Africa (Continent) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Jirsa. Tamara Dogandžic. Kathryn L. Ranhorn. David R. Braun.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmen Martin-Ramos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone tool making has proven to be essential in human evolution and evolutionary cognitive archaeology studies (Herzlinger et al. 2017; Martín-Ramos 2022; Martín-Ramos and Steele 2023). In the case of the Acheulean technocomplex, concepts such as innovation, imposition of arbitrary form, and artifact variability have been linked to cognitive traits such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Stark. Robert Mahler. Artur Obluski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the capital of the medieval Kingdom of Makuria, in what is today Sudan, Old Dongola was a central location of administration and culture; Old Dongola was also the seat of a bishopric. Such factors would have made Old Dongola a key location for mobility, with various pull factors from economic, social, and religious, including monastic. Numerous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Moll. Lyn Wadley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At Sibhudu Cave, the Still Bay technocomplex is found ~71,000 years ago and its formal tool component is dominated by bifacial points, while the deposit below, which Wadley (2012) called the pre-Still Bay, has a low density of bifacial points. The Pre-Still Bay has many flakes with few bifacial points, and it dates to between about 74,000 and 80,000 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cézar Sebastião Mahumane.

Following discovery of sea route around the Cape by Vasco da Gama in 1498 that opened the maritime trade between Europe and India, Mozambique Island-which served as capital of Portuguese East Africa from 1507 to 1898-came to play an important role in mediating the maritime interactions that subsequently emerged. The Island’s underwater archaeological heritage that results from this history has been heavily impacted over the last decade by commercial salvage activity as assessed in 2015 by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the Columbian Exchange had a significant impact on local agroecologies, we still know very little about the African side of the exchange. This is particularly complex knot to unravel given that the Atlantic slave trade peaked during those same centuries. Both processes were to have major impacts on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Stephens. David Killick.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Willeke Wendrich.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Stevens.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Futures through a Virtual Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Technologies inspire the creation of new subjectivities - changing our points of perspective and augmenting the ways in which we perceive. Through our ever-expanding applications of innovation, humans recontextualize realities. We use the tools of the present to formulate our visions of the future and our understandings of the past. Along...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Kroot.

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...

IMAGE Matthew Boulanger. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

These images show the individual sherds analyzed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Photographs were taken at LBNL and scanned by the Archaeometry Laboratory at MURR. Individual files were named according to the official catalog numbers of each image assigned by the Graphic Arts Department at LBNL.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul T Nicholson. H L Patterson.

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...

PROJECT Uploaded by: Ann Stahl

The Banda Research Project encompassed archaeological investigations in the Banda area, Bono Region, Ghana from 1982 through 2011. Investigations focused on sites dating to the last two millennia, with a particular focus on how life in the region was shaped by wider inter-regional and inter-continental networks. The project originated in Ann B. Stahl's PhD research (University of California, Berkeley), followed by multiple seasons of survey, site testing and wider excavations at sites dating to...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Uploaded by: Ann Stahl

Field notes from the 2009 Banda Research Project field season at site Banda 13, Banda area, Brong-Ahafo Region, Ghana, consisting of small-scale excavations in two mounds (mounds 1 and 3) Typed transcriptions of field notes are accompanied by traced plan and profile maps. Handwritten notes on original field maps have been transcribed as comments to facilitate their use.

DOCUMENT Full-Text Ann B. Stahl.

This document describes the archaeological activities of the Banda Research Project, which from 1982-2011 investigated sites dating to the last two millennia in the Banda area, Bono Region, Ghana. It summarizes the project’s history and describes general excavation strategies and lab procedures as context for using the excavation field notes and other materials curated in The Digital Archaeological Record’s (tDAR) “Banda Through Time” Collection...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Tritsch.

A striking example of the sophistication of the vitreous materials industry at the time it was produced, a faience bead depicting Tutankhamun drinking from a white lotus chalice possesses tremendous symbolic meaning that reflects the mores of the ancient Egyptian culture of the time. Although a published piece from the Eton College Collection, this is the first time extensive research has been performed on this unprovenanced artifact bought on the antiquities market in the late 1800s. Production...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sabrina Stempfle. Jörg Linstädter. Decio Muianga. Martina Seifert. Nikola Babucic.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016, a research cooperation between the Eduardo Mondlane University and the German Archaeological Institute was started. Since then, this cooperation performed various surveys and geomagnetic prospection and developed with Hamburg University a dedicated research project which this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A C Lawton.

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 Full-Text Erin Torkelson.

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Cash transfer programs are significant, world-making responses to global poverty, made all the more necessary in the time of Covid-19. There has been surprising consensus ? among Silicon Valley techies, World Bank bureaucrats, and lefty academics ? that cash transfers can right the wrongs of top-heavy and inappropriate development interventions by "just giving money to the poor." Cash...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akshay Sarathi.

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. Studies of urbanism in East Africa have tended to focus on the medieval “stone towns” that dot the coast. However, studying these more traditional expressions of urbanism produces an incomplete picture of the settlement patterns of precolonial East Africa. In islands such as Zanzibar, settlement patterns are unique due to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Herta Haselberger.

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 Curtis Marean. Jacob Harris. Jessica Thompson. Kiona Ogle.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Radican. Alejandra May. Jennifer Miller. Jessica C. Thompson. Elizabeth Gomani-Chindebvu.

This is an abstract from the "Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research Consortium Poster Symposium" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Later Stone Age (LSA) bead production is typically reported with ostrich eggshell (OES) as the primary raw material. In south central Africa, land snail shell (LSS) was also used, but most sites have uncertain and poorly dated associations. The Malawi Ancient Lifeways and Peoples Project has now recovered both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcos Leitao De Almeida.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent syntheses incorporating linguistic, archaeological, and paleoclimatic evidence have argued that villages inhabited by Bantu-speaking communities spread from Cameroon to the Lower Congo from about 1200 BCE to 100 BCE. This southward migration was facilitated by an abrupt climatic warming event that expanded...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Arthur.

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...