Africa (Continent) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Reid.

Humans have inhabited southern Ghanaian forest for millennia, and nearly everywhere there are traces of human activity in the deep past. This paper discusses my integration of satellite remote sensing with traditional archaeological field methods to study longue durée continuity and transformation in both West African societies and the landscape itself. I am consolidating previous survey data and expanding upon them using several methods of archaeological survey and remote sensing with the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Lisa Goddard.

This handout, "Scanning from Slides and Film," is a part of the Improving African Futures Using Lessons from the Past (IAfF) Digital Resource Guides. The digitization process for both film and slides are described along with the pros and cons of scanning these media compared to photographic prints.

DOCUMENT Full-Text Lisa Goddard.

This handout, "Scanning to a Text File," is a part of the Improving African Futures Using Lessons from the Past (IAfF) Digital Resource Guides. Although PDF is a convenient format for reading and sharing textual documents online, there are times when it is most useful to create a fully editable transcription of a document. This guide walks you through the steps on creating a Word document from a paper report. Anytime that you have a paper copy of a document, and you would like to have a digital,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Lisa Goddard.

This handout, "Scanning Unbound Documents," is a part of the Improving African Futures Using Lessons from the Past (IAfF) Digital Resource Guides. Although it is possible to scan printed documents on a photo scanner, it is more convenient to purchase a document scanner if you are going to do a lot of this kind of material. A document scanner is optimized for scanning documents quickly, and it comes with optical character recognition software that can turn an image into editable text. This guide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Tryon. Nick Blegen. J. Tyler Faith.

Among recent groups, foraging activities are unevenly distributed across the landscape. Archaeological traces of past foragers are also spatially variable as a result of multiple factors, including the redundancy of site use, a bias towards tasks that leave well-defined material traces likely to preserve into the present (e.g., stone tool manufacture), and local sedimentological factors that mediate site preservation through burial as well as subsequent recovery through erosion or excavation....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tilman Lenssen-Erz. Brigitte Mathiak. Eymard Faeder. Maya von Czerniewicz. Joana Wilmeroth.

In prehistoric rock art the notion of ‘scene’ always played an important role but a clear and widely accepted definition of scene does not exist and little was written about what constitutes a scene. If informing context lacks, Gestalt features are often taken to identify what can be considered a meaningful scene. If we consider a scene as displaying a social animated configuration, then the Gestalt laws alone are an insufficient tool. Particularly in scenes including humans and animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Hinderling.

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 Yvonne M J Lammers-Keijsers. Rüdiger Kelm. Roeland P Paardekooper. Hana Dohnálková. J. Kateřina Dvořáková.

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 Zoltan Gluck.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My project is a study of Kenya's 'war on terror,' examining how security practices and counterterrorism are affecting urban space and state power. In recent years Kenya has experienced a number of terrorist attacks that have profoundly impacted the country, placing security at the center of national politics and transforming the very institutions of state security. Through historic and...

PROJECT K. Ann Horsburgh.

Photographs in this file relate to the below papers. On the basis of morphological analyses of faunal remains recovered from Sehonghong Rock Shelter, Lesotho, Mitchell et al. (2008) argued that significant numbers of domestic stock were being husbanded by traditionally foraging groups. Nineteen specimens were provided to us for ancient DNA analysis (Horsburgh et al. 2016), and we were able to recover mitochondrial DNA from ten. In only one specimen did the genetic identification of species match...

DOCUMENT Full-Text K. Ann Horsburgh.

Photographs in this file relate to the below papers. On the basis of morphological analyses of faunal remains recovered from Sehonghong Rock Shelter, Lesotho, Mitchell et al. (2008) argued that significant numbers of domestic stock were being husbanded by traditionally foraging groups. Nineteen specimens were provided to us for ancient DNA analysis (Horsburgh et al. 2016), and we were able to recover mitochondrial DNA from ten. In only one specimen did the genetic identification of species match...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Kissel. Agustin Fuentes.

