Glorioso Islands (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
301-325 (510 Records)
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...
Mining and metallurgy in Negro Africa (1937)
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...
(Mis-) Reading Land: Early Portuguese Settlement on Cape Verde (2017)
This paper considers the early Portuguese settlement on Santiago Island, Cape Verde. Particularly focussing upon the towns of Cidade Velha and Alcatrazes, their immediate topographic settings clearly contributed to the long-term success of the former and the failure of the latter. Nonetheless, the results of a decade of excavation at Cidade Velha demonstrates how long it took for the colonisers to actually understand the landscape’s environmental dynamics, especially the impact of seasonal...
Mochena Borago Rockshelter and the Southwest Ethiopian Highlands as a Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Refugium: The Current State of Research (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. One of the long-term goals of the Southwest Ethiopia Archaeological Project (SWEAP) is to test the hypothesis that the SW Ethiopian highlands were a major refugium for plants, animals, and hunter-gatherer groups during the very arid periods of MIS 4 (~72-59 ka) and MIS 2 (~27-12 ka). In highland Wolaita, SW Ethiopia,...
A Model of the Extinct Palaeo-Agulhas Plain Ecosystem in Southernmost Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike some regions, Africa was not subject to massive and abrupt mammalian extinction events in the Late Quaternary, but some African regions were subject to abrupt extinctions of small numbers of species. The coast of South Africa records such an extinction event near the Pleistocene and Holocene boundary. These extinct species were all adapted to...
Modeling Human-Environment Interaction in Sub-Saharan Africa: Archaeological Data, Ecological Questions (2017)
The African Iron Age transition is characterized by a shift from nomadic hunting and gathering societies to food-production, ferrous metallurgy, and centralized states and empires across most of the continent. Because of the magnitude and persistence of the change, understanding the African Iron Age is critical for assessing the present state and potential future of Africa’s ecosystems. Because the transition occurred episodically and at different times in different regions, and because large...
Modeling Mobility and Lithic Raw Material Transport in the Late Pleistocene along the Southern Coast of South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how hunter-gatherer groups move around the landscape is essential for answering questions about human behavioral ecology and evolution of the social landscape. Lithic raw material proveniencing sheds light on how far people in the past were traveling for toolstone and...
Molecular Starch Degradation and Their Fingerprints: Insights from Modern African Taxa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient starch analysis is a controversial technique, as the polymer’s chemical survivability over long periods of time is not understood. Our objectives are to establish the molecular composition of starch granules from sub-Saharan taxa of ethnobotanical relevance subjected to diagenetic processes, and to determine if these byproducts have diagnostic...
More Than Just Pretty Things: Taphonomic and Behavioral Observations from the Unworked Ostrich Eggshell Assemblage Recovered from Grassridge Rockshelter, South Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Grassridge Rockshelter demonstrates one of the largest assemblages of ostrich eggshell beads and preforms in southern Africa that dates to the mid-Holocene. The site, located in the interior of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, therefore reflects an intensive use of ostrich eggshell as a raw material source for the production of...
Morphometric Comparison of Early Hominin Butchery Evidence to Carnivore Modifications within a Bayesian Framework (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence of stone tool use for butchery by early hominins is a contested topic due to the rarity of early tool evidence. In the absence of tools, the primary trace evidence for their use as butchery implements is bone surface modifications (BSM). However, current BSM recognition protocols are subjective. They can lead to conflicting identifications—for example,...
Mortuary Variability and Identity Upstream of the Fourth Cataract (2017)
Fieldwork upstream of the Fourth Cataract in northern Sudan reveals substantial variation in mortuary practices among roughly contemporaneous sites on both local and regional levels. Cemeteries in the Bioarchaeology of Nubia Expedition (BONE) concession on the right (north) bank of the Nile River near el-Qinefab include intervisible clusters of graves from the Kerma period (c. 2500-1500 BC) and into the subsequent period of Egyptian colonization of Nubia. These sites constitute a mortuary...
Moving Words: Malagasy Slam Poetry at the Intersection of Performance, Politics, and Transnational Circulation (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2014)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Initial findings suggest that recent developments in who can speak and what can be said in kabary (Malagasy oratory) show that the form does not, as has been suggested, solely serve to rigidify social hierarchies; it is also a means of reflecting and improving current realities. Nonetheless, a critical component of kabary remains substantiating one's claims by referring to the razana...
