Republic of Sierra Leone (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
226-250 (436 Records)
The ability to transmit cultural information with high-fidelity across generations is a defining trait of modern humans. It is unclear, however, how and when this adaptation emerged in the human lineage. The earliest forms of human technology—stone artifacts—required knappers to understand raw material mechanics, as well as geometry (volume reduction, angles), and physics. Thus, it is often assumed that the spread of lithic technologies involved some degree of information transmission. However,...
Life in times of change – A bioarchaeological perspective on health and living conditions in Upper Nubia in the late 2nd and early 1st millennium BC (2017)
With the end of the Pharaonic Egyptian colonial occupation c. 1070BC and the increasing deterioration of climatic conditions, communities in Upper Nubia faced significant changes, both to the political structure (which may have affected trade networks), and to the agricultural potential of the region (e.g. availability of arable land). This presentation aims to elucidate if, and in what ways, these alterations impacted upon the living conditions of the people in the area, using the skeletal...
Lithic Analysis of GaJj17: a Middle Stone Age Locality in Koobi Fora, northern Kenya (2017)
The Koobi Fora region in eastern Turkana, northern Kenya, is known for its preservation of Plio-Pleistocene hominin fossils. However very little is known about the Middle Stone Age (MSA) from this region. Fossil and genetic evidence suggest modern humans originated in eastern Africa ~200ka, adding to the significance of this time period and region. In 2016, we excavated site GaJj17, an MSA site located in Area 104 of Koobi Fora. Here we present lithic analysis of recovered in situ and surface...
Lithic artifact production at the Large-scale Pharaonic chert quarries of Wadi el-Sheikh, Egypt (2017)
Recent research into quarrying and lithic production in Wadi el-Sheikh, Egypt by the University of Vienna has identified activities extending from the Middle Paleolithic to modern times. These include Middle Paleolithic use of surface materials, Neolithic chert quarrying, Pharaonic gypsum extraction, quarrying and production of groundstone, ochre collection, and small-scale independent modern salt quarrying. However, the most striking activities are the large-scale Pharaonic period chert...
Lithic Miniaturization and Behavioral Variability in Southernmost Africa 18–11 kcal. BP (2018)
Lithic miniaturization, the systematic production of small stone artifacts by controlled fracture, was a pervasive feature of late Pleistocene lithic technology. Smaller toolkits enabled humans to exploit raw materials more efficiently, to produce composite tools more effectively, to reduce a wider range of rocks, and to increase mobility by lightening toolkits. These benefits allowed humans to occupy a wider range of ecological niches. Archaeologists working in southern Africa have long...
Lithic Taphonomy and Digital Hydrogeologic Models: A GIS Based Approach to Understanding the Formational History of Surface Assemblages (2018)
Surface assemblages play an important role in understanding human behavior. However, modern erosional processes—specifically flowing water—can limit the behavioral inferences that can be gained from surface assemblages by transporting materials from their original discard sites. The influence of these processes can be observed in the size distribution and condition of surface lithic assemblages. The topography and geomorphology of the landscape heavily dictates the degree to which fluvial...
The Location for the Origin of Domesticated Sorghum in Africa: A Brief Review of Some Cultures in the Sahara, Nile, and Sahel (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent analyses have established the location for the origin of domesticated sorghum occurring in the far eastern Sahel of Sudan during the fourth millennium BC associated with the Late Neolithic Butana Group. For over a half century, sorghum domestication has been hypothesized as occurring somewhere in the Sahelian...
Longevity and authority in a mobile world the megasites of the Ugandan grasslands (2017)
Much of the recent past of Great Lakes Africa is characterised by short-lived settlements and mobile societies, that produced ephemeral occupation sites. In part because of this, attention has long been drawn to sites like Bigo and Ntuusi which seem to offer much more substantive archaeological remains. Yet, notwithstanding the longevity of the latter and the extent of both, this is clearly not a simple occupation site featuring a large population. Rather it is much more effective to understand...
Luminescence Age Calculation Models, Termites, and Dune History in the Northern Kalahari Desert, Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists often accept optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages with less critical review than those derived from the more commonly used radiocarbon dating methods. This is largely because of an incomplete understanding of optical dating techniques and the modeling assumptions used to calculate these ages....
Macro- and Microscopic Effects of Heating in Lithics: Potential Indicators of Human-Controlled Fire? (2018)
Outside of clear association of human activities and fire features (e.g., a constructed hearth and artifacts), a perennial challenge persists in linking human/hominin behavior to the control of fire. This particularly vexes ongoing investigations to determine early human-fire interaction(s). Although natural landscape fires can be intense, their tendency to move quickly may limit modifications in lithic material at ground level. Studies examining the effect(s) of heating tool-stone at different...
Mai Adrasha and Its Neighbors (2017)
A team from UCLA in cooperation with the Tigrai Culture and Tourism Agency and the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage of Ethiopia has completed two excavation seasons at the site of Mai Adrasha located about 70 kilometers west of the ancient capital of Aksum. With the information gathered in these excavations, we can now begin to compare Mai Adrasha to neighboring sites and place it within its regional framework. Radiocarbon dates from the first season of excavation...
