Africa: Eastern Horn (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Bassett. Bruce J. Larson. Hayden Bassett. Christopher P. Chilton. Neil L. Norman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. River drainages have long been loci of seasonal migration and settlement for pastoralist societies in the Horn of Africa. Dotted with pastoralist camp sites, eastern Djibouti’s Amboule River drainage is an ideal location to study long-term pastoralist settlement dynamics at a sub-regional scale. In 2017 and 2018, as part of a systematic survey of pastoralist...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Willeke Wendrich.

In the years of willful destruction of cultural heritage as part of an extremist obliteration of the past, there have been several instances in the news of local populations taking stance against these destructive forces. In some cases protection of cultural heritage has become a voice against suppression and the reconstruction of destroyed monuments, e.g. through 3D printing and resurrecting lost parts, an act of defiance. Most destruction of cultural heritage, however, takes place much more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Arthur.

This is an abstract from the "Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: A Global Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beer is an essential culinary food for many African societies today and in the past for daily meals, economic compensation, and ritual feasting. This paper focuses on the ethnoarchaeology and archaeology in the Gamo region of southwest Ethiopia located on the western escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. Today, a unique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mica Jones. Steven Brandt.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environmental changes during the African Humid Period (~11,000-5,000 BP) are associated with the emergence of new social and economic strategies among some hunter-gatherers in northern and eastern Africa. In response to Early Holocene climatic amelioration, foragers in southwestern Libya and the Lake Victoria Basin decreased their mobility and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Mazzariello. Michael Harrower. A. Catherine D’Andrea.

Settlement pattern analysis has long remained a key means of examining the social, economic, and political relationships among archaeological sites and the way those relationships changed through time. Two common approaches involve: 1) analyzing the relative sizes of sites to evaluate possible site size hierarchies, and 2) analyzing the spatial distribution of sites across landscapes to evaluate possible clustering or dispersion. This paper applies more statistically rigorous methods that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Clark.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will review the ethnoarchaeological context of ceramic production in North Wollo, Ethiopia, and trace changes to ceramic traditions influenced by sociopolitical factors, with implications for archaeological reconnaissance and research. This research is a part of the broader Solomonic-Zagwe Encounters Project and its ongoing efforts to, in part,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Arthur. Matthew Curtis. Kathryn Arthur. Jay Stock.

Mota Cave located in southwest Ethiopia was found in 2011 in collaboration with local Gamo elders and partially excavated in 2012. The cave has exposed a long sequence of occupation (5295 Cal BP to 305 BP) revealing remarkable technological, subsistence, and cultural changes. We uncovered a burial of a male with the earliest complete ancient genome recovered from the African continent. We have named him Bayira, meaning "first born" in the Gamo language where the cave is located. Bayira begins to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dil Basanti.

This paper looks at how network theory and materiality may challenge progressive evolutionary models of complexity. Archaeologists working on the African continent have long argued against neoevolutionary models of complexity, advocating instead for understandings that promote dynamism and fluidity. However, the spectre of neoevolution still claims the public imagination: bigger still seems to be better even if we agree it really shouldn’t be. This paper aids in complicating these views by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Klehm. Mark Helper. Elisabeth Hildebrand.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beads play a prominent role in personal ornamentation in life and death: desired, exploited, and widely traded throughout prehistory. Although manufacture and use provide important social context, evaluating the materials used and their source locations is a crucial component of understanding how these industries arise. This paper features an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Brandt. Alice Leplongeon. Clément Ménard.

Recent paleoclimate studies indicate rainfall increased dramatically over many parts of northeastern and eastern Africa at the end of MIS 2 and the hyper-arid LGM ~14.7 ka, thereby marking the beginning of MIS 1 and the "African Humid Period" (AHP). These studies also suggest that not only should the "early" AHP be decoupled from the start of the Holocene some 3000 years later, it should also encompass the cooler, more arid Younger Dryas (12.9-11.7 ka). This paper explores two key questions: 1)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Arthur. Sean Stretton. Matthew C. Curtis.

