Africa (Other Keyword)
1-25 (27 Records)
The study of ancient glass in Africa has undergone a resurgence in the past 10+ years, particularly with regards to the integration of new and varied analytical approaches. Glass from Roman, Byzantine and Islamic Era contexts are increasingly undergoing scrutiny to explore modes of manufacture, access to raw materials, provenance of raw materials and finished glass goods, and the role that glass production and consumption played in those societies, to name a few. Advances in instrumental...
An Animist Shamanism: The World behind San Rock Art (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunter-gatherer cosmology in southern Africa is very clearly multinatural; persons human and nonhuman working to behave intelligibly to each other so that relations are brokered and maintained. Until recently, however, rock art interpretations have implied a physical division between realms animal and human,...
Beer, Porridges, and Feasting in the Gamo Region of southern Ethiopia (2017)
Porridges and beer make up a majority of the household diet throughout much of rural Africa and could possibly be some of the earliest foods produced. In Africa, pottery is one of the primary culinary tools used to make both porridges and beer. This ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research explores pottery using use-alteration and morphological analyses from the Gamo of southern Ethiopia to indicate the use of pottery as a culinary tool. Beer and porridges are considered luxury foods...
Building Colonialism: Nineteenth-Century Colonial Tanzania and its Urban Representation (2013)
Tanzania’s coastal harbour towns underwent phenomenally rapid transformation from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s. This was the result of British and German colonialism and the development of a new capitalist system of economic and social control. This new western design served to re-define the earlier systems of capitalist exchange within the formally Omani dominated Swahili Coast. The various systems of appropriation and reorganisation are represented in the urban landscape and resulted in...
Cultural heritage, history and memory in the context of Madagascar (2013)
Cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, distinguishes a nation. Culture is patent in everyday life, through the various activities that man performs, language, traditions, rituals, beliefs it conveys, all the objects he uses. With modernity and globalization, this heritage, its history and memory, is greatly endangered and degrades rapidly. Among different reasons such as ignorance, indifference, destruction, theft, illicit trafficking of cultural property, natural disasters, failure in the...
THE DECLINE OF THE TRADITIONAL IRON WORKING INDUSTRY IN THE ABUJA AREA OF CENTRAL NIGERIA: THE ROLE OF BRITISH COLONIAL POLICIES. c. 1800-1960 (2016)
By the beginning of the 19th century iron working played important roles in the economic and socio-cultural ways of the inhabitants of Abuja. The traditionally produced iron tools and implements provided the much needed tools for agriculture, warfare, trade, inter-group relations, control of the environment, and other socio-cultural developments. By c. 1800 A.D., British colonial interests in the area had increased, just like other parts of Nigeria. This paper explores the decline of the...
DECODING THE SWAHILI: ANCIENT DNA STUDIES ON THE KENYAN COAST (2015)
Our project examines the role of migration in the development of the large autonomous Swahili towns and city-states that grew out of small fishing, agrarian, and pastoral settlements on the East African coast in the late first millennium CE. Our sample is comprised of 97 individuals from three sites on the Kenya coast: Mtwapa (N=72; 900-1732 BCE) near Mombasa, and two sites in the Lamu archipelago, Manda (N=16; 800-1400 BCE), and Shanga (N=9; 800-1400 BCE). The teeth were well preserved and...
Ethiopia and the Politics of Representation in Local, National, and Privately-funded Museums (2017)
The Wolaita people are a minority cultural group within southern Ethiopia. In 1896 Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia engaged in one of his bloodiest campaigns to unseat King Tona and absorb the land and people under the aegis of the Abyssinian Empire. Since then, the Wolaita and other southern groups have been ascribed relatively marginal status in larger representations of Ethiopian identity. In 1994, however, the Ethiopian government began to actively facilitate the development of cultural museums...
Evolution of Iron Age to Modern Landscapes in the Benoué River Valley, Cameroon (2017)
African landscapes have undergone radical ecological transformations since agriculture was introduced and spread across the continent. In some areas, it appears that grassland was encouraged at the expense of forests and woodlands, for agriculture and to provide fodder for livestock. To this point, most of the evidence for such practices has come secondarily from ocean or swamp cores, not directly from archaeological contexts. In this paper, we present a scenario for landscape evolution and...
Gold and Glass: African Expressions of Creation aboard the Slave Ship La Concorde (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Telling a Tale of One Ship with Two Names: Queen Anne’s Revenge and La Concorde" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Amongst the artifact assemblage of the early 18th century slave ship La Concorde, housed in the North Carolina Conservation laboratory on East Carolina University campus, are a gold jewelry item and worked glass bottle fragments. Preliminary research suggests that the gold may be of Akan origins...
"The implementation of the 2001 Convention on the Underwater Cultural Heritage in sub-Saharan Africa: case study in Senegal and Gambia". (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Maritime Archaeology in West Africa", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. There is a great wealth of UCH lying off Africa Atlantic coast and in the continent's inland waters, all speaking to the cultural identity of the coastal communities, but also witness to long history and the many maritime links to other parts of the world.In 2018 the UNESCO Regional Office in Dakar launched an initiative that articulates...
In Search of King Tona’s Palace: The Politics of Archaeology and Memory in Southern Ethiopia (2017)
In 1896 Emperor Menelik II of Abyssinia engaged in one of the bloodiest battles of his military campaigns, attempting to unseat King Tona of Wolaita. After two weeks of fighting, King Tona was captured and the royal court devastated. The last palace of the Wolaita Kingdom stood in Dalbo just 10 kilometers northeast of the current city of Soddo. While the general location of King Tona’s palace is known, contesting narratives situate the exact location at different sites. This paper reports on...
