Africa (Continent) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Kay.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Situated within the Great Rift Complex of northwest Kenya, the Elgeyo Escarpment and surrounding region has been home to Marakwet communities for the last three hundred years. Many of these communities inhabit settlements which span diverse ecosystems, from semi-arid bush to highland forests. In tandem with changes in local lifeways and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Zaia.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The name Punt, the fabulous land of the gods, is known since the discovery and excavation of the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari. The queen undertook a commercial expedition to the land of Punt to collect precious materials to carry back to Egypt. Such resources were crucial for performing religious ceremonies and funerary rituals. Although the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Reeves. Matthew Douglass. Seminew Asrat. Melissa Miller. David R. Braun.

Lithic surface scatters comprise a large proportion of the archaeological record but their value for understanding human behavior is often doubted. Modern geomorphological processes often laterally displace and selectively bias surface assemblages of artifacts. The predictable effects of displacement on the condition, weathering and size distributions of lithic assemblages is better understood. While topography is known to play a role in this process, the degree to which topographic variables...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Miller. Russell Cutts. David Braun. J.W.K. Harris.

Previous research in the Koobi Fora Formation, Marsabit District, Kenya identified nine delineated areas where the sediment was lithified and rubefied. These features derived from the excavation of the archaeological site of FxJj20-Main in the Lower Okote Member, which dates between 1.5 and 1.64 Ma. Previously, similar features in archaeological sites have been recovered with material that exhibit evidence of having been exposed to high temperatures. These features are discrete, isolated,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Schoville. Jayne Wilkins. Kyle Brown. Alex Blackwood. Jessica von der Meden.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The southern Kalahari Basin in the northern interior of South Africa has provided evidence for early use of fire, Mode 3 technological developments, early stone-tipped spears and pigment use. Innovations seen in the southern Kalahari Basin early in the Middle Stone Age may represent changes in how human populations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Whitney.

The widespread availability of satellite data has opened up parts of the world that have long been inaccessible for archaeological research. One such area is the border between Ethiopia and Somalia, which has been embroiled in civil conflicts for the past 30 years. As such, little is known about the cultural heritage of southeastern Ethiopia and the greater Somalia region. This project shows how using geographic information systems (GIS) as a form of initial survey can reveal substantial results...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wolfgang Alders. Julia Jong Haines.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using archaeological and geospatial methods, we compare landscape modifications associated with the maintenance of the monocropping plantation orders under Omani, French, and British colonialism in nineteenth-century Zanzibar and Mauritius. How do similarities and differences in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kofi Nutor.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the complex history of Atlantic slavery and European colonization in Peki, a frontier Ewe community in present-day southeastern Ghana. This community played a pivotal role that led the pan-Ewe confederacy– the Krepi– out of Akwamu and Asante domination in the mid-nineteenth century. To consolidate their power, the Peki made two major...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerome Reynard. Liezl Van Pletzen-Vos. Sarah Wurz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Klasies River is one of the most significant Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites in Africa with a sequence spanning from c. 120,000 to c. 50,000 years ago (ka). Because it yields one of the largest collections of human remains dated to the Late Pleistocene associated with an abundance of MSA cultural remains, it is an important site for understanding the development...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Hixon. Kristina Douglass. Brooke Crowley. Lucien Rakotozafy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recently expanded estimates for when humans arrived on Madagascar (up to ~10,000 years ago) are based on limited data yet highlight questions on the causes of the island’s relatively late megafaunal extinctions (~2000–500 years ago). Introduced domesticated animals could have contributed to extinctions through competition, but the arrival times and past diets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Bertacchi. Jessica C. Thompson. Stanley Ambrose. Andrew Zipkin. Elizabeth Gomani-Chindebvu.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Zambezian Ecozone of east-central Africa comprises faunal communities that include elements from both southern and eastern Africa. The region has long served as an important crossroads for faunal exchange, but its timing and implications for hunter-gatherer behavior are unknown. Late Pleistocene faunal assemblages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Schoville. Jayne Wilkins.

