Kenya (Other Keyword)
1-6 (6 Records)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Globalisation of Sino-foreign Maritime Exchange: Ocean Cultures", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Chinese navigator Admiral Zheng He led seven epic voyages into the Indian Ocean, reaching the shores of North-Eastern Africa. Chinese historical documentation records his visit to Malindi on the Kenyan coast in 1417-19. Since 2000 there have been several spectacular announcements in Kenya and China that have...
Hominin land use of and movement in the Koobi Fora Formation (Kenya) (2017)
The occurrence of large densities of lithic and fossil material in Early Pleistocene contexts have been the focus of much interest. Several hypotheses modeling hominin foraging strategies have been generated to explain their formation. Assemblage formation is often hypothesized to be the result of particular land use strategies that relate to the movement and discard of stone artifacts. These hypotheses are difficult to test because they rely on ethnographic models of human movement, yet they...
Nested Proxies: Multi-scalar Approaches to Interpreting Human-Landscape Interactions (2015)
Interpretive challenges involving issues of equifinality and causation can chronically hamper environmental reconstruction efforts, as numerous physical, environmental, or anthropogenic processes may potentially be responsible for creating observed raw data patterns. Nested multi-proxy and multi-scalar analyses offer potential means of approaching these difficult conceptual issues which can plague interpretations reliant on single lines of proxy evidence. A dataset comprised of multiple...
Obsessively Opacifying Obsidian: Adapting Three Dimensional Laser Scanning Techniques (2015)
Three dimensional (3D) imaging technologies are being increasingly utilized by archaeologists to improve the accuracy of material analysis. To facilitate the development of these technologies, it is crucial to determine the limits of different devices and materials. This project focused on the challenge of scanning obsidian blades with the Next Engine HD 3D Laser Scanner, a popular and inexpensive choice among researchers. The Next Engine device was used to scan six small obsidian blades from...
Petrography of "Nderit" pottery from Pastoral Neolithic sites surrounding Lake Turkana in Kenya (2015)
"Nderit" pottery is associated with the earliest pastoralists in eastern Africa, c. 4000-4500 bp. and is found at both settlement sites and ritual "pillar sites" surrounding Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya. Several of the known megalithic "pillar sites" are large communal cemeteries and contain very large numbers of Nderit sherds, yet little research has been carried out on these ceramics in terms of their technology or provenance. Primary research questions concerning the early pastoralists...
Site Formation Analysis of Middle Stone Age Locality GaJj17 in the Koobi Fora Formation, Northern Kenya (2017)
The Koobi Fora Formation (KF Fm.) of the Turkana Basin in Kenya is comprised of a Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary sequence that has produced unprecedented paleoanthropological discoveries. Previous work in the KF Fm. reported an archaeological locality, GaJj17, exhibiting in situ Middle Stone Age (MSA) material eroding from an indurated sandstone. Understanding the depositional context of this locality required further geologic study as few MSA localities are represented in the KF Fm. This is due...