Republic of Madagascar (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bailey Goodling. Alicia Fritz. Jingyu Liang. John Murray.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic heat treatment technology was utilized as early as ~162,000 years ago at Pinnacle Point in South Africa to improve the quality of silcrete raw material for flaking. Despite its antiquity, we have little understanding of how these early Middle Stone Age humans heat-treated silcrete and why. A primary reason for this is a general lack of proxies for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Jirsa. Tamara Dogandžic. Kathryn L. Ranhorn. David R. Braun.

Given the low frequency of retouched stone tools in many Middle Stone Age (MSA) assemblages, the analysis of edge damage on unretouched artifacts offers a promising depth of insight into tool-use behavior. Taphonomic process such as trampling, however, can also cause edge damage on lithic artifacts. As part of the investigation of GaJj17, an MSA site in the Koobi Fora region (Kenya), we conducted an experiment designed to investigate differences between edge damage resulting from use and that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmen Martin-Ramos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone tool making has proven to be essential in human evolution and evolutionary cognitive archaeology studies (Herzlinger et al. 2017; Martín-Ramos 2022; Martín-Ramos and Steele 2023). In the case of the Acheulean technocomplex, concepts such as innovation, imposition of arbitrary form, and artifact variability have been linked to cognitive traits such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Moll. Lyn Wadley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At Sibhudu Cave, the Still Bay technocomplex is found ~71,000 years ago and its formal tool component is dominated by bifacial points, while the deposit below, which Wadley (2012) called the pre-Still Bay, has a low density of bifacial points. The Pre-Still Bay has many flakes with few bifacial points, and it dates to between about 74,000 and 80,000 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Stephens. David Killick.

Evidence for trade between southern Africa and the Muslim world dates back to the 8th century CE. However, it is not until the 12th and 13th centuries, with the discovery of alluvial gold in southern Africa, that entanglement between the two regions intensified. As a result, state-level societies emerged and began incorporating aspects of the Muslim identity into their own culture. With the intensification of these trade relations, craftsmen began expanding their repertoire of iron and copper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Stevens.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Futures through a Virtual Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Technologies inspire the creation of new subjectivities - changing our points of perspective and augmenting the ways in which we perceive. Through our ever-expanding applications of innovation, humans recontextualize realities. We use the tools of the present to formulate our visions of the future and our understandings of the past. Along...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Kroot.

Archaeological ethics require all sites identified on survey to be reported and described in such a manner as to allow for the archaeological community to understand their research potential. This can present a challenge in regions without a significant body of previous research to aid in the interpretation of finds. The Bandafassi Regional Archaeological Project in southeastern Senegal faces just such a situation. A research question driven survey strategy, directed at the archaeological record...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sabrina Stempfle. Jörg Linstädter. Decio Muianga. Martina Seifert. Nikola Babucic.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016, a research cooperation between the Eduardo Mondlane University and the German Archaeological Institute was started. Since then, this cooperation performed various surveys and geomagnetic prospection and developed with Hamburg University a dedicated research project which this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A C Lawton.

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 Akshay Sarathi.

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. Studies of urbanism in East Africa have tended to focus on the medieval “stone towns” that dot the coast. However, studying these more traditional expressions of urbanism produces an incomplete picture of the settlement patterns of precolonial East Africa. In islands such as Zanzibar, settlement patterns are unique due to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Marean. Jacob Harris. Jessica Thompson. Kiona Ogle.

Bone surface modification (BSM) remains a primary source of taphonomic inference in paleontological and archaeological contexts. However long-standing debates in BSM studies have undermined the utility of this approach. We use an objective machine-based learning algorithm rooted in Bayesian probability theory designed to quantify the level of uncertainty associated with a formal assignment of agent to individual BSM. Our multivariate Bayesian model, trained on large assemblages of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Radican. Alejandra May. Jennifer Miller. Jessica C. Thompson. Elizabeth Gomani-Chindebvu.

This is an abstract from the "Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research Consortium Poster Symposium" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Later Stone Age (LSA) bead production is typically reported with ostrich eggshell (OES) as the primary raw material. In south central Africa, land snail shell (LSS) was also used, but most sites have uncertain and poorly dated associations. The Malawi Ancient Lifeways and Peoples Project has now recovered both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Arthur.

