of response to exogenous factors like the development of civilization, introduction of camels, or global climate change. In research triggered by NGS support, we proposal a new conceptual model for pastoral mobility regulated by dynamic feedback loops in...
Pastoralist Land Use and Mobility in the Horn of Africa: An Archaeological Predictive Model (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological Predictive Models (APMs) are a critical tool for archaeologists working across the globe; however, they are underutilized in continental Africa. As part of ongoing archaeological research in Djibouti, the Southeast Djibouti Regional Archaeological Project (SEDRAProject) developed an ArcGIS-based APM for pastoralist sites in the eastern Horn...
Pastoralist Spacetimes and Political Life in the Past: Exploring the Value of Living and Dead Animals Archaeologically (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anthropological approaches to value assert that creating and contesting value is at the heart of politics. Herd animals offer a complex window into this basic theoretical insight—they are simultaneously producers of and objects of value and their value cannot be easily reduced to the categories of economic or symbolic value. Analyzing...
A Pathway to Attain Sustainable Development in Africa (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Initiative for Sustainable Development in Africa (ISDAf) was conceived in 2020 to raise awareness of the need to engage local indigenous and descendent (LID) communities as equal partners in Strategic Environmental and Social Assessments (SESA) and Environmental and Social Impact Assessments (ESIAs) for development and conservation projects at the...
Patterns in Amino Acid Delta 15N Values of Lemurs Are Inconsistent with Aridity Driving Megafaunal Extinction in Southwestern Madagascar (2017)
Early human colonists of Madagascar encountered a diverse endemic fauna during the late Holocene that included elephant birds, pygmy hippos, and giant lemurs. All fauna >10 kg went extinct in the past 1,000-2,000 years. Direct human predation and anthropogenic landscape change help explain aspects of the extinction pattern. Increasing aridity may have also played a role in some regions, but its contribution remains controversial. We track changes in aridity during the past 4,000 years in...
Patterns of a Life and Death through Machine Learning: Archives of the Bois Marchand Cemetery in Mauritius (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. The Bois Marchand cemetery in Mauritius was established in 1867, during the malaria epidemic, as the largest in the Indian Ocean and the third largest in the world. The Bois Marchand Cemetery Archive (1867–to date) holds a near-complete set of burial records of individuals interred in this cemetery. The records contain...
Patterns of Hominin Land Use and Raw Material Procurement in the Paleo-Olduvai Basin, Tanzania (2017)
Suitable toolstone was a key affordance for Early Stone Age (ESA) populations across Africa. Northern Tanzania’s Olduvai Basin, because it contains numerous ESA archaeological localities and a variety of quartzitic outcrops, offers an excellent opportunity to evaluate the effect of raw material distribution on hominin landuse. While the lithology and mineralogy of these outcrops have been well described, their macroscopic similarities confound efforts to reliably determine the exact source of...
Patterns of Land-Use and Political Administration Beyond the Core Areas of the Sasanian Empire (2018)
The landscapes of the Sasanian Empire have long been viewed as massive and state-sponsored development projects, in particular in politically and economically core zones. Despite these unparalleled understandings, our knowledge of peripheries and their connection with the sociopolitical organization of the time have still remained as some of the key gaps in the studies of late antiquity. To address these questions, I examine the settlement expansion, water management systems and agricultural...
People and Palaeoclimates at the Diallowali Site Complex: Changing patterns along the Middle Senegal Valley throughout the 1st millennium BC (2017)
The first millennium BC was a time of considerable social, technological, and environmental change for the peoples of West Africa. Despite the growing number and distribution of archaeological projects throughout the region, very little is known about this critical period. Likewise, many of the climate models currently in use lack the sufficient temporal or spatial resolution needed to provide context for the variety of changes occurring at a localized level. Recent research at the Diallowali...
Persistence in Pastoralist Practices During the Uruk Period at Tepe Farukhabad (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Uruk period (4100 - 3100 BCE) was a transformative time in Southwest Asia, marked by the precursors of writing, the rise of urbanization, and an intensification in cross-cultural interactions. Subsistence strategies were shifting as well, as hunting declined relative to herding and animals such as sheep and goats became favored for both their primary...
Perspectives on the Organization and Use of Lithic Technology: A Modern Ethnographic Case Study in East Turkana, Kenya (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Expedient Technological Behavior: Global Perspectives and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Expedient technology has taken on several meanings within the study of stone tools. However, the range of behaviors associated with the term expedient and its manifestation in the archaeological record is dependent on the socio-ecological and functional contexts in which technology is used. Acquiring a deeper...
