Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shadreck Chirikure. Munyaradzi Manyanga. Genius Tevera.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Lipson. Mary Prendergast. Isabelle Ribot. Carles Lalueza-Fox. David Reich.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Fenn.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timpoko Hélène Kienon-Kabore. Galla Guy-Roland Tié Bi. Arouna Yéo.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadia Khalaf.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomos Evans.

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...

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 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 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 Peter Coutros. Brooke Luokkala.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Ambrose.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akshay Sarathi. Laure Dussubieux. Jonathan Walz.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Wright. Jeong-Heon Choi. Jessica Thompson.

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)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher DeCorse.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monika Baumanova.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Hixon. Kristina Douglass. Henry Wright. Brooke Crowley. Laurie Godfrey.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Hixon. Alejandra Domic. Kristina Douglass. Patrick Roberts. Douglas Kennett.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Soto. Siobhan Clarke. Jamie Inwood. Patrick Roberts. Julio Mercader.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gwenael Herve. Caroline Robion-Brunner. Giorgia Ricci. Emmanuelle Delque-Kolic. Didier N'Dah.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The life of African iron smelting sites (duration and production rate) is poorly known because of the low number of dates per site and the dependence on radiocarbon. On two fields in Togo (Bandjeli district) and Benin (Aplahoué district), this methodological communication shows that coupling...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Collins. Ayanda Mdludlu. Jayne Wilkins. April Nowell. Christopher Ames.

This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans are social beings and being able to track social interactions and relationships across space and through time is a major focus of both anthropological and archaeological research. Within archaeology, the scale and intensity of social interactions has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Goldberg.

As the British Navy patrolled the West African coast in an effort to enforce the cessation of the Atlantic Slave Trade beginning in the early nineteenth century, several American and European traders shifted their focus a slightly inland, establishing trading sites on the more visibly protected tidal branches of the Rio Pongo of coastal Guinea. This paper explores the material culture used and maintained by one of these establishments at the site of Gambia, considering how material consumption...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Coutros.

The first millennium BC was a period of dramatic social and environmental change throughout West Africa. Along the Middle Senegal Valley (MSV), communities experienced rapid and dramatic changes to biospheric conditions accompanied by largescale technological, social, and economic reorganizations. On the western edge of the MSV, the inhabitants of the Diallowali site system developed a network of flexible institutions capable of maintaining a thriving community throughout this turbulent period....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan. Dela Kuma.

Food is an integral part of how people interact with landscape, and tasks associated with food production, preparation, and consumption are often strongly gendered. Using gendered taskscapes (Logan and Cruz 2014) as a starting point, we forward the notion of foodscape as a lens through which to see the varied and multi-scalar forms that gender may take on a landscape. Using case studies from both ancient and modern West Africa, we examine how tracing food production, preparation, and consumption...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dela Kuma.

In the context of Africa, foodways are usually portrayed very differently than in the archaeology of food literature. Food in West Africa is depicted by its primary historians as shrouded in continuous food insecurities and largely lacking differentiated cuisines. However, recent archaeological and historical research in Atlantic era West African foodways have highlighted the dynamic nature of West African foodways. Despite these advancement, the full processes through which American crops...