Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Olajide.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the fact that the need to study early indigenous agricultural systems in Africa has long been recognized and reaffirmed in recent archaeological discussions, African agricultural practices are still being modeled using concepts, terminologies, questions, lines of evidence, and methods derived from research elsewhere in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francois Richard.

This paper examines the travails of colonial government in Senegal, looking specifically at material histories in the rural region of Siin. One tenet of French colonial policy was to govern through the operation of commerce, specifically through the infrastructure of cash-cropping. If peanut agriculture would, in principle, create both wealth for the colony and ‘African subjects,’ on the ground, peanuts combined with a web of material entities that bent, diverted, or interrupted the flow of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olanrewaju Lasisi.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the discoveries of the astronomical orientation of Stonehenge in the 1960s, several scholarships have employed skyscape archaeology to answer questions about state formation and consolidation of complex societies. The majority of these works have focused outside Africa, particularly on cultures in Latin America, China,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Womack. Peter Coutros. Mamadou Cissé.

In the spring of 2017 geophysical remote sensing surveys were conducted across three locations at and around the Dakajalan sacred site, Commune Rurale de Sanankoroba, Mali in order to detect anomalies associated with archaeological features. This site has been described in oral tradition as the location where the battle that proceeded the formation of the Mali Empire took place, and also where the village that acted as the first capital of the newly formed empire was located. Surface survey of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paloma De La Peña. David M. Witelson.

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. This new project aims to map mobility patterns and social networks from prehistory to historical times in the western piedmont of the Maloti-Drakensberg, South Africa. It also considers the relationships between archaeological and rock art sites, and how rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timpoko Hélène Kienon-Kabore. Vincent Serneels.

Près de Kaniasso dans la zone d’Odiénné, sur les sites de Siola, zones 1000 et 2000, et Doumbala, une séquence chrono-technologique en trois phases a été mise en évidence, caractérisées par trois traditions techniques différentes : KAN 1 (1300 – 1450 AD), KAN 2 (1450 – 1650 AD) et KAN 3 (1650 - 1900 AD). Des vestiges présentant de grandes similitudes ont été identifiés sur de nombreux sites dans la région. Par contre, le site de la zone 4000 de Siola, dont l’étude sur le terrain a été reprise en...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Pargeter. Marika Low.

Lithic miniaturization, the systematic production of small stone artifacts by controlled fracture, was a pervasive feature of late Pleistocene lithic technology. Smaller toolkits enabled humans to exploit raw materials more efficiently, to produce composite tools more effectively, to reduce a wider range of rocks, and to increase mobility by lightening toolkits. These benefits allowed humans to occupy a wider range of ecological niches. Archaeologists working in southern Africa have long...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Wriston. Christina Neudorf. Gary Haynes.

This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists often accept optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages with less critical review than those derived from the more commonly used radiocarbon dating methods. This is largely because of an incomplete understanding of optical dating techniques and the modeling assumptions used to calculate these ages....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Cutts. Ervan Garrison. Douglas Crowe.

Outside of clear association of human activities and fire features (e.g., a constructed hearth and artifacts), a perennial challenge persists in linking human/hominin behavior to the control of fire. This particularly vexes ongoing investigations to determine early human-fire interaction(s). Although natural landscape fires can be intense, their tendency to move quickly may limit modifications in lithic material at ground level. Studies examining the effect(s) of heating tool-stone at different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Marean. Richard Cowling. Janet Franklin.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike some regions, Africa was not subject to massive and abrupt mammalian extinction events in the Late Quaternary, but some African regions were subject to abrupt extinctions of small numbers of species. The coast of South Africa records such an extinction event near the Pleistocene and Holocene boundary. These extinct species were all adapted to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Gokee.

