Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (64 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first ostrich eggshell beads appeared across parts of Africa 50 ka and represent one of the earliest forms of ornamentation. Far from being uniform, research shows differences in bead diameter which cluster regionally and chronologically. These clusters are thought to represent distinct bead making traditions...
Engaging Materiality: Archaeology of Craft Production in Igbo Ukwu (Ninth–Twelfth Century CE) (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 adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of craft production in antiquity. It combines theoretical and methodological toolkits from archaeology, material science, studies of craft production, and ancient economies to investigate the organization...
Estimating the Temporality of Iron Smelting sites in Africa by Coupling Radiocarbon and Archeomagnetism (2023)
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...
Evolving Social Networks during the Late Pleistocene: An Interior Perspective from Grassridge Rockshelter, South Africa (2021)
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...
Exploring the Material Culture of the 19th Century Slave Trade in Coastal Guinea (2018)
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...
Flexibility Against Fragility at the Diallowali Site System during the 1st Millennium BC (2018)
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....
Foodscapes as Gendered Landscapes in West Africa (2018)
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...
Foodways in Atlantic Era West Africa – Ghana: Towards an Archaeology of Daily Life (2018)
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...
From Making to Mobilizing History in Banda: Learning from Ann Stahl’s Place-Based Approach to Archaeology (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. Ann Stahl’s career spans over 40 years, and for most of that time, she has focused on working in one small place in central Ghana known as Banda. Banda is different than most regions where archaeologists usually conduct sustained, long-term fieldwork: it was not a...
Heritage Pragmatics: Problems and Opportunities in Pursuing Decolonization (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. “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Tuck and Yang remind us (2012). What does this call to action mean for heritage studies? This paper explores attempts at decolonizing cultural heritage management and research. First, tracing the ways coloniality has continued to influence management practices in Rwanda, the...
Human Agency and Theory in West Africa: Understanding Early Forest Agriculture Dynamics during the Neolithic (2023)
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...
Imperial Mixtures and Paradoxes of Government in Colonial Senegal (2018)
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...
Indigenous Hermeneutics and the Contribution of Africa to Skyscape Archaeology (2023)
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,...
Initial Results from Magnetometer Survey at the Sacred Site of Dakajalan, Mali (2018)
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...
Introducing "Project Piedemonte": Between the Maloti-Drakensberg and the Great Escarpment in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa (2021)
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...
La Metallurgie Ancienne du Fer de la Zone 4000 de Siola (Kanisasso, Zone d’Odienne, Nord-ouest de la Cote D’Ivoire) (2018)
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...
Lithic Miniaturization and Behavioral Variability in Southernmost Africa 18–11 kcal. BP (2018)
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...
Luminescence Age Calculation Models, Termites, and Dune History in the Northern Kalahari Desert, Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe (2023)
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....
Macro- and Microscopic Effects of Heating in Lithics: Potential Indicators of Human-Controlled Fire? (2018)
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...
A Model of the Extinct Palaeo-Agulhas Plain Ecosystem in Southernmost Africa (2019)
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...
Multispectral Satellite Imagery for Mapping, Modeling, and Interpreting the Archaeological Landscape of Bandafassi, Senegal (2018)
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...
Narabeb: Examining the Middle Stone Age of the Namib Sand Sea (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Namib Sand Sea (NSS) in Namibia is known to preserve a wide variety of Pleistocene-age archaeological sites. However, few Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites in this region have been systematically investigated and basic questions around chronology and technological organization remain open. Here we examine Narabeb Pan, an open air MSA surface site deep in...
Negotiating Local Tastes in Trade Networks: Reflections on Ann Stahl’s Contributions to West African Archaeology (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. My research on local tastes and embodied practices during the Afro-European trade in Ghana is greatly influenced by Ann Stahl’s extensive theoretical work in West Africa. The 19th and early 20th centuries in West Africa witnessed a surge in the demand and export of...
New Neighbors/Nearest Neighbors: Slavery, Displacement, and Belonging Along the West African Coast (2019)
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...
North American Provincialism and Outdated Archaeological Curricula: The Bane of Global Archaeology (2023)
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...