Africa: East Africa (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (77 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In African and Indo-Pacific contexts, beads play a significant role in the maintenance of social and economic networks across long distances. In modern continental African contexts, these networks are argued to represent delayed reciprocity, with beads acting as a currency to secure the relationship between distant gifting partners. However, archaeological...
Approaching Equifinality: Pollen and Non-pollen Palynomorphs as Complementary Paleoecological Proxies (2018)
In analyses of paleoenvironmental records, the specific effects of climate/precipitation patterns and human landscape impacts on ancient ecologies can be difficult to discern. As largely substrate-specific in nature, fungal spores may serve as proxy for a range of phenomena, such as soil erosion, landscape burning, vegetation clearance, moisture availability, and the existence of particular plant types in a given area. Microbotanicals, including pollen, fungal spores, phytoliths, and...
Beer and Feasts in the Highlands of Southern Ethiopia: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Perspectives (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Exploration of the Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Feasting and drinking beer by the Gamo Boreda, who live in the highlands of southern Ethiopia, represent status and seniority and have a long tradition of connecting the living with the ancestors. This paper focuses on the archaeological site of Ochollo Mulato (AD 1270–1950), incorporating oral traditions in...
Bone Preservation, Specimen Identifiability, and Outcrop Shape – A Preliminary Investigation of Early Pleistocene Taphonomy at Koobi Fora, Kenya (2018)
Fossil bone surface assemblages include differential specimen preservation (weathering stage, cortical surface exfoliation, polish, roundedness, fracture type) and identifiability (taxonomic or anatomical precision). Three 1x1 meter inventory squares placed on steep, moderate, and minimally sloping areas of a fossiliferous outcrop test whether outcrop shape is a megabias that influences assemblage attributes. A digital elevation model created from drone-captured aerial imagery describes outcrop...
Bridging the "Kansyore gap": Continuous Occupation and Changing Subsistence Strategies at Namundiri A, Eastern Uganda (2018)
Environmental heterogeneity and climatic instability in the mid-Holocene (~8,000-3,000 BP) are linked to increased socioeconomic diversity in East Africa. Increasing aridity ca. 6,000-5,000 BP encouraged early herders to migrate south into the region, while local hunter-gatherers intensified their reliance on ecologically-rich environments. Kansyore hunter-gatherers of the Lake Victoria basin established specialized subsistence systems that incorporated heavy pottery-use and seasonal site...
Cabaceira Pequena Archaeological Site: Initial Data and Interpretations (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Swahili Coast Civilization was a collection of independent polities that stretched across a large portion of the East African Coast from about 800 CE to the early modern period. There are several important sites that have contributed to our understanding of the wider Swahili world in northern...
Carbon Enamel Isotopes as Proxy for Dietary Changes in the Omo-Turkana Basin between 2 and 1.4 Ma (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the numerous hominin fossils found in the Omo-Turkana Basin dating to between 2.0 and 1.4 Ma., a resolved understanding of their dietary ecology has been challenging due to limited research on similar patterns in contemporaneous large mammals In this study, we use a sample (n = 390) of enamel δ13C values of six Bovidae, Suidae, and Equidae taxa as...
A Characterization of Site Formation Processes at FxJj34, Northen Kenya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any inference of behavior based upon the spatial distribution of archaeological material requires an understanding of site formation processes. Natural agents, such as water flow, may be responsible for post-depositional alteration of buried materials and can result in spatial patterns which mask the behavioral processes associated with the initial deposition...
Cobbling Material Memory: Kings, Gods, and Shrines in an Old Kingdom with Active Roots – Kanazi Palace, NW Tanzania (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last decade, heritage research in Kagera Region of NW Tanzania has responded to community-driven initiatives focused on preservation, tourism, and museum development. This attention to heritage-related programs has fostered several projects that continue to enhance our understanding of appropriate methods for preserving local and...
Comics, Colonialism, & Pseudoarchaeology: The Case of "La Crane de Mkwawa" (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Interactions with Pseudoarchaeology: Approaches to the Use of Social Media and the Internet for Correcting Misconceptions of Archaeology in Virtual Spaces" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are frequently represented in comic books as caricatures, where adventure and profit are exaggerated and the interpretation of finds is oversimplified. In this paper it is argued that these misrepresentations of how and...
The Communalities of Pastoralist Life: Perspectives on Household Organization at the Pastoral Neolithic site of Luxmanda, Tanzania (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household organization has been a topic of relatively little archaeological discussion in the Pastoral Neolithic (PN) literature for eastern Africa, in part because domestic architecture has rarely been found. Scholarly literature has therefore focused on pastoralists’ putative mobility, rather than on their settlements. However,...
Comparative Evidence of Maritime Activity in the Early Swahili Harbours of Zanzibar (2018)
The Swahili of East Africa are regarded historically as a maritime culture, whose coastal sailing networks and prosperous Indian Ocean trade connections can be dated back to at least the 7th century CE. Archaeological investigations have demonstrated that maritime elements were deliberately embedded in the architecture of the famous second millennium Swahili stonetowns, but a focus on urban areas has sometimes been at the expense of areas of potential maritime infrastructure within settlements,...