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. Recent investigations of the southern African Late Pleistocene archaeological record have transformed our understanding of the biocultural evolution of our species. Although the intensity of research on coastal and near-coastal records is greater than in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve Dewar. Elizabeth Niespolo. Mike Morley. Judith Sealy. Brian Stewart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at Spitzkloof A Rockshelter, northern Namaqualand, South Africa, identified a deep stratified sequence with pulsed occupation dating to the Last Glacial Maximum (23–17 kcal. BP) and Marine Isotope Stage 3 (>51 ka BP), while the lowest layers are candidates for U-series dating. Importantly, this period encompasses a time of marked climate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Olszewski. Brenda Baker.

Later Stone Age (LSA) foragers in the Middle Nile Valley had relatively mobile lifeways that included use of pottery. Distinguishing LSA from Neolithic ceramics is difficult due to continuity in styles, an issue that extends to lithic assemblages. Lunate microliths and scaled pieces and use of flint and quartz as main lithic raw materials span both periods. We examine the lithic assemblage at ASU 09-02, a LSA site in the 4th Cataract region of northern Sudan. Situated on a terrace north of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only V Roux.

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...

DATASET Jay Stephens.

Lead isotopic data for archaeological samples analyzed during the course of this project.

DATASET Jay Stephens.

Lead isotopic data for geological samples analyzed during the course of this project.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valery Terwilliger. Marilyn Fogel. W. Paul Adderley. Zewdu Eshetu. A. Catherine D'Andrea.

Home to Aksum and other highly-developed polities, the Tigrai Plateau is a leading contender for sub-Saharan Africa's richest center of ancient state formation. This and its susceptibility to environmental (climate and land cover) variation make the region compelling for evaluating whether environmental changes affected the trajectories of polities. Soils exposed by gullying are the longest continuous archives of environmental proxies in the region. Many proxies are affected by both climate and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ingrid Herbich.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Levi Raskin. Jonathan Reeves. Matthew Douglass. David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variation in lithics has been used as a mechanism to infer diachronic aspects of hominin behavior. The emergence of the Acheulean industry is considered a major milestone in the evolution of hominin cognition. This perspective is predicated on the idea that Acheulean large cutting tools (LCTs) require mental templates imposed through knapping and that LCTs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bram Tucker.

This is an abstract from the "Three Sides of a Career: Papers in Honor of Robert L. Kelly" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One way to view the twentieth-century history of hunter-gatherer studies is as a long attempt to evaluate Victorian notions of foragers as primitive relics with actual data from real foraging peoples. This history came to a fiery climax during the Kalahari history debate of the 1990s, when researchers argued whether...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Rose.

Ancient Egypt is characterized as a highly centralized and dominating state. However, following the disintegration of the New Kingdom in the 11th century BC, division of state and conquests by foreign rulers ushered in a period of economic decline and political instability. The fracturing of dominion continued until the 8th century BC, when the Nubian kingdom of Kush unified Upper and Lower Egypt into the geographically largest empire since the New Kingdom. The Nubian pharaohs began...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Ranhorn. David R. Braun. Francys Subiaul. Alison Brooks.

The ability to transmit cultural information with high-fidelity across generations is a defining trait of modern humans. It is unclear, however, how and when this adaptation emerged in the human lineage. The earliest forms of human technology—stone artifacts—required knappers to understand raw material mechanics, as well as geometry (volume reduction, angles), and physics. Thus, it is often assumed that the spread of lithic technologies involved some degree of information transmission. However,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Albino Jopela.

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This book analyses the politics of memorialization of the struggle for independence in postcolonial southern Africa with special reference to Mozambique. The aim is to scrutinise the different ways in which liberation heritage discourse is used and mobilised to construct a range of socioeconomic and political values in the southern African. The book illustrates how the recent heritagization...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Steele. Alex Mackay. Mareike Stahlschmidt.

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. Varsche Rivier (VR) 003 is located in the Knersvlakte, the quartz-gravel plains of southern Namaqualand, South Africa. While currently a marginal, low-rainfall region within the Succulent Karoo Biome, conditions were more favorable during the Late Pleistocene....