Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (64 Records)
This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What was night life like at Great Zimbabwe? While this question excites imagination in numerous ways, in fact and myth, not much is known about nocturnal life in this ancient African urban landscape. Most archaeological reconstructions of urban life at Great Zimbabwe create the erroneous impression that the...
Ancient Human DNA from Shum Laka (Cameroon) in the Context of African Population History (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We generated genome-wide DNA data from four people buried at the site of Shum Laka in Cameroon between 8000–3000 years ago. One individual carried the deeply divergent Y chromosome haplogroup A00 found at low frequencies among some present-day Niger-Congo speakers, but the genome-wide ancestry profiles for all four individuals are very different...
The Appearance, Use, and Production of Glass in Ancient Sub-Saharan West Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the commodities heading south across the Saharan Desert over the past 2000+ years was glass. The typical form was as beads, but vessel glass and other forms also have been recorded. Glass not only was imported but at some point in the past also was produced by indigenous populations for local and regional consumption. Advances in...
Archaeological Research on the Ancient Iron Metallurgy in Côte d’Ivoire (2003-2016) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the year 2003, programmed research is carried out on the old iron metallurgy in Ivory Coast. Documentary research, field surveys and archaeological excavations have discovered ancient sites of iron metallurgy from 2003 to 2016. In a large part of the regions of Côte d'Ivoire, sites were discovered, studied then dated. The northern zones (Korhogo,...
Archaeological Survey and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in African Archaeology: Perspectives from the Niger Valley, Benin (2018)
The Niger River Valley in the north of the Republic of Benin, West Africa, has abundant archaeology that until recently has been under researched. During a systematic field survey carried out for my doctoral research as part of the European Research Council-funded Crossroads of Empires project led by Prof Anne Haour, over 300 new archaeological sites were discovered and 50,000 material culture objects recorded. This paper will discuss the methodology used to systematically survey the landscape...
Archaeological Survey in the Lower Save River Valley, Southern Mozambique (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southern Mozambique, with extensive Quaternary-aged deposits, shows great potential to inform on early modern human behavior. Despite its geographic proximity to well-known southern African hotspots of Stone Age archaeology, the area represents a major gap in our knowledge due to civil war and political instability in the late 20th century. In 2023, we...
Archaeology and the End of Empire in Nigeria: Learning from the History of Late Colonial Archaeology at Ile-Ife (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the city of Ile-Ife (Nigeria) in 1953, three foreign archaeologists (Bernard Fagg, AJH Goodwin, and William Fagg), with the permission of the Oni of Ife, conducted several months of fieldwork in the old city. With the aim of uncovering evidence relating to Ile-Ife’s early industries (including exquisite brass and terracotta artworks), they...
An Archaeology of Return?: African Diaspora Heritage in the Wake of the Slave Trade (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analytical vectors of the African Diaspora have traditionally run east-to-west, charting the journeys of captive Africans from Sub-Saharan homelands to spaces and systems of racial violence in the Americas. Historical archaeology continues to shed light on the realities of such experiences across the spectrum of...
Archaeology, Indigenous Archiving Practices, and the African Past: Researching the History of Atlantic Slavery in Peki, Ghana (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the creative use of indigenous and conventional archives and archaeological data in unearthing the history of Atlantic slavery in Peki. This frontier Ewe community in present-day Ghana led the pan-Ewe Krepi state out of Akwamu and Asante...
Assessing Production Components of the Pre-Still Bay Lithic Assemblage from Sibhudu Cave, South Africa. (2024)
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...
Assessing the Suitability of Southern Africa for Archaeological Provenance Studies with Lead Isotopes (2018)
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...
Augmented Curiosities: Virtual Play in African Pasts and Futures (2024)
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...
Beer in the Desert: Archaeological, Ethnohistoric, and Experimental Perspectives on Early Beer Brewing in the Central Namib Desert, Namibia (2018)
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...
A Bioarchaeological Analysis of a Skeletal Population from Elmina, Ghana during the Period of the Transatlantic Trade: 1482–1873 (2021)
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...
A Biocultural Analysis of the Impacts of Interactions between West Africans and Europeans during the Transatlantic Trade at Elmina, Ghana (2023)
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...
