Republic of Rwanda (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Kissel.

Discerning what makes Homo sapiens distinctive among the rest of the species on the planet has been a difficult task. One suggestion has been our use of symbolic culture, the use and transmission of symbols intergenerationally. There is much discussion, however, about who the first ‘symbol users’ were, partly due to debates as to what actually makes something ‘symbolic.’ In this paper, I discus how anthropologists first came to use symbol as the sine qua non of modern human behavior. Then, using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Pawlowicz.

From its inception in 2014, the Bantu Mobility Project has sought to recover the various mobilities that made up peoples’ experience of the Bantu Expansions, the spread of over 500 related languages across nearly half the African continent. We have sought to refocus research on the Bantu Expansions away from the macro-scale and onto the specific movements of people, animals, and material goods at various spatial and temporal scales. From an archaeological standpoint this effort necessitates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Porter. Maryse Biernat. W. Andrew Barr. David Patterson. David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the numerous hominin fossils found in the Omo-Turkana Basin dating to between 2.0 and 1.4 Ma., a resolved understanding of their dietary ecology has been challenging due to limited research on similar patterns in contemporaneous large mammals In this study, we use a sample (n = 390) of enamel δ13C values of six Bovidae, Suidae, and Equidae taxa as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J Oliver.

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 Katherine Woolard. Briana Pobiner.

Evidence for hominin meat acquisition in the form of butchery marks on fossil animal bones dates back to at least 2.6 million years ago. With this new dietary behavior came competition between hominins and large carnivores for animal carcasses. Identifying which carnivores hominins were interacting with would allow various models of the timing and sequence of hominin and carnivore carcass to be evaluated. However, many studies of carnivore tooth marking and damage patterns are conducted with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Skosey-LaLonde. Jonathan Reeves. Matt Douglass. David Braun. Emmanuel Ndiema.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any inference of behavior based upon the spatial distribution of archaeological material requires an understanding of site formation processes. Natural agents, such as water flow, may be responsible for post-depositional alteration of buried materials and can result in spatial patterns which mask the behavioral processes associated with the initial deposition...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mareike C. Stahlschmidt. Christopher Miller. Susan M. Mentzer.

This is an abstract from the "Charred Organic Matter in the Archaeological Sedimentary Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Middle and Later Stone caves and rockshelters in South Africa are commonly rich in organic matter. The formation history of the organic component in the archaeological deposits is still unclear and several natural and anthropogenic processes can be considered. This paper will focus on a discussion of possible anthropogenic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Stewart. Genevieve Dewar.

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 roots of long-distance social networking run deeper than Facebook. At some point in the Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers began exchanging ‘non-utilitarian’ artifacts like beads and other ornaments over hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of kilometers. Among ethnographically documented foragers these networks...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yadi Wen.

This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since Wu Da-cheng’s Catalogue of Ancient Jades in the Qing Period, research of Chinese jades has largely focused on analyses of their social and ritual significances. In latter half of the 20th century, excavations in Liangzhu, Hongshan, and Xinglongwa culture sites discovered many prehistoric jades. These important discoveries...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Mentzer. Bertrand Ligouis. Christoph Berthold. Christopher Miller. Sarah Wurz.

This is an abstract from the "Charred Organic Matter in the Archaeological Sedimentary Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several South African Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites contain deposits rich in anthropogenic materials whose preservation was impacted by extreme burial environments. The specific chemistries of the burial environments are evidenced by dissolution of archaeological materials and/or precipitation of secondary minerals. In sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abagail Breidenstein. Geoff Emberling. Abigail Bouwman. Frank Ruehli. Abigail Bigham.

The Nubian site of el-Kurru (modern Sudan) lies along the Nile River about 140 km upstream of Old Dongola, the capital of the Medieval Christian kingdom of Makuria. In 2015-2016, a cemetery adjacent to the settlement was excavated, containing 26 skeletons. Here, I will present current bioarchaeological work on these individuals. Biological profiles were developed, including sex and age ranges, health markers evaluated, and indicators of pathology and trauma identified. Those interred span all...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard A Krause.

