Republic of Liberia (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
351-375 (432 Records)
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...
Silcretes from Nearby Sources Display Different Responses to Rapid Heating: Implications for Models of Early Human Heat Treatment (2017)
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...
Single-Use Heritage: An Archaeological Approach to Plastic Wastescapes as Places of (Ecological) Shame (2019)
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...
Site Formation Analysis of Middle Stone Age Locality GaJj17 in the Koobi Fora Formation, Northern Kenya (2017)
The Koobi Fora Formation (KF Fm.) of the Turkana Basin in Kenya is comprised of a Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary sequence that has produced unprecedented paleoanthropological discoveries. Previous work in the KF Fm. reported an archaeological locality, GaJj17, exhibiting in situ Middle Stone Age (MSA) material eroding from an indurated sandstone. Understanding the depositional context of this locality required further geologic study as few MSA localities are represented in the KF Fm. This is due...
Slave Trade and Colonialism in African Islands from the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans (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. One key period of history involved the forced migration of millions of people due to slavery. Information on the origins of the enslaved individuals has been reconstructed from historical records and, more recently, through the use of paleogenomic techniques. However, all these ancient DNA studies have been performed on...
Slavery and Colonialism: Selectively Embracing and Erasing the Past in The Gambia (2018)
Banjul was founded in 1816 as part of the British efforts to block the slave trade on the Gambia River. A planned urban center, the city developed around a series of neighborhoods designated as colonial, merchant, and African laborer spaces. Amongst the most prominent settlers were the Aku (Liberated Africans) from Sierra Leone and French traders from Goree who were instrumental in the growth of the colonial economy. The Banjul Heritage Project seeks to highlight contributions of the different...
Slavery and Freedom from the West Indies to West Africa (2018)
"Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you" is a phrase attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre. While the French philosopher was concerned with political freedom rather than freedom in the context of slavery, Sartre’s words offer lessons for analyzing a vast spectrum of how individuals experienced the conditions of slavery and freedom. This paper explores an ambitious project of freedom and future-making initiated by a group of Barbadians one generation after emancipation in the English...
Slavery without Slaves: Archaeology of Frederikssted Plantation and Its Implications for Plantation Archaeology in Ghana (2018)
In 1803, Denmark and Norway abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which took effect on 1st January 1803. However, this did not end slavery itself in Africa. Intensification of cash-crop agriculture on the West African coast by the Danish colonists provoked an upsurge in the local slave trade. As the Danish plantation economy solidified, increasing numbers of enslaved people were engaged to labour in these plantations in Ghana. The research examines the documentary and the archaeological data...
The Socio-economic Dynamics of Iron Production in Viking Age Northern Iceland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SANNA v2.2: Case Studies in the Social Archaeology of the North and North Atlantic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how an agricultural society organized the production of iron and the trade of farming implements allows us to describe how they managed natural resources and non-agricultural activities as a community. In the North Atlantic region known for its ephemeral material culture, slags and other...
Sourcing Lithic Raw Materials in the Namib Desert: Exploring land use and technological organization (2017)
Under a technological organization perspective, archaeologists seek to understand how prehistoric societies organized their activities across landscapes and how variation at individual sites articulates with changes in large scale land use systems. Lithic sourcing offers a powerful tool for testing hypotheses about technological organization and land use, but its application across the globe has, until recently, been hindered by expense and methodological difficulties. In this paper, we use pXRF...
The Span of ‘Slavery’: Considering Systems of Domination and Labour in the Lake Chad Basin (2019)
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. "The kings of the Sudan sell their people for no reason, and quite apart from any wars…" (Ahmad al-Ya’kūbī). The Lake Chad Basin was one of the anchor points of the trans-Saharan slave trade, through the millennium after al-Ya’kūbī wrote about the rulers of Kanem in the 9th century AD. This region had no equivalent to...
The spread of iron metallurgy: the African continent (2017)
Theories of the origin(s) of iron production and the spread of ferrous technology have provoked many decades of lively and enduring debate. The notion that iron production developed in one core location – from where knowledge of it spread – has been challenged by claims of early, independent inventions of iron production in Africa, India and China. However, it has proved problematic to verify the timing and contexts of these multi-origin hypotheses without placing undue emphasis on isolated...
Statistical Evidence For a New Method of Identifying Anthropogenic Fire in the Archaeological Record (2017)
Clarifying evidence for anthropogenic fire in the archaeological record has been subject to contention and vagueness. This uncertainty centers not on evidence for fire, rather what constitutes it being human-controlled. New research pursuing this question suggests that a peculiar angular fragment, termed thermal curved-fractures (TCF), are the byproduct of knapped materials (flakes, cores, bifaces) exposed at length to high heat. We present here results of experiments expanding our...
