Africa: Northern Africa (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Gauthier.

Earth system models are climate models capable of simulating land-atmosphere feedbacks and the complex biogeochemical and biogeophysical processes that drive them. These models are particularly well-suited to studying the impact of preindustrial land use on regional climate change, as they explicitly resolve the impacts of irrigation, deforestation, and agropastoral production on the flow of water and energy between the land and atmosphere. Generating realistic maps of past land use is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kayla Worthey. Jessica Tierney. Steven Kuhn. Abdeljalil Bouzouggar.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lipid biomarkers derived from plant waxes (n-alkanes) and the cell membranes of bacteria and archaea (GDGTs) are potentially powerful paleoenvironmental proxies in the field of archaeology given their durability and ubiquity in terrestrial sediments. We use the distributions of glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether (GDGT) and plant wax n-alkane structural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Sterrett-Krause. Laure Dussubieux.

This is an abstract from the "Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the site Bir el Knissia in Carthage from 1990 to 1992 recovered large glass assemblages from the site of an early Byzantine cemetery basilica, constructed by the mid-sixth century CE and destroyed by fire in the mid-seventh century. These artifacts include vessels (especially lamps,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Anglisz.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Jazwa. Aomar Akerraz. Stephen Collins-Elliott. Katelin McCullough. Katie Tardio.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Olszewski. Brenda Baker. Sidney Rempel.

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. Africa is the continent of origin for Homo sapiens and thus is the source for human colonization of the Old (and eventually New) World. Out of Africa 2 (anatomically, then behaviorally, modern humans) is supported archaeologically by African stone artifact industries found outside of Africa. Two routes widely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zineb Moubtahij. Benjamin Fuller. Adeline Le Cabec. Klervia Jaouen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Paleolithic to Neolithic transition generally denotes a dietary change from hunting, gathering, and fishing to agriculture. However, due to the limited number of Pleistocene sites that have yielded preserved human remains, our knowledge of the diets of pre-agriculturist human populations is still limited. Previously published isotopic studies have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Fenn. Brett Kaufman. Ali Drine. Hans Barnard. Sami Ben Tahar.

During the summer of 2016, preliminary geophysical prospection survey using ground penetrating radar (GPR) was conducted at the Neo-Punic and Roman period site of Zita, Tunisia. Since the time available for the fieldwork was limited to two weeks, the survey focused on examining specific areas of the site to document certain architectural features, and in several locations where industrial activities were known to have occurred based on previous limited excavations. Additionally, a region...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Hunt. Evan Hill. Paula Reimer. Graeme Barker.

Land snails have a radiocarbon ecology which leads to offsets in shell radiocarbon age, relative to contemporary biogenic carbon. We describe new methods for evaluating and calculating this offset. We radiocarbon date and apply the new methods to land snail food debris, from the deep MSA to Neolithic sequence in the Haua Fteah cave, NE Libya. Oxcal modelling of the resulting 136 dates over ~45000 years shows the site was used for short episodes separated by long periods of abandonment. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ismael Sánchez-Morales.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cave of El’Aliya on the Atlantic coast of Morocco contained a Middle Stone Age (MSA) occupational sequence that produced Aterian lithic assemblages (i.e. with tanged tools) dated to Marine Isotope Stage 3 (Layers 6 and 5). The site was excavated during the late 1930s and 1940s and the lithic assemblages from the MSA deposits were originally described...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Dobrov.

This project is centered around the Roman amphorae excavated from the Palatine East Archaeological Project. The site is located on the northeast slope of the Palatine Hill in Rome. The ceramic deposits date from the first century to about the fifth of sixth century CE. I focus on the amphorae produced in North African, specifically those of Tunisian origin. My work is hoping to better understand the geographical location of production sites of these trade vessels. The results of this project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Said Ennahid. Néjat Brahmi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the recurrent themes of French colonial-period discourse on conducting archaeology in Morocco was the belief that the state and the people had little or no interest in their pre-Islamic past or its material correlates. To explore and deconstruct this theme, we will examine a set of never-before-published archives consisting of 8 firmans (also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Lanza. Amanuel Beyin. Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

There is a broad paleoanthropological consensus that hominins left Africa multiple times during the Pleistocene, but the geographic routes through which they exited the continent remains unclear. Although the Sinai Land Bridge and the Strait of Bab-al-Mandab on the southern end of the Red Sea are commonly implicated as the likely pathways used by early humans during their expansion out of Africa, the evidence supporting each route is still much debated. Here, we identify viable pathways for...