The Inscribed Word vs. the Spoken Word in African History and Archaeology (2013)
Pierre Nora got it wrong when he drew a distinction between inscribed history and social memory. By making this unfortunate dichotomy he unwittingly amplified a long standing separation between the written word and the spoken word in history making. The writings of F. Lwamgira in NW Tanzania provide a poignant study from which insights emerge about the speciousness of such distinctions. Lwamgira's writings take on an authoritative quality by becoming materially inscribed representations of Haya...
Instigating Technological Knowledge through an African Ontology (2015)
This paper focuses on the relationship between material culture and living peoples as constructed through an African perspective of what it means to be in existence- ontology. It is critical that we precedent descendant theories of the human and nonhuman world to produce meaningful narratives of the past, to avoid alienation and ethnocentrism. The Borada-Gamo of southern Ethiopia offers that their worldview enlightens their knowledge of technology. Material culture as spiritually animated has...
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...
Iron producers, iron users. (2015)
Participation in technological activity in sub-Saharan Africa is often discussed in terms of identity, whether that is framed by gender, kinship, status or ethnicity. In particular, social distinctions between iron producers and iron users are well known from the ethnohistorical and ethnographic records of numerous African regions, providing important information as to the social organisation and values of a particular society. However, recognising these identities in the archaeological remains...
Just Nuisance to Standby Diver: Exploring the cultural heritage of Simon’s Towns as a British Naval Port and South African Navy Base (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Port of Call: Archaeologies of Labor and Movement through Ports", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Simon’s Town, in South Africa, served as naval port and harbor first for the British and later for the South African Navy. Cultural connections to other parts of Africa, United States, and the Far East are an equally important part of the historical narrative and naval identity of the False Bay. Kroomen from West...
Late Pleistocene lithic technological patterns in East Africa (2016)
Genetic and fossil evidence suggest East Africa played a significant role in the origin and dispersal of modern humans. While studies of East African Middle Stone Age (MSA) assemblages exhibit apparent regional patterning, this is often based on industrial designations derived from presence/absence or frequency of specific forms. Regional comparisons of these assemblages are inhibited by differences in comparability, especially of raw material, reduction intensity, and inter-analyst variation....
Living Systems of Raised-Field Agriculture in Africa: What Can They Tell Us About Pre-Columbian Systems in the Neotropics? (2015)
The study of pre-Columbian raised-field agriculture is marked by several unresolved questions: How did raised fields function as agroecosystems? Were they cultivated continuously or were fallow periods incorporated? What population densities did they support? Did making and managing raised-field landscapes require top-down control in a hierarchical society (or supervision by specialists)? Can raised-field agriculture play any role in reconciling food production and ecosystem services in...
Mapping The Land God Made In Anger: Conducting A Rapid, But Thorough Survey Of Namibia’s Forbidden Zone (2016)
There are few sites more remote or environments more hostile than the mostly abandoned diamond fields of the southern Namib Desert. This is the Sperrgebiet, declared the Forbidden Zone by the German colonial administration in 1908 and still forbidden to this day. It’s 26,000 km2 of industrial debris and a few sand-drenched settlements. Our goal was to produce a comprehensive map of the town of Pomona, abandoned in 1928, and nearby mining camp Stauch’s Lager in as little time in the field as...
A Middle and Later Stone Age sequence from Iringa, southern Tanzania (2017)
Magubike rockshelter in the southern Highlands of Tanzania contains a long archaeological sequence ranging from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) through historic times. This paper describes the lithic sequence from test pit 5, which contains a 2.5 m thick cultural deposit composed of recent / historic remains, an Iron Age, a microlithic Later Stone Age (LSA), a macrolithic LSA, a transitional sequence from the MSA to the LSA and 90 cm of MSA artifacts. The later part of the sequence replicates the...
"More field than habitation, and far more fallow than field": Settlement Patterns, Farming Practices, and Demographic Change on the Abomey Plateau, Republic of Bénin (2016)
Archaeologies of urbanism in West Africa have long focused on major cities associated with expansive kingdoms and empires of the second millennium AD. In recent decades, however, archaeologists have turned to the countryside for an alternative view on urban dynamics in this period. Yet, for most of the forested region this shift has been hampered by the problem of identifying sites, both large and small. This difficultly arises from the combined effects of dense vegetation, poor site...
Public Use of Beach Shipwrecks on African Shores (2017)
Shipwrecks on African beaches serve as archaeological field training sites, history classrooms for school children, tourist hiking, horse riding or driving trails, as fashion show props and as outdoor studios for film productions. Public uses of beach shipwrecks, often more accessible than underwater sites, has potential to enhance appreciation and management of global maritime heritage. This paper presents case studies in South Africa, Namibia and the Transkei. Examples include Kakapo (1900)...
Recent paleoanthropological work at DK East, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania (2015)
Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, remains one of the richest sources of information on human bio-behavioral evolution between 1-2 million years ago. While much research has justifiably focused on the gorge’s junction area and its rich collection of sites, including FLK 22 (The Zinjanthropus Floor), the older fossiliferous deposits to the west have received much less attention in recent years. The DK area, which lies along the north edge of the main gorge, is particularly intriguing and was made famous by...
Revisiting Bipolar Technology‘s African Distribution and Diversity (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. Bipolar reduction is a central strategy in Pleistocene archaeology, recognized as an archetypal “expedient” technology. It entails hammer and anvil flake production, suitable for stabilizing smaller cores during miniaturized flake production. Despite its widespread occurrence and decades of study, debates...