Africa: East Africa (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (77 Records)
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. One of the long-term goals of the Southwest Ethiopia Archaeological Project (SWEAP) is to test the hypothesis that the SW Ethiopian highlands were a major refugium for plants, animals, and hunter-gatherer groups during the very arid periods of MIS 4 (~72-59 ka) and MIS 2 (~27-12 ka). In highland Wolaita, SW Ethiopia,...
Molecular Starch Degradation and Their Fingerprints: Insights from Modern African Taxa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient starch analysis is a controversial technique, as the polymer’s chemical survivability over long periods of time is not understood. Our objectives are to establish the molecular composition of starch granules from sub-Saharan taxa of ethnobotanical relevance subjected to diagenetic processes, and to determine if these byproducts have diagnostic...
Morphometric Comparison of Early Hominin Butchery Evidence to Carnivore Modifications within a Bayesian Framework (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence of stone tool use for butchery by early hominins is a contested topic due to the rarity of early tool evidence. In the absence of tools, the primary trace evidence for their use as butchery implements is bone surface modifications (BSM). However, current BSM recognition protocols are subjective. They can lead to conflicting identifications—for example,...
Neotaphonomy of a "Common Amenity" on the Grasslands of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying the variables that influence the deposition, preservation, and spatial distribution of faunal material across landscapes remains a key goal of taphonomic research. Here, we report on the results of pedestrian surveys for faunal material around a seasonal waterhole surrounded by woodland within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA). All visible...
Obsidian Characterization in East Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Steve Shackley’s wide-reaching research includes X-ray fluorescence analyses of obsidian from East Africa. He and co-authors explored sources of obsidian from sites in Ethiopia, providing data that informed many later studies in a relatively unknown region for obsidian studies. Our work on obsidian from mid-Holocene...
Of Fire and Stone: Cremation and Secondary Burial Practices at Noomparrua Nkosesia, a Pastoral Neolithic Site in Southwest Kenya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The spread of food production in East Africa c. 5000-1000 BP involved peoples with diverse subsistence patterns, material culture repertoires and identities. Pastoral Neolithic burial traditions include monumental pillar sites in northern Kenya, cremations in rockshelters in the southern highlands of Kenya and northern Tanzania, and widespread...
Paleoecological and Archaeological Evidence for Iron Age Economic and Ecological Transformation in the Highlands of Western Kenya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Until recently, chronologies of food and iron production activities have been poorly resolved in the western Kenyan highlands, and have been informed largely by historical linguistics and only a handful of radiocarbon dates. New archaeological and microbotanical data are presented that allows reexamination of earlier cultural history models for this region,...
Pastoral Neolithic Mortuary Site Sedimentology at Noomparrua Nkosesia, Kenya (2018)
Mobile pastoralism was the earliest form of food production in eastern Africa. The spread of pastoralism in Kenya c. 5000-1200 BP involved peoples with diverse subsistence patterns and material culture repertoires. However, little is known about the social landscapes and mortuary practices in southern Kenya. The mosaic of Pastoral Neolithic burial traditions across Kenya is diverse, ranging from monumental pillar sites to the north to cairns and rockshelter cremations to the south. In 2016,...
Phytolith Analysis of Experimental Fires: Insights into the Prehistory of Fire (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cooking Hypothesis suggests the morphological changes in the Homo lineage, including larger brains, were due to incorporating controlled combustion to cook food. Most archaeological evidence for fire comes from cave sites, which are less likely to be exposed to post-depositional processes (e.g. wind and water) that can destroy combustion evidence. Yet the...
Phytolithic Analysis of Site FxJj 20 AB (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Controlled fire could have significantly impacted hominin evolution, providing an adaptive release resulting in reduced teeth and gut size, and larger brains. Evidence of hominin controlled fire is sparse in the early Pleistocene archaeological record. These sites are usually in open-air contexts where taphonomic factors can obscure the identification of...
Post-depositional Processes and Their Impact of Inferences of Behavior at FxJj 34 (Koobi Fora Formation, Northern Kenya) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is often argued that surface assemblages provide insight into human behaviors at a regional scale. Measures of artifact use life and reduction intensity at this broad scale are often used to characterize the structure of stone tool use across space. However, once re-exposed, artifacts are subject to a variety of processes that potentially bias the...
Quantifying Basalt Artifact Weathering and Depositional Context: Insights from the Koobi Fora Formation, Kenya (2018)
Stone artifact weathering is important for understanding the formational history of surface and in situ assemblages. While much of this work has focused on chert and other crypto-crystalline sillicas, the weathering of basalt is under-studied. As a large proportion of the Early Stone Age record consists of basalt, it is necessary to explore the weathering process of this material. Characterizing basalt weathering currently relies on the subjective characterization of both mechanical and chemical...
