Republic of Rwanda (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (541 Records)
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...
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...
Archaeology and the End of Empire in Nigeria: Learning from the History of Late Colonial Archaeology at Ile-Ife (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the city of Ile-Ife (Nigeria) in 1953, three foreign archaeologists (Bernard Fagg, AJH Goodwin, and William Fagg), with the permission of the Oni of Ife, conducted several months of fieldwork in the old city. With the aim of uncovering evidence relating to Ile-Ife’s early industries (including exquisite brass and terracotta artworks), they...
Archaeology as Storytelling (2017)
The rise of open source publications has increasingly made archaeological research available to wider audiences and yet the knowledge we as archaeologists produce is not always freely accessible or available. It is fully understood within our discipline that archaeological sites have strong connections to the past; that they are embodied spaces and irreplaceable sources of knowledge. However, this view of sites does not always extend to the broader public or to communities with ties to those...
Archaeology by experiment (Japanese translation) (1977)
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...
Archaeology in the Age of the Anthropocene: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (2018)
The 2016 decision by the Working Group on the Anthropocene of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) to designate an Epoch based on a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) fixed at AD1950 is significant for managing global ecological systems moving forward. There is no serious scientific debate on whether humans have impacted the global ecology, but regardless of the ICS decision to anchor the so-called "Golden Spike" to the advent of the nuclear age, humans are known...
An Archaeology of the 'Natural': Historical Landscapes of the Sandawe Homeland, Central Tanzania (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2017)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project will carry out the first archaeological analysis of socio-natural landscapes in the Sandawe homeland of central Tanzania. This project will generate a basic corpus of data for the last 2,000 years of the region, including material culture inventories and chronologies, settlement patterns, and evidence of vegetation and environmental change. Traditionally, scholarship has cast the...
Archaeology, Local History, and Heritage in Limpopo National Park (2021)
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. Over a period of several years (from 2003 to 2018), we carried out interviews on local history in combination with archaeological surveys, vegetation studies, and livelihood assessments in several villages in Limpopo National Park (LNP), southern Mozambique. We present the results of the...
Archaeology, People and Identity in Cape Verde Islands (2018)
The geographical location of Cape Verde islands made them one of most important places in early Portuguese exploration of African coast. The first European settlers were favoured by the Portuguese monarchy in the relations with African coast. Since 1472, they were forced to carry out exchange with local goods. This encouraged the development of cotton and sugarcane crops with slaves from the "Guinea Rivers", as was common in other Atlantic islands and the American colonies. The excavations...
Arqueologia Experimental (translation of ”archaeology by experiment” by TORRINHA, Maria Fernanda) (1976)
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...
The Art of Survival: Mitigating the Impacts of PTSD and Combat Stress through the Manipulation of Moral Status and Identity in the Colonial-Era Rock Art of Southern Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the South African colonial period, settler incursion was met by indigenous resistance, sparking a series of brushfire conflicts. In the borderlands of the colony, “Bushman” bandits conducted an insurgency against colonists, facing as they did so significant traumatic stress. Being horse-borne was part of their identity, as was their association with...
Artifact Density and Population Density in Bronze Age China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A common method of estimating population is to multiply a settlement area by an occupational density. Empirical studies show that occupational density generally increases with settlement size but estimating occupational density when structural remains are not...
An Assemblage-Level Comparison of Silcrete Flake Attributes across Three Methods of Heat Treatment: Preliminary Results from Actualistic Experiments (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic heat treatment technology was utilized as early as ~162,000 years ago at Pinnacle Point in South Africa to improve the quality of silcrete raw material for flaking. Despite its antiquity, we have little understanding of how these early Middle Stone Age humans heat-treated silcrete and why. A primary reason for this is a general lack of proxies for...
Assessing Edge Damage in MSA Lithic Assemblages: Experimental Proxies for the Analysis of Use and Post-Depositional Damage (2017)
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...