The Bandafassi Plateau of southeastern Senegal today defines a landscape in which ethnic identities (Bedik, Peul, and Malinke) appear to be grounded in "traditional" patterns of settlement and land use, and yet oral histories speak largely of movement at multiple scales—from the fission and fusion of villages, to the migrations of hunters and merchants, to the arrival of foreign invaders and colonial powers. Seeking to better chart the interplay between natural environment and social history...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Norman.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Atlantic Period, Kingdoms along the West African Coast swelled as traders, emissaries, and famers moved to palatial capitals. As these groups freely poured into West African cities, African kings added war captives and enslaved individuals to the urban mix. Elite Africans were reliant on enslaved and attached...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Schmidt.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I was trained at Northwestern University by Stuart Struever, a student of L. Binford. I was nurtured on a positivist paradigm and force-fed like a goose on the 1960s New Archaeology. I was gratefully cured of these limitations by elders in East Africa who taught me deep respect for historical perspectives on the past. Because I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregor Bader. Lyn Wadley. Christian Sommer. Nicholas Conard.

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. The final MSA of southern Africa (~40–28ka) represents one of the most understudied technocomplexes in this part of the world. Researchers often focused on earlier time periods or those shortly after, encompassing the transition between Middle and Later Stone Age....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aribidesi Usman.

This paper will report the 2017 excavation at Okete-Kakini site near the king’s (Attah) palace in Idah. Okete-Kakini was the residential area of Attah’s eunuchs (amonoji), one of the two major palace officials who carried out various functions for the Attah. The aim of the investigation is to identify the activities of the palatine elites through an examination of their material culture found in archaeological excavations. It is thought that the members of the palatine groups, like the formal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Challis. Brent Sinclair-Thomson.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The protracted colonisation of southern Africa's Cape created conditions of extreme prejudice and violence. Like the Caribbean equivalent, however, the Cape conditions presented opportunities for the colonised to escape. Slaves, the unwilling migrants to the Cape comprised of all sorts from the Dutch and British colonies:...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Reid.

Humans have inhabited southern Ghanaian forest for millennia, and nearly everywhere there are traces of human activity in the deep past. This paper discusses my integration of satellite remote sensing with traditional archaeological field methods to study longue durée continuity and transformation in both West African societies and the landscape itself. I am consolidating previous survey data and expanding upon them using several methods of archaeological survey and remote sensing with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liza Gijanto.

Banjul was founded in 1816 as part of the British efforts to block the slave trade on the Gambia River. A planned urban center, the city developed around a series of neighborhoods designated as colonial, merchant, and African laborer spaces. Amongst the most prominent settlers were the Aku (Liberated Africans) from Sierra Leone and French traders from Goree who were instrumental in the growth of the colonial economy. The Banjul Heritage Project seeks to highlight contributions of the different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Reilly. Caree Banton.

"Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you" is a phrase attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre. While the French philosopher was concerned with political freedom rather than freedom in the context of slavery, Sartre’s words offer lessons for analyzing a vast spectrum of how individuals experienced the conditions of slavery and freedom. This paper explores an ambitious project of freedom and future-making initiated by a group of Barbadians one generation after emancipation in the English...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott MacEachern.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "The kings of the Sudan sell their people for no reason, and quite apart from any wars…" (Ahmad al-Ya’kūbī). The Lake Chad Basin was one of the anchor points of the trans-Saharan slave trade, through the millennium after al-Ya’kūbī wrote about the rulers of Kanem in the 9th century AD. This region had no equivalent to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abidemi Babalola.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Technology transfer is a popular concept in the studies of pyro-technologies globally. This concept has been used uncritically in discourses on the origins and development of sophisticated technologies in sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of continuous patronage of this inherently derogatory concept in sub-Saharan African archaeology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chiamaka Mangut.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A reconnaissance of Dutsen Kura hill was carried out in June 2022. It is claimed that former occupants of the hill had ancestral links with Dutsen Kongba, a sixth millennium BC Later Stone Age hill settlement located in the same region. In addition, the present-day Bace group living in the plains in Dutsen Kura claims an ancestral link with former...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Collins. April Nowell. Christopher Ames.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ostrich eggshell and marine shell beads have been linked to the establishment and maintenance of hunter-gatherer social networks in southern Africa, but studies focusing on the methods of their manufacture and especially the social contexts surrounding their manufacture are often overlooked. This research presents a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akin Ogundiran.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Women’s work and administrative leadership were essential to the running of the Oyo Empire (ca. AD 1570–1836). As wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, enslaved and free bureaucrats, traders, artisans, and laborers, women played a wide range of roles in palace administration and in financing and reproducing the state (materially...