The Copper Coins of the Kilwa Region, Tanzania, AD 1000–1500: Creating a Regional Currency in an Indian Ocean World of Coins (2018)
The residents and rulers of Swahili towns along the eastern African Swahili coast fashioned cosmopolitan worlds through their participation in long-distance trade both across the Indian Ocean and into the continental interior, their conversion to Islam, and the construction of cities that incorporated styles from across the Indian Ocean world. The creation and use of a local coinage—silver from the 8th-10th centuries, and copper from the 11th century onward—is often viewed as a way that town...
Diachronic Changes in Late Pleistocene Ochre Technology at Mochena Borago Rockshelter, SW Ethiopia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations of the Late Pleistocene levels at Mochena Borago Rockshelter in SW Ethiopia, dating >50–35ka, have revealed one of the densest concentrations of modified ochre in eastern Africa. Here we consider technological variations of ochre and associated processing tools through studies of use-wear, trace elemental signatures, and artifact spatial...
Diasporic Tensions of Historical Framing and Material Process in Mauritian Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the tension between historical framing and material process in the context of colonial labor migrations, using archaeology of domestic and settlement landscapes in nineteenth-century Mauritius as a case study. Historical archaeology has the benefit of being able to...
Displacement and Burials in Wartime Acholiland; Archaeological Surveying and Ethnographic Research in Northern Uganda (2018)
A multi-subfield anthropological research team from the University of Tennessee Knoxville has been conducting fieldwork in Acholiland since 2014 in order to analyze how improper burials are affecting the cultural and geospatial reality of post-war Northern Uganda. The project has primarily involved ethnographic research; however, archaeological surveying was introduced in 2016 for the purpose of locating and documenting wartime burials. The concerned burials are related to the 1987 to 2006 war...
Early Herding Practices in Tanzania Revealed through Strontium Isotope Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. East African pastoralists today rely on extensive social networks through which livestock are exchanged to maintain herds. The role of such animal exchange networks among ancient pastoralist communities can be revealed through stable isotope analysis. Pastoral Neolithic sites are broadly distributed across southern Kenya and northern Tanzania....
Early Middle Pleistocene Flake Production Methods at Nadung'a Site Complex, West Turkana, Kenya (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Pleistocene (0.77-0.13 Ma) was a crucial time in the evolution of the human brain. Homo heidelbergensis cranial fossils and endocasts provide evidence of brain size increases and structural changes during this time, which resulted in brains more like our own. The analysis of Acheulean lithic assemblages provides a means of exploring how these...
Early Pastoralists in Tanzania: Mobility and the Seasonal Round (2018)
First developing around 8,000 years ago, pastoralism in Africa has continued as a flexible and dynamic mode of subsistence. One key feature of this dynamism is mobility, which is crucial for many East African pastoralists today to access seasonally available pasture and water. In areas of unpredictable rainfall, mobile pastoralism permits more people to live in dry lands than do other subsistence strategies. How the earliest herders in Tanzania used the landscape is still relatively unknown....
The EAST Typology: A Remedy for Eastern Africa’s "Lithics Systematics Anarchy" (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. Eastern Africa boasts the world’s longest archaeological record, more than 3,4 million years so far. And yet, that record defies easy synthesis due to "lithics systematic anarchy." Archaeologists working in Eastern Africa describe and measure stone tools in so many different ways, that detailed comparisons within...
Economic Changes through Time along the Tanzanian Swahili Coast, as Seen through the Examination of Non-ferrous Metals and Metallurgical Technologies (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. Historic Swahili towns along the East African coast played prominent roles in the triangular Indian Ocean maritime trade linking East Africa with India and the Persian Gulf/Red Sea, but the impact and extent of economic changes through time in these towns are still poorly understood. Examining...
Establishing Baselines for Stone Tool Variation Across the Early Pleistocene: A Least Effort Approach (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of the evolution of human behavior is largely predicated on how stone tools vary through time and across space. Despite a long history of research, the behavioral processes associated with Early Pleistocene lithic technology remain debated. Some research suggests that lithic...
Ethno-Archaeometry of Ochre Mineral Pigment Extraction, Transport, and Use in the Kenya Rift Valley (2018)
Ochre occurs in African archaeological sites from the later Middle Pleistocene to the ethnographic present. Ochre is used worldwide for symbolic and functional purposes, and is often considered to be evidence for symbolic behavior by cognitively modern Paleolithic humans. Geochemical provenience analysis, complemented by ethnographic studies of ochre source exploitation, transport, and use, can elucidate whether culturally mediated source exploitation differs significantly from a least-cost...
Feeding the Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite Society: Subsistence Strategies of Cities, Towns, and Urban Centers in the Horn of Africa (800 BCE–900 CE) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Local and long-distance trade and productive agricultural systems contributed to establishing complex socioeconomic institutions in the Horn of Africa between 800 BCE and 900 CE. Several important urban centers and towns, such as Yeha, Aksum, and Matara, emerged...
Fire in the Early Pleistocene: Evidence for the Use of Fire by Hominins at the 1.5 mya Site of FxJj20 AB, Koobi Fora, Kenya (2018)
The Cooking Hypothesis contends that fire use became common in the Early Pleistocene and was part of a suite of characters that were associated with the appearance of Homo erectus. The morphological changes associated with H. erectus support this hypothesis. Archaeological evidence for the control of fire in this time period is generally sparse, and arguments for controlled fire at early sites have been controversial. Here we present evidence for fire use by early hominins at the open-air site...