Quantitatively and Qualitatively Evaluating the Impact that Palaeoanthropology Makes on the Lives of the Maasai People of Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tanzania’s Oldupai Gorge is a flagship human origins research site, yet less recognised is that the lands surrounding Oldupai are home to the pastoralist Maasai society. Even though scientists have, for over a century, sought to illuminate the shared past of our species in what many regard to be a cradle of humankind, there has seldom been meaningful and...
Quaternary Paleoenvironmental Changes in the Inhambane Bay (Southeastern Mozambique) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Contrasting with other areas of the globe, there are few palaeoenvironmental studies in Africa and in particularly in Mozambique. However, the knowledge about Quaternary palaeoenvironmental changes and their forcers (e.g. climate and sea level changes) is essential to understand the environmental context of human occupation of the Inhambane...
Recompiling the Archaeology of East Africa: The Swahili GIS Project, and What Comes Next (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The East African coast is famous for the stonetowns of the 'maritime trading' culture of the Swahili, but the scale of this region, fractured history of research, and scattered publication of work have until recently prevented macro-scale investigations of settlement patterns and coastal interactions....
Religion as a Social Adhesive in Colonial Mauritius (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mauritius was a “terra incognita et nullius” for Europeans before the sixteenth century. With the arrival of the Dutch (1638–1710), French (1715–1810), and British (1810–1968) colonizers, and the bondsmen they brought, the island became a significant part of the global sugar production. The workforce was gathered from all around the Indian Ocean and beyond....
Resilience Theory and Human-Environment Interactions during the Early Holocene at Lothagam-Lokam, Northern Kenya (2018)
The pluvial conditions during the African Humid Period of the Early-to-Mid Holocene profoundly influenced environments across northern and eastern Africa, expanding lakes, rivers, and grassland ecologies. Archaeologists have often explained human responses to these increasingly aquatic environment as in terms of an increasing reliance on fisher-hunter-gatherer economies. Similarly, once the AHP ended, humans abandoned these lifeways. These perspectives are overly deterministic; in this paper, we...
Rice Cultivation and the Craft of the State (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 19th century oral histories from the highlands of Madagascar traced a history of sovereignty and governance through a narrative of major landscape transformation. The construction of dikes, canals and rice fields around the capital city was figured as part of the work of building the kingdom. This was an expansive and expanding craftwork...
Ritual Sites as Anchors in a Dynamic Landscape: The Social and Economic Importance of Monumental Cemeteries Built by Eastern Africa’s Earliest Herders (2018)
In eastern Africa, herding was the earliest form of food production, supplanting fishing-hunting-gathering around Lake Turkana (northwest Kenya) ca. 5000-4000 BP. Fueled by the dramatic recession of Lake Turkana 5300-3900 BP, which made fishing less predictable and exposed vast plains of rich pasture near the lake, early herding probably involved both in-migration of pastoralists and adoption of livestock by local fishers. As herding took hold a mortuary tradition developed, with megalithic...
ron Smelting, Stone Carving, and Pottery Production by the Early Settlers in Northeastern Madagascar: Transfer of Techniques and Local Adaptation (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 project “Stone and Iron by the Rasikajy” started in 2017, focusing on the material remains of iron smelting, soapstone carving, and pottery production in northeastern Madagascar between 700 and 1700 CE. It is a joint project involving scholars from several universities in Switzerland and...
Shaping Hominin Cognition: A Comparative Three-dimensional Shape Analysis of LCTs and Cores from the Early Acheulean at Kokiselei 4, West Turkana, Kenya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The development of ‘shaping’ abilities in hominin lithic technology involved increases in higher-order cognition including forward planning, working memory, and spatial reasoning. Longstanding assumptions engrained in lithic typologies claimed that "Long Core Tools" (LCTs), such as "handaxes", were the earliest shaped lithics....
The Signs of the Dead: Theorizing Ancestrality via Semiotics (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. In this presentation I explore the ways in which African perspectives on ancestrality can inform archaeological approaches to the past. In historic Madagascar, the works and inheritance of the ancestors were fundamental to the building of political sovereignty, just as they are fundamental to the practice of archaeology and...
Social Mechanism of Information Transfer in the Paleolithic: The Influence of Raw Material Quality (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans are distinct in their ability to transfer information between individuals with remarkable fidelity. Although this feature defines our lineage, the antiquity of this distinction is not well known. This is due to difficulties in deciphering levels of information transfer in Paleolithic assemblages. Recently, several new techniques were developed to...
Social Memory and Sustainability in Dynamic Landscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore the role of social memory in facilitating human survival within the dynamic landscape of southwest Madagascar. By analyzing an oral history archive compiled through interviews with over 100 knowledge holders in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area, we address questions about human adaptation to climate...
Stone Tool Debitage Fails to Reliably Identify a Toolmaker’s Handedness (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The classification of stone tool debitage features as right- or left-oriented has become an increasingly common method for assessing knapper handedness in experimental and archaeological lithic assemblages. Replication attempts using these published methodologies, however, have been unsuccessful. We tested the validity of eight flake feature categories, from...