In 2011, we began a collaborative project with Boreda Gamo communities of southern Ethiopia to understand the spatial and historical relationships between settlements and sacred areas. Community elders guided us along winding footpaths that ascended 9 mountain tops leading to settlements that were first occupied in the early 13th century and have now been abandoned for nearly 100 years. Surrounding these historic settlements are sacred groves with springs, caves, and boulders that give physical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dilpreet Basanti.

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper looks at how the location of the central stelae field in Aksum (in use from ~AD 100–400) took advantage of natural features to amplify Indigenous ideologies. The Northern Stelae Field is the burial location of the most powerful Aksumites, and tradition dictates that at least some were kings. The stelae field is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenail Marshall. Michele Buzon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Approximately 60 percent of all our antibiotics come from streptomycetes, a filamentous soil bacterium. Over 30 years ago, the first evidence of deliberate antibiotic use was among Sudanese Nubian agriculturalists through the consumption of beer that contained tetracycline. The range of archaeological research since the Nubian findings show the profound role...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ralf Vogelsang.

Although high-altitude mountain habitats are often regarded as unfavorable for human occupation; on the other hand tropical highlands in Africa are suggested as potential refugia during times of environmental stress. The presentation gives a review of new evidence of human occupation in the tropical highlands of Ethiopia from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene period. A first correlation of the archaeological data with the climate record suggests a complex interplay between humans and their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Gunter-Bassett.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological Predictive Models (APMs) are a critical tool for archaeologists working across the globe; however, they are underutilized in continental Africa. As part of ongoing archaeological research in Djibouti, the Southeast Djibouti Regional Archaeological Project (SEDRAProject) developed an ArcGIS-based APM for pastoralist sites in the eastern Horn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dilpreet Basanti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper uses micro-CT and funerary taphonomy to reconstruct ancient Aksumite burials (50-400 AD). Aksum, in northern Ethiopia, was the capital of an ancient polity that spread across the northern Horn of Africa and became a major power in the Indian Ocean trade. The most notable remains of the ancient capital are its towering funerary stelae and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dilpreet Basanti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents micro-CT histological data on bone samples from Aksum’s Stelae Park cemetery (AD 50–400). Aksum was the capital of an ancient polity (AD 50–800) that spread across the northern Horn of Africa and was a major global power in the Indian Ocean trade. The most notable lasting remains of the ancient capital are its towering funerary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Bassett.

The Somali Coast has long been a center of global commerce. At the confluence of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, port cities like Zeila and Berbera witnessed the arrival of Greek and Roman traders (ca. AD200) and Chinese merchants (ca. AD1300). Contacts with Muslim merchants from the Arabian Peninsula (ca. AD800) were particularly transformative, and by the tenth century, communities across Djibouti and Somaliland were converts. Scholars have hypothesized that pre-Islamic "monument sites"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanuel Beyin.

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 western periphery of the Red Sea (WPRS) occupies a pivotal location as a potential biogeographic corridor for hominin movement between Africa and Southwest Asia. Its long, coastal niche that once extended into the Danakil Depression would have made the WPRS a natural destination for hominins dispersing from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Arthur.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do we identify the transfer of technological knowledge on the local scale and how it might change through time and in regional contexts? The Gamo of southern Ethiopia offer that their Indigenous way of knowing the world enlightens understanding of transformations in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Ohman. Katharine Nusbaum. Bruce Larson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. NAVFAC Atlantic (LANT) is a government agency within the Department of Defense (DoD) that acts as a quasi-headquarters providing support both within the United States and overseas. As a Navy engineering facility, accounting for environmental concerns in the planning process also requires cultural resources assessments. LANT archaeologists are the DoD’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Castillo. Dorian Fuller.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although Ethiopia is remembered for famines in recent decades, the zone of vegecultural agriculture in the southwest has largely avoided food insecurity. Here agricultural systems are usually centered on Ensete ventrocosum, a tree-like vegecultural starch crop, an endemic staple food for 20 million...