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 Chapurukha Kusimba.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Complex city-states arose on the East African Coast that were hubs of international trade networks. However, by the seventeenth century, most of these settlements had been abandoned. What were the causes of the Swahili state collapse? Historians and archaeologists have implicated climate change as one of the causal factors in the collapse of highly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorenzo Castellano. Roderick Campbell. Yitzchak Jaffe.

In the last two decades, climatic narratives have returned as a central issue in archaeological discourse. The field has been flooded with publications on paleoclimatic reconstructions and we believe it is time for a critical evaluation – both as means of seeking better science, and for building better archaeological narratives. Climate history is composed by an overlapping meshwork of long-standing trends, punctuated events and short-term phases, with impacts ranging from the local to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Haines.

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. This paper examines changes in settlement patterns in Mauritius over the seventeenth through twentieth centuries and the ways these landscapes are remembered on the island today. I emphasize agro-industrial landscapes as a specific cultural mode of land use and as a spatial phenomenon that has come to define so much of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Stahl.

This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funded by a Canadian SSHRC-funded partnership development grant, our working group of collaborators is engaged in training and capacity building in digital heritage methods in Ghana. Project aims include fostering a community of practice inclusive of archaeologists, heritage practitioners, students...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erich Fisher. Hayley Cawthra. Irene Esteban. Justin Pargeter.

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 P5 Project is an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers studying hunter-gatherer adaptations in persistent coastal contexts in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Since 2015, excavations at the site of Waterfall Bluff (A2SE-1) have revealed stratified and well-preserved remains of coastal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Ellrich.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last decade, heritage research in Kagera Region of NW Tanzania has responded to community-driven initiatives focused on preservation, tourism, and museum development. This attention to heritage-related programs has fostered several projects that continue to enhance our understanding of appropriate methods for preserving local and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James McGrath.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the results of recent colorimetric analyses of the archaeological ochres from Pinnacle Point 5-6 (PP5-6), Western Cape Province, South Africa. Ochre colors are derived from digital photographs of streak plates and quantified in CIE L*a*b* color space. Results presented here indicate that the vast majority of ochres from this site produce...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Buckley. Manasij Pal Chowdhury. Fabienne Pigiere. Jessica Smyth. Cheryl Makarewicz.

This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Proteomic techniques are being increasingly used in bioarchaeological applications to improve understanding of the human past. However, few studies have focused on the study of tooth enamel for sexing in archaeofaunal remains despite initial studies over a decade ago looking at human teeth. Here we use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Biittner.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions with Pseudoarchaeology: Approaches to the Use of Social Media and the Internet for Correcting Misconceptions of Archaeology in Virtual Spaces" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are frequently represented in comic books as caricatures, where adventure and profit are exaggerated and the interpretation of finds is oversimplified. In this paper it is argued that these misrepresentations of how and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Grillo. Mary Prendergast. Agness Gidna. Audax Mabulla. Daniel Contreras.

This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household organization has been a topic of relatively little archaeological discussion in the Pastoral Neolithic (PN) literature for eastern Africa, in part because domestic architecture has rarely been found. Scholarly literature has therefore focused on pastoralists’ putative mobility, rather than on their settlements. However,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Fitton.

The Swahili of East Africa are regarded historically as a maritime culture, whose coastal sailing networks and prosperous Indian Ocean trade connections can be dated back to at least the 7th century CE. Archaeological investigations have demonstrated that maritime elements were deliberately embedded in the architecture of the famous second millennium Swahili stonetowns, but a focus on urban areas has sometimes been at the expense of areas of potential maritime infrastructure within settlements,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Buzon. Sarah Schrader.

Tombos, located at the Third Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, was established as an Egyptian colonial site in Nubia during the New Kingdom period. Burials provide evidence for high level Egyptian administrators and support staff as well as local community members. Previous investigations of the Tombos remains have indicated that individuals buried at Tombos participated in relatively low levels of strenuous physical activities, indicative of roles such as administrators, scribes, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akshay Sarathi. Laure Dussubieux. Jonathan Walz.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unguja Ukuu (sixth–eleventh cenuries CE) and Kizimkazi Dimbani (twelfth century CE) are early trading sites on Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania in eastern Africa. Here we investigate patterns of glass bead trade at these sites, examining continuities and change between sites and over time. Glass bead samples from...