Republic of Sierra Leone (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
176-200 (436 Records)
The Agulhas Bank Paleoscape (ABP), a broad coastal plain that is now a submerged continental shelf off the south coast of Africa, would have presented early modern humans with a variety of potential foraging options. A rich Middle Stone Age record documents the presence of early coastal foragers as well as terrestrial hunter-gatherers in the ABP. At Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1, both strategies are represented in a sequence spanning the end of the Middle Stone Age (about 40 ka) through to the end...
Herder land use and nutrient hotspots in southern Kenya: geochemical analysis of anthropogenic soil enrichment. (2017)
Mobile herding societies are often considered to leave behind few traces in the archaeological record, however pastoral settlements may have helped shape the broader landscape. Herders relying on domesticated cattle, sheep and goat arrived in the most productive grasslands of East Africa >3600 calBP years ago. Our collaborative research investigates the legacies of their land-use through geoarchaeological analyses. We present results of analyses of five Pastoral Neolithic era archaeological...
Heritage Pragmatics: Problems and Opportunities in Pursuing Decolonization (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Tuck and Yang remind us (2012). What does this call to action mean for heritage studies? This paper explores attempts at decolonizing cultural heritage management and research. First, tracing the ways coloniality has continued to influence management practices in Rwanda, the...
Het gebruik van vuur bij Bosjesmannen (1990)
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...
HISTORICAL ECOLOGY OF TIV MIGRATION AND CONFLICTS IN THE BENUE VALLEY OF NIGERIA: IMPLICATIONS FOR FOOD SECURITY. (2017)
When the Tiv, a Bantu language speaking group migrated into the Benue Valley of Nigeria from southwestern Cameroon over five hundred years ago, they faced hostilities from different groups in the valley. Hilltops readily served as important settlement locales to protect the Tiv from violence and conflict. As they migrated from one hilltop to another they eventually settled over much of the Middle Benue Valley. Archaeological research in the valley has investigated these ancient hilltop sites...
Historical Ecology: An Approach to the Investigation of Ancient Human-Environmental Interactions in the Horn of Africa (2017)
Recent archaeological survey, excavation, ethnoarchaeological and palaeoenvironmental research conducted in northeastern Tigrai by the Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) has produced new insights into the Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite periods (>800 BCE-CE 700). The principal ETAP excavations thus far include the Pre-Aksumite site of Mezber (1600 BCE-1CE) and Ona Adi (c. early 1st millennium CE) which was inhabited during the Pre-Aksumite to Aksumite transition. Both sites were occupied...
Hominin land use of and movement in the Koobi Fora Formation (Kenya) (2017)
The occurrence of large densities of lithic and fossil material in Early Pleistocene contexts have been the focus of much interest. Several hypotheses modeling hominin foraging strategies have been generated to explain their formation. Assemblage formation is often hypothesized to be the result of particular land use strategies that relate to the movement and discard of stone artifacts. These hypotheses are difficult to test because they rely on ethnographic models of human movement, yet they...
How Grassroots Initiatives Preserve and Protect Tunisian Cultural Heritage (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Medina of Tunis is an ancient Islamic city and a UNESCO World Heritage site. However, it is in a vulnerable state, with many historic palaces, ancient dwellings, and monuments confronting neglect, leading to an alarming rate of deterioration. In 2021, an independent ethnographic research study was conducted in the Medina of Tunis in collaboration with...
Human Agency and Theory in West Africa: Understanding Early Forest Agriculture Dynamics during the Neolithic (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. Despite the fact that the need to study early indigenous agricultural systems in Africa has long been recognized and reaffirmed in recent archaeological discussions, African agricultural practices are still being modeled using concepts, terminologies, questions, lines of evidence, and methods derived from research elsewhere in...
Human and Animal Foodways on the Afar Salt Route, North Ethiopia (2018)
Caravans form an important component of ancient trade routes world-wide. They were lifelines to settlements and connected diverse landscapes. They also encouraged complex transport networks. Our understanding of ancient ways of life along these trade routes is, however, hampered by an incomplete picture of the participants or caravaners themselves. This study uses quantitative and qualitative data from ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research on the Afar salt caravan route in northern...
The Human Experience of Social Transformations 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. Archaeologists and other scholars have long studied the causes of collapse and other major social transformations and debated how they can be understood. This paper instead focuses on the human experience of living through those transformations, analyzing 18 transformation cases from the North Atlantic and the US Southwest....
Human Interment and Making Memory in Viking Age 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. Over 300 Viking Age (AD 871–1000) human interments are known from Iceland, many with accompanying dogs and horses. Though these interments are similar to those of elites in Scandinavia, inhumation burial in Iceland apparently served a different purpose — to demarcate boundaries in a landscape devoid of...