This is an abstract from the "Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Exploration of the Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Feasting and drinking beer by the Gamo Boreda, who live in the highlands of southern Ethiopia, represent status and seniority and have a long tradition of connecting the living with the ancestors. This paper focuses on the archaeological site of Ochollo Mulato (AD 1270–1950), incorporating oral traditions in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant McCall. Theodore Marks.

For the better part of a century, archaeologists have surmised that beer brewing played a significant role in a range of major social and economic changes having to do with origins of agriculture. This paper examines an unusual case of early beer brewing, which likely originated during the Middle Holocene among the Later Stone Age (LSA) populations of the hyper-arid Central Namib Desert of western Namibia. In this paper, I discuss practices of modern traditional beer brewing in the region and I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Arthur. Matthew Curtis. Susan Kooiman. Kathryn Arthur.

Porridges and beer make up a majority of the household diet throughout much of rural Africa and could possibly be some of the earliest foods produced. In Africa, pottery is one of the primary culinary tools used to make both porridges and beer. This ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research explores pottery using use-alteration and morphological analyses from the Gamo of southern Ethiopia to indicate the use of pottery as a culinary tool. Beer and porridges are considered luxury foods...

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

Originally excavated in the early 1970s by Beatrice Sandelowsky, the Mirabib Hill Rockshelter is located roughly 250km southwest of Windhoek, Namibia, in the Namib-Naukluft National Park. This poster describes our re-analysis of the lithic technology recovered from Mirabib during the Sandelowsky excavations. The lithics examined in this poster were recovered from the lowest levels of the Sandelowsky excavation, just above bedrock, and date to around 19.5ka. This poster discusses the knapping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Davis. Kristina Douglass.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Madagascar’s southwestern coast has been inhabited by coastal foraging and fishing populations for over a millennium. Despite significant environmental changes in southwest Madagascar’s environment following human settlement, little is known about the scale, pace, and nature of human settlement and subsequent landscape modification. Recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Reeves. David Braun. Matthew Douglass.

The Early Stone Age record is a spatially continuous palimpsest representing thousands of years of artifact discard. The record thus reflects a long-term pattern of hominin movement at a landscape scale. Despite this, most recent research continues to employ interpretive perspectives suited for finer temporal grains and relies on targeted excavation of dense concentrations of artifacts. Here ‘sites’ are investigated as discrete functionally organized places and analytically interpreted based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Hinderling.

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 Dietrich Drost.

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 David Witelson.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock paintings of cattle raids are common in South Africa's southeastern mountains. Traditionally, such scenes are thought to illustrate some degree of conflict between two groups. The postures of the cattle depicted in the same scenes have been interpreted as showing movement such as walking or being driven from one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heidi Miller. Christopher DeCorse.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Castelo de São Jorge da Mina, better known as Elmina, was established in 1482 in modern-day Ghana by the Portuguese as the first European trading post on the coast of West Africa. The fort was captured by the Dutch in 1637 and remained under Dutch control for the next 235 years. It was transferred to the British in 1872, but, when the local Elmina...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heidi Miller. Christopher DeCorse.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project utilizes a biocultural approach to assess the demographics and health of the West African population from Elmina, Ghana. Elmina, selected by the Portuguese in 1482 as the site of the first European trade fort in sub-Saharan Africa, grew from a small coastal fishing village to a large settlement over the course of more than 400 years. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Pargeter. Metin Eren.

Lithic miniaturization, the systematic production and use of small tools from small cores, was a consequential development in Pleistocene lithic technology. Bipolar reduction is an important but often overlooked and misidentified strategy for lithic miniaturization. This experiment addresses the role of axial bipolar reduction in processes of lithic miniaturization. The experiments answer two questions: what benefits does axial bipolar reduction provide, and can we distinguish axial bipolar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Cleghorn. Thalassa Matthews. Christopher Shelton.

The exposure of the wide continental shelf of the Agulhas Bank during the gradual regression of the shoreline from 45,000 years ago, culminating in the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), opened up a vast new area for foragers. Humans with well-established coastal resource exploitation strategies would have naturally shifted their foraging range to the south, following the regressing shoreline. During this period, the South African technological record underwent a critical transition from the prepared...