Africa (Continent) (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (957 Records)
The medieval Norse settlements in Greenland formed the westernmost frontier of Scandinavia, and the Old World, between ca. AD 980-1450. A Norse society of perhaps only some 2500 farmer-hunters settled two subarctic niches: the Eastern Settlement in South Greenland with ca. 550 sites and the smaller Western Settlement 500 km north in the inner parts of the Nuuk fjord region and with only some 90 sites. For still not completely understood reasons, the latter was completely abandoned by AD...
Analyse et restitution d'un procédé de construction antique: réalisation d'une voûte d'arêtes sur coffrage perdu en tubes de terre cuite (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...
Analysis of a Jun/Wasi Nut Cracking Stone from Western Ngamiland, Botswana: Implications for the Origins of Hominin Technology (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A nut cracking stone collected from a 1960s dry season occupation site at Dobe (Western Ngamiland, Botswana) shows not only evidence of cracking and pounding of mongongo nuts and other uses, but also repetitive flaking around the periphery. This flaking is reminiscent of the putative anvil stones from Lomekwi, Kenya (~3.3 Ma) and reinforces the idea that...
An Analysis of Funerary Food Offerings and Imagery in Theban Tombs from New Kingdom, Egypt (2017)
Food played an important role in ancient Egyptian funerary practices, but there has not been an examination of the types of food offered. I examined food offerings and their corresponding imagery in Theban tombs from New Kingdom, Egypt (1550- 1070 BCE) in order to analyze how food in funerary rituals changed over time. Through museum records, excavation reports, and examinations of artifacts in the British Museum, the Petrie Museum and the Museo Egizio in Turin, I determined the most common food...
Analysis of Pastoralist Settlement Patterns in Eastern Djibouti (ca. 1200–500 BP) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. River drainages have long been loci of seasonal migration and settlement for pastoralist societies in the Horn of Africa. Dotted with pastoralist camp sites, eastern Djibouti’s Amboule River drainage is an ideal location to study long-term pastoralist settlement dynamics at a sub-regional scale. In 2017 and 2018, as part of a systematic survey of pastoralist...
Ancestor Shrines, Diversity, and Distributed Power in West Africa: Understanding the Strength of Flexibility and Cooperation in Sociopolitical Histories (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. The archaeology and ethnohistory of western Burkina Faso provide myriad insights into the ways that social and political identities can be simultaneously strong, anchored, and flexible: communities can be simultaneously autonomous, connected, and engaged in collective action; and hierarchies can exist while being extensively...
Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods (2017)
Egypt, located on the isthmus of Africa, is an ideal region to study historical population dynamics due to its geographic location and documented interactions with ancient civilizations in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Particularly, in the first millennium BCE Egypt endured foreign domination leading to growing numbers of foreigners living within its borders possibly contributing genetically to the local population. Here we mtDNA and nuclear DNA from mummified humans recovered from Middle Egypt that...
Ancient Human DNA from Shum Laka (Cameroon) in the Context of African Population History (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We generated genome-wide DNA data from four people buried at the site of Shum Laka in Cameroon between 8000–3000 years ago. One individual carried the deeply divergent Y chromosome haplogroup A00 found at low frequencies among some present-day Niger-Congo speakers, but the genome-wide ancestry profiles for all four individuals are very different...
An Android-Based System for Archaeological Survey and On-Site Stone Tool Analysis (2017)
A recent survey project is documenting new Stone Age sites in various regions of Mozambique, including the areas of Niassa in the north and Limpopo in the south. Most of this work involves the identification and characterization of hundreds of surface lithic scatters among which thousands of stone tools must be analyzed. A digital recording system was required that would allow to: 1) register information of each scatter, including context description and geographical coordinates; 2) do on-site...
The Animal Subsistence System of Old Kingdom of Egypt (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations in various functional areas of the Workers’ Town and other settlement sites at Giza, Egypt, have provided a nuanced understanding of the distribution of animal taxa and body parts to dependents of the king. The residents of most of the areas excavated consumed sheep, goat, cattle, various birds, and fish. Young cattle and Nile perch were...
Another Form of Slave Ship: Local Nautical Technologies and Practices in the Persistence of the Senegambian Slave Trade (1818–1888) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "To Move Forward We Must Look Back: The Slave Wrecks Project at 10 Years" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite its abolition by France in 1818, the slave trade continued along the coasts of Senegambia until 1888. When, in 1822, France created a special African naval squadron stationed at Gorée Island to patrol the West African coasts, slave traders in the Senegambia responded by developing new strategies to escape...
Anthracological Analyses of the Iron Age Shell Middens Complex at Praia da Rocha, Inhambane, Mozambique (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016, our teams carried out survey and excavation field work in the Inhambane Province, located in southern coastal Mozambique. At Praia da Rocha we have identified several previously unknown shell middens dated to the regional Iron Age (c. 700 BP). All sites are located within few hundred meters of each other and only one (Praia da Rocha 1) was, so far, ...
The Anthropocene of Madagascar: Reviewing Chronological Evidence for Madagascar’s Colonization (2017)
The date of Madagascar’s initial settlement has long been the subject of academic inquiry and debate. Archaeologists, historians, geneticists, linguists and paleoecologists interested in the history of Malagasy and Indian Ocean peoples, regional exchange, and environmental change have contributed diverse datasets and perspectives to this debate over Madagascar’s colonization, but consensus on the timing of human arrival remains elusive. Despite its relative proximity to the African mainland,...
The Appearance, Use, and Production of Glass in Ancient Sub-Saharan West Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the commodities heading south across the Saharan Desert over the past 2000+ years was glass. The typical form was as beads, but vessel glass and other forms also have been recorded. Glass not only was imported but at some point in the past also was produced by indigenous populations for local and regional consumption. Advances in...
Applications of Multipsectral Imagery to the Archaeology of Human Origins (2017)
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...
The Archaeological Heritage of Zimbabwe: a masterplan for resource conservation and development. UNDP and Unesco Project Report (1992)
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...
Archaeological Identification, Investigation, and Implications of the Portuguese Slaver São José Paquette de Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "To Move Forward We Must Look Back: The Slave Wrecks Project at 10 Years" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In December 1794 the São José Paquete de Africa foundered near Cape Town, South Africa, while transporting over 500 slaves from Mozambique destined for northeastern Brazil, resulting in the death of over 200 souls. This presentation reviews the process through which independent lines of archaeological and archival...
Archaeological Proxies of Early Modern Human Niche Construction in Northern Malawi (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most archaeological literature dealing with niche construction avoids hunter-gatherer behaviors, in part because they can be difficult to detect archaeologically. As the role of humans in shaping environments over long time scales becomes increasingly apparent, it is critical to develop archaeological...
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...