Mozambican Maritime Landscapes of Slaving and Exchange: New Directions (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. This paper focuses on ongoing and emergent archaeological investigations that are opening new vistas on Mozambique Island’s global maritime interactions over the last millennium. Providing a brief overview of the program of collaboration between the Slave Wrecks Project and Eduardo Mondlane University that...
The Msikaba Red Sand Dunes: Middle Pleistocene Lithic Technological Variability in Pondoland, South Africa (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. The Msikaba Red Sand Dunes along South Africa's Pondoland coast are a recently discovered open-air site complex that documents Middle Pleistocene lithic technological and morphological change. The deposit comprises ancient dune surfaces stacked over time with repeated sea-level highstand events. Initial excavations and...
Multiple functions for an assemblage of Middle Stone Age Points: Use-Wear Evidence from Magubike Rockshelter, Tanzania. (2017)
Preliminary lithic use-wear evidence from Magubike Rockshelter, Tanzania, suggests a mixed function for an assemblage of Middle Stone Age points, including a possible projectile point role. The development of hafted hunting weapons during the Middle Stone Age is thought to have marked a major juncture in human behavioural evolution. Not only did the emergence of this technology likely have a major impact on the foraging strategies of hunting and gathering populations, many have speculated that...
Multispectral Satellite Imagery for Mapping, Modeling, and Interpreting the Archaeological Landscape of Bandafassi, Senegal (2018)
The Bandafassi Plateau of southeastern Senegal today defines a landscape in which ethnic identities (Bedik, Peul, and Malinke) appear to be grounded in "traditional" patterns of settlement and land use, and yet oral histories speak largely of movement at multiple scales—from the fission and fusion of villages, to the migrations of hunters and merchants, to the arrival of foreign invaders and colonial powers. Seeking to better chart the interplay between natural environment and social history...
Métallurgies Africaines (1983)
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...
Namib IV: Assessing Acheulean Technology in Relation to Depositional Processes in an Arid Landscape (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Namib IV is an Earlier and Middle Stone Age interdunal pan site in the Namib Desert’s Sand Sea. New investigations of the this hyper-arid landscape are piecing together the hominin occupations in relation to dry/wet climatic cycles. Hominins at Namib IV occupied the site multiple times...
Narabeb Pan: Exploring Middle Stone Age Archaeology of the Namib Sand Sea (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The vast Sand Sea region of the Namib desert in western Namibia has begun to yield evidence of long-term human occupations. In the past decades, several Early Stone Age (ESA) sites have been identified and described but the Middle Stone Age (MSA) human presence remains poorly understood. Here we describe in detail the newly documented site of Narabeb Pan,...
Neotaphonomy of a "Common Amenity" on the Grasslands of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying the variables that influence the deposition, preservation, and spatial distribution of faunal material across landscapes remains a key goal of taphonomic research. Here, we report on the results of pedestrian surveys for faunal material around a seasonal waterhole surrounded by woodland within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA). All visible...
Network Approaches to Cosmopolitanism in Ancient Ethiopia (50-700 AD) (2017)
This paper looks at how ideas of cosmopolitanism can be applied to the African context using Aksum (50-700 AD) in northern Ethiopia as case study. While there is much interest in issues of cosmopolitanism, or the making of a "world citizen" or a "world community" as drawn from 18th-19th century conceptualizations, such issues become difficult to study on the African continent given the strong emphasis on personhoods configured around local, corporate contexts. Burial practices from ancient Aksum...
A Neurobiological Explanation for Spheroids as Embodied Cognition (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spheroids (i.e., intentionally shaped or gathered round rocks) first appeared about 1.8 million years ago. Sahnouni et al. (1997) proposed that they were by-products from core reduction knapping. Walker (2008) concluded they served as evidence of modern-like behavior in a belief system. Wilson et al. (2016) viewed them as throwing-affordances for killing...
New Excavations at Border Cave: Preliminary Reflections on Stratigraphy and Site Formation Processes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Border Cave rock shelter, formed in Early Jurassic fragmental rocks of the Jozini Formation on the western scarp of the Lebombo Mountains, KwaZulu-Natal, has a long history of archaeological investigation starting with Raymond Dart in 1934. Phases of informal and formal excavations have yielded remarkable archaeological assemblages including five hominin...
New Neighbors/Nearest Neighbors: Slavery, Displacement, and Belonging Along the West African Coast (2019)
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. During the Atlantic Period, Kingdoms along the West African Coast swelled as traders, emissaries, and famers moved to palatial capitals. As these groups freely poured into West African cities, African kings added war captives and enslaved individuals to the urban mix. Elite Africans were reliant on enslaved and attached...