Republic of Rwanda (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

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...

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 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...

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 Michael Ziegler. Shannon Warren. Ssebuyungo Christopher. Silindokuhle Mavuso. Kathryn Ranhorn.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Malkia Okech.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Futures through a Virtual Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. African Digital Heritage (ADH) is a Nairobi-based nonprofit organization working to encourage a more critical, holistic, and knowledge-based approach to digital solutions within African heritage. Through this, we hope to cement the place of African culture in an era of rapidly changing technologies and endless frontiers. Our focus areas are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Fregel. Sara Armas-Quintana. Clara Díaz-Pérez. Javier Serrano. Alejandra Ordóñez.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liza Gijanto.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Reilly. Caree Banton.

"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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mensah Abrampah.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Brooks. John Yellen.

While interest in the role of social learning in the Paleolithic has focused extensively on stone artifacts, very little attention has been paid to social learning in living forager populations. In this paper we report on many years of fieldwork among the Jun/wasi of northwestern Botswana and Namibia. We argue that most cultural transmission in relation to domains such as technology, language and food acquisition was informal, and was acquired in the context of close daily relationships between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmel Schrire.

A central imperative in historical archaeology is to produce original information and insights that cannot be derived from historical records. Sophisticated analyses of slave burials that combine the physical elements of burial grounds, coffins, and grave goods, with the biology and chemical signatures of the human remains, can identify and source first-generation slaves, and help to infer the social bonds reflected in their burial. Orlando Patterson has defined slavery as "social death" to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Biddle. Umazi Munga. David Braun. Olivia Weibe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans are distinct in their ability to transfer information between individuals with remarkable fidelity. Although this feature defines our lineage, the antiquity of this distinction is not well known. This is due to difficulties in deciphering levels of information transfer in Paleolithic assemblages. Recently, several new techniques were developed to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Douglass. Tanambelo Rasolondrainy.

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore the role of social memory in facilitating human survival within the dynamic landscape of southwest Madagascar. By analyzing an oral history archive compiled through interviews with over 100 knowledge holders in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area, we address questions about human adaptation to climate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodore Marks.

This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Basalts and dolomites, associated with the Etendeka Large Igneous Province (ELIP), in northwestern Namibia, often make up the bulk of lithic raw materials present in archaeological assemblages from the region. Different igneous formations within the ELIP can readily be distinguished...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodore Marks. Grant McCall. James Enloe. Andrew Schroll. James McGrath.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott MacEachern.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ella Beaudoin. David R. Braun. Jonathan Reeves.

Despite more than a century of scholarship, our knowledge about the use of stone artifacts remains relatively sparse. Major advances in the analysis of microscopic wear have been the primary focus of much previous research. However, post-depositional processes and the logistics of microscopic analysis limit sample sizes in these studies. New approaches that quantify macroscopic damage patterns on the assemblage scale provide a robust basis for drawing behavioral inferences about hominin tool...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Louise Iles.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sen You. Long Wang. John Olsen. Ying Guan. Quanchao Zhang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has long been a vital link between Europe and eastern Asia. In the past, understanding prehistoric diets in Xinjiang was based mainly on carbonized plant remains unearthed from archaeological sites and isotopic analyses of excavated human bones. Here, we report on our analysis of human dental residues preserved on...