Petrographic and Chemical Analysis of Ceramics of the Atlantic Period of Baol (1400–1900), Historical Kingdom of Northern Senegambia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The petrographic and chemical analysis of ceramic shards from the Senegalese Atlantic period (1400-1900) is the weak link in archaeological research in Senegal. Archaeological surveys and excavations carried out for my doctoral thesis yielded several artifacts, including local ceramics. A qualitative study of the ceramics collection was carried out...
Pfahlbauten in Afrika, Phil. Diss. (1978)
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...
Phoenician Iron Smithing and Cult at Tel Akko, Israel (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations (2010 - 2018) directed by A. E. Killebrew and M. Artzy at Tel Akko, a major eastern Mediterranean Phoenician maritime center and emporium, have uncovered an unprecedented quantity of iron smithing slags, hearths and cultic artifacts, all dating to the sixth - fourth centuries BCE. This assemblage includes fragments of figurines and masks, a...
Photogrammetry, Spatial Patterning, and Site Formation of the Hominin-Bearing Layers at the Lower Paleolithic Site of Dmanisi, Georgia (2018)
The Lower Paleolithic site of Dmanisi, Georgia, is well known for its rich archaeological and paleontological deposits, which include bones from at least five individuals attributed to Homo erectus. Taphonomic analyses show that carnivores contributed greatly to the accumulation of faunal material, while contributions by hominins were present, but uncommon. Recent excavations in the hominin-bearing layers of Block 2 at Dmanisi have revealed a complex underlying basalt formation that likely...
Phytolith Analysis of Experimental Fires: Insights into the Prehistory of Fire (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cooking Hypothesis suggests the morphological changes in the Homo lineage, including larger brains, were due to incorporating controlled combustion to cook food. Most archaeological evidence for fire comes from cave sites, which are less likely to be exposed to post-depositional processes (e.g. wind and water) that can destroy combustion evidence. Yet the...
Phytolithic Analysis of Site FxJj 20 AB (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Controlled fire could have significantly impacted hominin evolution, providing an adaptive release resulting in reduced teeth and gut size, and larger brains. Evidence of hominin controlled fire is sparse in the early Pleistocene archaeological record. These sites are usually in open-air contexts where taphonomic factors can obscure the identification of...
Phytoliths, Geochemistry and Ethnography: A Multi-method Approach for Interpreting the Neolithic Sites of WF16 and ‘Ain Ghazal (2018)
Understanding Neolithic sites in southwest Asia is often difficult because of the lack of preservation of organic remains and the effects of various taphonomic processes that alter the original record. It is, therefore, critical that we maximise the information that can be acquired from these sites. Here, we use an ethnographic approach to test the potential of using plant phytoliths and geochemistry to aid our interpretation of southwest Asian Neolithic sites. We sampled two Neolithic...
Picking Up the Pieces: The Continued Influence and Impact of Redding's “Breaking the Mold” on Animal Domestication (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Richard Redding’s work on “breaking the mold” on how we explain the development of food production is emblematic of the major contributions he made to zooarchaeological thinking: his creativity, curiosity, and willingness to question dearly held beliefs. In this paper, we overview some of Redding’s many...
Plant and Animal Remains from Old Babylonian Ur (2018)
Archaeologists have been examining the great cities of ancient southern Mesopotamia for well over a century now, but as yet we have limited understanding of their subsistence economies. For decades researchers more or less ignored the wealth of faunal and botanical remains in and around ancient Mesopotamian architecture. Over the course of the twentieth century researchers began to recover animal bones and teeth, but as few digs dry-screened or floated their soils the resulting assemblages...
The Politics of Archaeology: Reflections on the Early Decades of the 21st Century (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2003, Bradley Parker co-organized a workshop at the University of Utah exploring the politics of archaeology, with emphasis on the Middle East. Both at the workshop and in the resulting edited volume, Controlling the Past, Owning the Future: The Political Uses of Archaeology in the Middle East, contributors...
Post-Charring Bacterial Degradation of Archaeological Lentils by Bacterial Degradation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. According to common knowledge, the preservation of stable isotope values in archaeological seeds requires that they be charred at low temperatures, because charring reorganizes sugar and protein polypeptides into stable Maillard reaction products. Charred seeds are understood to be resistant to diagenetic...
Post-depositional Processes and Their Impact of Inferences of Behavior at FxJj 34 (Koobi Fora Formation, Northern Kenya) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is often argued that surface assemblages provide insight into human behaviors at a regional scale. Measures of artifact use life and reduction intensity at this broad scale are often used to characterize the structure of stone tool use across space. However, once re-exposed, artifacts are subject to a variety of processes that potentially bias the...