Human Landscape Modification and Environmental Change in the Western Kenyan Highlands (2017)
Interpretive challenges involving issues of equifinality and causation can chronically hamper environmental reconstruction efforts, as numerous physical, environmental, or anthropogenic processes may potentially be responsible for creating observed raw data patterns. Nested multi- proxy and multiscalar analyses offer potential means of approaching these difficult conceptual issues which can plague interpretations reliant on single lines of proxy evidence. A dataset comprised of multiple...
Hunters in transition: Mesolithic societies of temperate Eurasia and their transition to farming (1986)
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...
An Ideology of Blood at the Root of Symbolic Culture (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At ~160ka, roughly at the end of our African speciation, archaeologists identify a change from sporadic to habitual use of red ochre. This has been interpreted as primarily a pigment for decorating performers’ bodies during...
Imagined Forests: Woodlands and Wood Resources in Medieval Icelandic Literary, Documentary and Archaeological Sources (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. Medieval literary sources describe the Icelandic landscape when the first settlers arrived as ‘forested from the mountains to the shores’. It had previously been thought that the island was rapidly deforested after settlement, but recent research gives a much more nuanced picture of woodland history. It...
Imagining Kotið: Artistic Visualization as Archaeological Practice (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Small Dwellings on the Viking Frontier: New Research from Kotið, North Iceland" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster offers an artistic visualization of the Viking Age dwelling at Kotið, North Iceland. Based on geospatial data and photogrammetry collected in 2022 and 2023, the rendering demonstrates how this structure differs from previously excavated turf dwellings in Viking Age Iceland. Its small size,...
The impact of experience and flake attributes on carcass processing time and efficiency during actualistic Early Stone Age butchery (2017)
Actualistic butchery often investigates the relationship between tool characteristics and butchery behavior but rarely considers individuals’ butchery skill. Therefore idiosyncratic behavioral differences may confound analyses of butchery time or efficiency. Here, two novice butchers used replicated Oldowan flakes on 40 domestic goat limbs to examine how tool attributes affected processing time and efficiency during defleshing and disarticulation, and whether a learning curve impacted butchery...
Impact of Prehistoric Cooking on Proxy Signatures in Shell Midden Constituents (2017)
The analysis of geochemical proxies in skeletal remains has become a standard tool in shell midden research. Sub-seasonally resolved proxy records provide information about environmental and anthropological aspects such as ancient climate conditions, fishing and foraging seasonality or site occupation pattern. However, as subsistence was the primary purpose for fishing activities in most prehistoric cultures, it is likely that many shell midden constituents were subjected to processing methods...
Imperial Mixtures and Paradoxes of Government in Colonial Senegal (2018)
This paper examines the travails of colonial government in Senegal, looking specifically at material histories in the rural region of Siin. One tenet of French colonial policy was to govern through the operation of commerce, specifically through the infrastructure of cash-cropping. If peanut agriculture would, in principle, create both wealth for the colony and ‘African subjects,’ on the ground, peanuts combined with a web of material entities that bent, diverted, or interrupted the flow of...
Implications of Ostrich Eggshell Diagenesis Experiments and Observations for Isoscape Analyses (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ostrich eggshell (OES) is widely used for environmental reconstruction with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen isotopes, and radiocarbon dating. Strontium isotope ratios of OES artifacts can be used to reconstruct object biography, human mobility, and interaction networks. OES can provide an isotopic baseline for reconstructing past environments and provenience of...
The Importance of Specialized Use Sites in the Settlement History of Iceland (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Climate and Heritage in the North Atlantic: Burning Libraries" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sandvík, located in the Westfjords of Iceland, seems to have been a seasonally utilized site focused primarily on winter fishing and fish processing. The site is situated directly on the coast, quite near to the main farm of Bær, and dates to very early in the settlement period of Iceland, which began around AD 877. Even...
In Search of King Tona’s Palace: The Politics of Archaeology and Memory in Southern Ethiopia (2017)
In 1896 Emperor Menelik II of Abyssinia engaged in one of the bloodiest battles of his military campaigns, attempting to unseat King Tona of Wolaita. After two weeks of fighting, King Tona was captured and the royal court devastated. The last palace of the Wolaita Kingdom stood in Dalbo just 10 kilometers northeast of the current city of Soddo. While the general location of King Tona’s palace is known, contesting narratives situate the exact location at different sites. This paper reports on...
Indigenous Hermeneutics and the Contribution of Africa to Skyscape Archaeology (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. Since the discoveries of the astronomical orientation of Stonehenge in the 1960s, several scholarships have employed skyscape archaeology to answer questions about state formation and consolidation of complex societies. The majority of these works have focused outside Africa, particularly on cultures in Latin America, China,...
Initial Results from Magnetometer Survey at the Sacred Site of Dakajalan, Mali (2018)
In the spring of 2017 geophysical remote sensing surveys were conducted across three locations at and around the Dakajalan sacred site, Commune Rurale de Sanankoroba, Mali in order to detect anomalies associated with archaeological features. This site has been described in oral tradition as the location where the battle that proceeded the formation of the Mali Empire took place, and also where the village that acted as the first capital of the newly formed empire was located. Surface survey of...