Africa: East Africa (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (100 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using archaeological and geospatial methods, we compare landscape modifications associated with the maintenance of the monocropping plantation orders under Omani, French, and British colonialism in nineteenth-century Zanzibar and Mauritius. How do similarities and differences in...
Late Holocene Spread of Pastoralism Coincides with Endemic Megafaunal Extinction on Madagascar (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recently expanded estimates for when humans arrived on Madagascar (up to ~10,000 years ago) are based on limited data yet highlight questions on the causes of the island’s relatively late megafaunal extinctions (~2000–500 years ago). Introduced domesticated animals could have contributed to extinctions through competition, but the arrival times and past diets...
Late Pleistocene Archaeofauna from the Kasitu Valley of Northern Malawi: Palaeoenvironments and Evolution of Faunal Communities in the Zambezian Ecozone (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. The Zambezian Ecozone of east-central Africa comprises faunal communities that include elements from both southern and eastern Africa. The region has long served as an important crossroads for faunal exchange, but its timing and implications for hunter-gatherer behavior are unknown. Late Pleistocene faunal assemblages...
Least-Effort Knapping as a Baseline to Study Social Transmission in the Early Stone Age (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variation in lithics has been used as a mechanism to infer diachronic aspects of hominin behavior. The emergence of the Acheulean industry is considered a major milestone in the evolution of hominin cognition. This perspective is predicated on the idea that Acheulean large cutting tools (LCTs) require mental templates imposed through knapping and that LCTs...
Local Responses to Global Events: Regionally Distinct Dietary Changes among Eastern African Herders at the Close of the African Humid Period (2018)
Changing human diets in eastern Africa across the end of the African Humid Period (AHP) have been inferred indirectly from cultural and faunal remains at archaeological sites. Stable isotope analysis (SIA, specifically δ13C) can measure diets directly, yet few studies have conducted SIA on human remains from this region. We present 25 new δ13C values from human tooth enamel recovered from archaeological sites around Lake Turkana (northwest Kenya) and on Lukenya Hill and Rigo Cave (southern...
Long-Term Settlement in Plantation Regions of Unguja, Zanzibar (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I discuss the results of an archaeological survey conducted in 2019 in north-central Unguja, Zanzibar. The aim of the survey was to investigate the long-term settlement history of regions that were transformed in the nineteenth century by Omani landowners who developed an agricultural export economy using a labor force of enslaved East Africans....
Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Evidence for Plant Use and Consumption at Gede, Kenya (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last several decades, excavations at numerous Swahili period sites along the East African coast have yielded a wide variety of data on economic and cultural practices during the last millennium BP. The results of intensive flotation recovery of macrobotanical remains from pit latrine sediments at housing structures are presented, providing direct...
Mammalian Enamel Stable Isotopic (δ13C, δ18O) Evidence for Environmental Change during the MSA-LSA Transition at the Kisese II Rockshelter, Tanzania (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environmental perturbations are invoked as an influence of hominin speciation, dispersal and technological innovations. Archaeological occurrences preserving the transition from the Middle Stone Age to the Later Stone Age are critical to gauging environmental influences of human adaptations, yet there is a dearth of well-dated sites in eastern Africa. The...
Maritime Archaeology and Slavery in Mauritius: Le Coureur Shipwreck (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. Analyzing slavery through the lens of shipwrecks makes a significant contribution to the understanding of labor migration. However, beyond the labor diaspora, there are social dynamics that can be view through maritime heritage. The ‘vessel’, the ship itself, was a vehicle of culture contact and the study of the artefacts...
Mauritian Indenture in the Indian Ocean (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. This paper presents a case study of an African/Indian Ocean plantation that focuses on daily lives of indentured laborers during the 19th century. Mauritius’s Bras d’Eau National Park was a sugar estate that functioned from 1786 to 1868. During the 1830s, French colonial landowners shifted from a reliance on enslaved...
Measuring Movement: The Influence of Scraper Reduction Models on the Early Pleistocene (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The identification of the “Frison Effect” on Middle Paleolithic scraper variability has had numerous subsequent implications. The initial influence revolved around our understanding of the then-prevailing use of typological distinctions in the Middle Paleolithic. However, the quantitative...
Mochena Borago Rockshelter and the Southwest Ethiopian Highlands as a Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Refugium: The Current State of Research (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. 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,...
Modeling Socioecological Transformation in Coastal East Africa: A Case Study from Unguja Island, Zanzibar, Tanzania (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists in the Pacific have viewed islands as “laboratories” for studying social, agricultural, and ecological transformations. Can a similar approach be applied to the near-shore island environments of coastal East Africa, and what might island case studies contribute to broader anthropological understandings of East...
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,...
A Mutual Gaze: Watching and Being Watched in the Unsettled Sociopolitical Landscape of Early Twentieth-Century Southwestern Tanzania (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long considered surveillance as a tool of control—for example, over enslaved or colonized peoples. But what of cases where the gaze goes both ways? The first two decades of the twentieth century were marked by seismic sociopolitical upheavals in what is now southwestern Tanzania: German colonialism...
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...
New Perspectives on Precolonial Trade in Eastern Africa (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community " session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discrepancies are emerging between historical and archaeological perspectives on the nature, scale, and chronology of precolonial and caravan exchange networks in the eastern African interior. For example, the caravan trade is thought to have emerged as coastal interests...
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...
Paleoanthropology in the Central Highlands of Kenya: A Knowledge Co-production Research Model (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human origins research in the East African region has largely focused on sites within the rift basin. The story of human origins is also credited to highly educated Western nation paleoanthropologists and a few local researchers. The work presented here demonstrates the importance of high-elevation tropical sites to human evolution using the Central...
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,...
Patterns of a Life and Death through Machine Learning: Archives of the Bois Marchand Cemetery in Mauritius (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bois Marchand cemetery in Mauritius was established in 1867, during the malaria epidemic, as the largest in the Indian Ocean and the third largest in the world. The Bois Marchand Cemetery Archive (1867–to date) holds a near-complete set of burial records of individuals interred in this cemetery. The records contain...
Perspectives on the Organization and Use of Lithic Technology: A Modern Ethnographic Case Study in East Turkana, Kenya (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Expedient Technological Behavior: Global Perspectives and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Expedient technology has taken on several meanings within the study of stone tools. However, the range of behaviors associated with the term expedient and its manifestation in the archaeological record is dependent on the socio-ecological and functional contexts in which technology is used. Acquiring a deeper...