Bone Tool Technology in West Africa: Contributions from the Diallowali Site System, Senegal (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Worked bone has a long history across the African continent, occurring as early as the Middle Stone Age in eastern and southern Africa. However, since the beginning of the Holocene, barbed and un-barbed points – associated with the so-called ‘African Aqualithic’ peaking at 9,000 BP – have likewise been recovered from sites within Sahelian and...
Calibrating the Chronology of Late Pleistocene Climate Change and Archaeology with Geochemical Isochrons (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. Chronometric dating of Late Pleistocene environmental changes and archaeological sites can be refined by correlations with precisely dated volcanic isochrons, stalagmites, and marine isotope stages (MIS). Lake Malawi cores have volcanic ash from the Toba super-eruption, dated ~74 ka at levels previously dated to ~62.5...
A Comparison of the Glass Bead Trade at Unguja Ukuu and Kizimkazi Dimbani, Zanzibar (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unguja Ukuu (sixth–eleventh cenuries CE) and Kizimkazi Dimbani (twelfth century CE) are early trading sites on Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania in eastern Africa. Here we investigate patterns of glass bead trade at these sites, examining continuities and change between sites and over time. Glass bead samples from...
Construction of Pleistocene Geochronologies in Central Africa: Luminescence Dating in Northern Malawi (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. Advances in understanding the Pleistocene archaeology of Africa depend on well-dated models of human behavioral change. Portions of southern Africa with limestone caves and eastern Africa with volcanic tephra have datable materials (uranium and argon, respectively) beyond the limit of the radiocarbon clock (50ka)....
Contact, Colonialism, and the Intricacies of Ethnogenesis: Portugal, Spain and the Iberian Moment (2018)
This paper examines Portugal’s and Spain’s varied contacts, intersections and colonial aspirations in West and western Central Africa. Portugal and Spain share centuries of culture history, religion, and governance, and were united under the Iberian Union between 1580 and 1640. Yet within the context of European expansion into the non-Western world, they have often been considered distinct with regard to their histories and as foci of study. Pushing beyond national pasts, this paper...
Context-Specific Applications of Space Syntax on African Urban Sites (2018)
Organisation of space in preserved buildings and town layouts in sub-Saharan Africa have increasingly been in the research scope of archaeologists and architectural historians alike. The methods of space syntax and its associated theory have, especially since 2000’s, paved its way to African archaeology and used for new interpretations of architecture e.g. of Benin, Dahomey and the Swahili coast. Traditionally, space syntax is undertaken using access analysis graphs for individual buildings,...
A Critical Review of Radiocarbon Dates Clarifies the Human Settlement of Madagascar (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The timing and subsequent environmental impacts of the human settlement of Madagascar remain key topics of debate in archaeology. Located approximately 250 miles off the East African coast, Madagascar, the fourth largest island in the world, appears to have been one of the world’s last large landmasses to...
Cut-Marked Bone of Drought-Tolerant Extinct Megafauna Deposited with Traces of Fire, Human Foraging, and Introduced Animals in SW Madagascar (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People could have hunted Madagascar’s megafauna to extinction, particularly when introduced taxa and drought exacerbated the effects of predation. However, such explanations are difficult to test due to the scarcity of individual sites with unambiguous traces of humans, introduced taxa, and endemic megaherbivores. We excavated three coastal ponds in arid...
Decontaminating Archaeological Dental Calculus: A Protocol for Reliable Extractions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During dental calculus formation, mineralization preserves microbotanical remains. These provide paleoenvironmental and dietary information. However, modern contaminants on archaeological samples overlap with target species thus necessitating decontamination procedures. We present an efficient protocol to avoid the presence of contaminants: a) testing the...
Doctrines of Discard in the Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom: Social Stratigraphies of Refuse Mound Deposition in Southern Nigeria, AD 1400–1900 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom (southern Nigeria) was for centuries involved in far-reaching trade networks – with the inland and coastal Yorùbá ìlú (city-states), European merchants from various nations, and eventually the British Lagos Colony following its establishment in 1862. During this period, the Ìjẹ̀bú...