The Stimuli of Technological Inventions (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. Technology transfer is a popular concept in the studies of pyro-technologies globally. This concept has been used uncritically in discourses on the origins and development of sophisticated technologies in sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of continuous patronage of this inherently derogatory concept in sub-Saharan African archaeology,...
Stone implements: how they were made and used (1950)
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...
Storage, Cooking, and Transport. A Preliminary Residue Analysis of Ceramics from Mai Adrasha (2017)
This paper outlines the preliminary investigation of a collection of diagnostic and undiagnostic ceramics recovered from the site of Mai Adrasha, located in the Shire region of Ethiopia. Mai Adrasha is one of the largest and arguably most significant early town sites west of Aksum dating to the pre-Aksumite to Early Aksumite periods (12th century BCE-2nd century CE) located in the Western Tigray. The site consists of a cemetery and a domestic area characterized by a collection of stone walls and...
‘Stuck like Glue’: A Multi-method Analysis of Hafting Adhesives from Later Stone Age Assemblages in Southern Africa (2017)
The characterization of hafting adhesives, the glue of composite tools, by chemical analysis and microscopy provides a means by which we may evaluate the organic components of technologies. In southern Africa, the well-preserved assemblages of the Later Stone Age (LSA) present a unique opportunity to evaluate the procured raw materials related to tool manufacture, with a focus on the ingredients of these plastic components. This paper presents the findings of a multi-site study of hafting...
A Supplemental Approach: The Influence of Ann Stahl’s Interdisciplinarity to African Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a long history of interdisciplinary research on the precolonial African past, with historians, archaeologists, and historical linguists seeking out and drawing on insights from their allied disciplines. These scholars often seek to integrate different types...
A Survey of Hilltop Settlement in Northern Jos Plateau, Nigeria: A Preliminary Report (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A reconnaissance of Dutsen Kura hill was carried out in June 2022. It is claimed that former occupants of the hill had ancestral links with Dutsen Kongba, a sixth millennium BC Later Stone Age hill settlement located in the same region. In addition, the present-day Bace group living in the plains in Dutsen Kura claims an ancestral link with former...
Sustainable Heritage through Community Engagement and Education (2018)
In addressing the problem of burning libraries, this paper focuses on sustainable heritage through public awareness and civic engagement. Political rhetoric and limited first-hand experience has created a system whereby the impacts of climate change, coastal erosion, and rising sea levels are no longer a priority; and for students, it has become but a distant concern. This paper addresses these problems through education programs designed to (i) get students involved in the archaeology of...
Swahili Agriculture and Power Dynamics in Regional Perspective (2017)
Urbanization along the Swahili coast coincided with an increasing importance of Islam, stone architecture, and materials traded through connections built inland as well as with Indian Ocean merchants. Archaeobotanical data from the town of Chwaka on Pemba Island, Tanzania (AD 1100-1500) suggest that foodways turned towards Asian crops, including rice and legumes, during the urbanization process. Beyond subsistence, crops held political power. Jeffrey Fleisher (2010) has suggested that feasting...
Swandro, Rousay, Orkney: Between Sea and Land (2018)
The site of Swandro is on the eroding coastal fringe of the island of Rousay, Orkney and has been the focus of field training for the next archaeological generation between the University of Bradford, Archaeological Institute UHI and Hunter College, CUNY since 2010. Such sites are a finite resource, endangered by coastal erosion exacerbated by the effects of climate change. The site straddles both the shore and the land and consists of a Neolithic Chambered Cairn and a later settlement dating...
Synthesis of Social-Ecological Change in the North Atlantic and US Southwest (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anna Kerttula had the vision and commitment to support an experiment: two interdisciplinary research teams working in dramatically different settings, striving to find valuable insights from cross-region, cross-case studies. One team from the North Atlantic islands (NABO) and another from the US Southwest (LTVTP) combined...
Systematic Differences in Sieved and Point-Provenienced Fauna Ecofacts from PP5-6, South Africa (2021)
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. In zooarchaeological analysis, there is a tendency to give point-provenienced ecofacts analytical priority over ecofacts found in sieved material. To test for the effects of this bias, we conducted a zooarchaeological and taphonomic analysis of faunal ecofacts (n = 841) found in the 10 mm sieved material from...
Taphonomic and geological approaches to the identification of in situ versus ex situ archaeological material: a case study from BK East, Bed II, Olduvai Gorge (2017)
A variety of post-depositional processes can add to, subtract from, and/or spatially reconfigure archaeological deposits. The challenge for archaeologists, then, is to unravel these processes in order to assess the fidelity with which a given deposit reflects hominin behavior. BK East, an early Pleistocene locality in Olduvai Gorge’s middle/upper Bed II, preserves stone tools, butchered animal bones, and hominin remains. This rich archaeo-paleontological collection rests within an interbedded...