One of the distinctive aspects of human behavior is the ability to think symbolically. However, the ability to track this capacity archaeologically is complicated by debates on what makes an object symbolic. Rather than initially asking if materials are symbols/symbolic, we offer that it may be better to ask if and how they are signs. A more nuanced view of "symbol" in the archaeological record, combined with aspects of Peircean semiotics, can help to bridge the gap between the material record...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Madagascar constitutes a major anomaly in the history of human colonization: 400 km from the African mainland, but with a population whose culture, language, and genes derive substantially from Indonesia, more than 7000 km away. Recently, the argument has gained ground that the island was settled (perhaps from Africa) significantly earlier...

IMAGE Matthew Boulanger. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

These images show the individual sherds from Shaheinab analyzed by neutron activation 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 A K Quarcoo. M Johnson.

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 Hilary Duke. Amy Fox. Andrew Riddle. Sonia Harmand.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The development of ‘shaping’ abilities in hominin lithic technology involved increases in higher-order cognition including forward planning, working memory, and spatial reasoning. Longstanding assumptions engrained in lithic typologies claimed that "Long Core Tools" (LCTs), such as "handaxes", were the earliest shaped lithics....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Said Ennahid. Néjat Brahmi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the recurrent themes of French colonial-period discourse on conducting archaeology in Morocco was the belief that the state and the people had little or no interest in their pre-Islamic past or its material correlates. To explore and deconstruct this theme, we will examine a set of never-before-published archives consisting of 8 firmans (also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Faulkner. Akshay Sarathi.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Zanzibar Archipelago experienced dramatic socioeconomic and socioecological changes over the last 2,000 years in line with the rest of the Swahili Coast. The onset of Iron Age transformations linked to foraging and farming economies, connections via the broader Indian Ocean trade network, through the colonial period and into the present day, together...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Drake Rosenstein.

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. David Killick came to archaeology perhaps earlier in life and almost surely in a more unconventional way than did most of us: at a prestigious, all-boys boarding school in what was then colonial Rhodesia. Student trips to the nearby Matobo Hills, an extraordinary landscape of balancing granite...

IMAGE Matthew Boulanger. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

These images show the individual sherds from Shurafa analyzed by neutron activation 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 Alice Mullen.

Within the corpus of San rock art in the South African Drakensberg mountains is a category of highly embellished, oversized anthropomorphic figures termed Significantly Differentiated Figures (SDFs). Such images have previously been interpreted as San ritual specialists' conceptualisation of themselves, in metaphor, as a result of the arrivals of African farmers and European colonists. This paper, drawing on new data gathered during surveys of the Matatiele region in the Eastern Cape, South...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoë Crossland.

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. In this presentation I explore the ways in which African perspectives on ancestrality can inform archaeological approaches to the past. In historic Madagascar, the works and inheritance of the ancestors were fundamental to the building of political sovereignty, just as they are fundamental to the practice of archaeology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Murray. Jacob Harris. Andrew Zipkin. Nicolas Hansen. Bailey Goodling.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The heat treatment of silcrete is an important technological strategy during the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in South Africa. Heat-treating silcrete improves its quality for tool making and use. Although it is found as early as ~162,000 years ago (ka) at Pinnacle Point 13B, heat-treated silcrete does not become common in South African MSA assemblages until...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Mackay. Sam Lin. Lachlan Kenna. Alex Blackwood.

Heat treatment of silcrete in the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa has been taken to indicate cognitive complexity. This inference is based on the argument that silcretes require well-regulated heating and cooling rates to avoid thermal fracture. Alternative arguments have been made that silcrete can be heat treated with limited control over temperature gradients, and thus that heat treatment may have been a relatively simple process. These apparently contrasting positions elide the fact that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Lewis-Sing. Oscar Moro Abadia. Julia Brenan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, archaeologists have been increasingly interested in ‘places of shame’, i.e. places related to past traumatic, painful, or regrettable human actions. In this paper we argue this concept can be expanded to incorporate sites with negative ecological impact. In particular, the interpretation of places of single-use plastic waste accumulation as...