Malaria in the African Indian Ocean Islands: Prospects and Challenges for Biomolecular Archaeology (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. Malaria remains one of the most devastating infectious diseases affecting human populations, with over 200 million cases and 500,000 deaths annually worldwide, most of which focused on the mainlands of sub-Saharan Africa. While malaria is an “old” disease on the mainland dating back tens of thousands of years, its history on...
Man does not go naked: Textilien und Handwerk aus afrikanischen und anderen Ländern; Festschrift für Renée Boser-Sarivaxévanis (1989)
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...
Managing Wooden Resources in Norse Greenland: Using Tree-Rings to Explore Wood Use and Acquisition Strategies in a “Treeless” Environment (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During medieval times, Norse Greenlanders relied heavily on wood for making household items, as a construction material, and as a fuel source. Although the quantity and quality of timber available in local woodlands were limited, Norse craftspeople also had access to driftwood and imported materials. Most studies in the North Atlantic use taxonomic...
Mapping Archaeological Smithing Sites with the Aid of Hammerscale (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. In 2013 and 2017 three major smithing sites in the Bitchabe zone of the Bassar region of northern Togo were mapped with GPS: former Bitchabe, Upper Bidjomambe, and Old Bitchobebe, covering 20.3, 14.5, and 5.4 ha, respectively. The sites were variously occupied from the late seventeenth to...
Mapping MSA Deposits: Regional Geological Investigation of Upper Chari Member Sediments in the Ileret Region, East Turkana, Kenya (2017)
The Ileret region of the Koobi Fora Formation (KF Fm.), located in Kenya’s Turkana Basin, has historically been the focus of extensive archaeological research. Mid-Late Pleistocene units have previously lacked defined sedimentary beds due to an understudied unconformity of the upper Chari Member (1.34 Ma to 10 Ka). This represents a substantial limit to Middle Stone Age (MSA) research. Recent fieldwork (2016) incorporated a geoarchaeological survey of the upper Chari Member. Here we describe and...
The Material Culture of Back-to-Africa: Object Reinvention in the Development of Africa's First Republic (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nineteenth-century Black American and Caribbean settlers of the Back-to-Africa movement to Liberia brought with them a wide variety of objects for building new lives and landscapes for their emancipatory and civilizing mission in West Africa. The migrants arrived to lands already inhabited by people long...
Material elaboration and monumentality: Mortuary beads, pastoralists, and social innovation in northwest Kenya (2017)
Megalithic architecture appeared suddenly in northwest Kenya 5000 years ago in tandem with the earliest pastoralists in the region. As Lake Turkana’s levels dropped, these people built "pillar sites" – massive feats of labor and coordination that represent one of the earliest instances of monumentality in Africa – in a brief explosion of material and architectural elaboration. The burials associated with these pillar sites are highly ornamented, with thousands of beads made from stone, bone, and...
Mauretanian and Roman Settlement Chronology in the Loukkos Valley, Northern Morocco (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological understanding of the chronology of pre-Roman and Roman occupation of northern Morocco has typically been determined by datable materials from large urban sites. We expand the scope to include smaller sites in the Loukkos River Valley near present-day Larache to investigate the understudied lives of rural populations in Roman North Africa....
Measuring performance under sail (2009)
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 Medieval Necropolis of Mouweis (Shendi Area, Sudan): Bioarchaeological Insights (2017)
The site of Mouweis is a Nilotic city of the Meroitic period excavated by the Louvre Museum since 2007. This settlement includes a 1st century AD palace, later destroyed and reduced to a hill-shaped ruin. During the medieval period, a cemetery was created in the demolition level of this palace. Radiocarbon dating reveals a funerary occupation between of the 8th to the 14th century. Burials were mainly individual with a uniform typology and follow the same orientation as the structure of the...
Mende (Westafrika, Sierra Leone) -Herstellung und Inbetriebnahme eines Einbaums (1959)
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...
Microremains on Stone (Tools): Discriminating Function-Related from Natural Residues (2019)
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. Plant microremains from stone tools speak to ancient hominin behaviour if genuinely related to usage. Residues, however, attach to rock surfaces naturally. My objectives are to identify pathways for microremain adherence prior to and after burial; study residue abundance in relation to petrography, microstructure, and...
A Middle and Later Stone Age sequence from Iringa, southern Tanzania (2017)
Magubike rockshelter in the southern Highlands of Tanzania contains a long archaeological sequence ranging from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) through historic times. This paper describes the lithic sequence from test pit 5, which contains a 2.5 m thick cultural deposit composed of recent / historic remains, an Iron Age, a microlithic Later Stone Age (LSA), a macrolithic LSA, a transitional sequence from the MSA to the LSA and 90 cm of MSA artifacts. The later part of the sequence replicates the...
The Middle Stone Age at Gona, Afar, Ethiopia: Implications for Regionalization and Migrations (2019)
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. Tentatively dated to MIS 5/4, the YAS-1 (Ya’alu South 1) site at Gona, Ethiopia is a high-density open-air archaeological site preserving classic Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone tools such as Levallois cores, Nubian cores, points, and blades in addition to a variety of fossil fauna, some with bone modifications including...