Africa (Other Keyword)
1-25 (63 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,...
The appearance of bifacial technology in the Middle Stone Age of Bizmoune Cave, Morocco (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> The Middle Stone Age Aterian of North Africa shows a high level of continuity in artifact forms and modes of reduction. This continuity probably reflects stable environments in near-coastal parts of North Africa, combined with the notable adaptability of Homo sapiens. However,...
Assessing the intensity of coastal resource use by micromorphological analyses (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Micromorphology has become a vital part of the toolkit for site formation process analyses in any archaeological context. The technique has been little applied in coastal settings, with most of the work focusing on shell-matrix sites in a few coastal areas of the world. In such...
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...
The Chains that Grind: An Experimental Archaeological Study Ancient Maya Granite Ground Stone Tool Production (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Toolstone and Mineral Geography Across Time and Space" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project recently recorded an extensive network of granitic rock quarry sites associated with an ancient Maya ground stone tool production industry in the Mountain Pine Ridge (MPR), Belize. At the extraction sites, raw material was workshopped into ground stone implements and then distributed...
Challenging Exoticization: Maritime Archaeology Logistics in West Africa and Eastern Canada (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Africa is often acknowledged in western academic spheres as a challenging archaeological fieldwork destination due to logistical issues like minimal internet resources, language barriers, and unfamiliar legal and physical landscapes. However, these traits are by no means exclusive to the African continent, and logistical issues are...
Coastal Foraging at a Shifting Shore: Assessing Late MIS 3 Coastal Resource Use at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 on the South Coast of South Africa (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early MSA coastal forager record of the African southern coast includes considerable variation in foraging strategies. The earliest sites show evidence of systematic use of coastal resources as part of a broader foraging strategy. True shell middens appear slightly later and...
Comparing Northern and Southern African Coastal Adaptations Through Faunal Remains (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of zooarchaeological research on faunas from coastal sites along the Cape of South Africa have documented human subsistence patterns during the Pleistocene Middle Stone Age (MSA) and the subsequent Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene Later Stone Age (LSA). MSA humans regularly...
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...
Cutting Edge Insights: A Newly Analyzed Ancient Maya Obsidian Assemblage from the Mid-to-Lower Belize River Valley (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Toolstone and Mineral Geography Across Time and Space" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian was used by the ancient Maya to create tools, weapons, and symbols of status. Archaeologists have analyzed these objects to better understand ancient trade and production systems, as well as socioeconomic and ideological spheres. While obsidian and obsidian sources have been thoroughly examined in many parts of the Maya...
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...
A Diachronic Analysis of Flaking Technology at the Multicomponent Site of Spring Lake (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Toolstone and Mineral Geography Across Time and Space" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spring Lake Site (41HY160) is a significant multicomponent archaeological site in Central Texas. Located at one of the State’s largest freshwater springs, the site contains material from Paleoindian to Protohistoric times. A combination of aggregate and typological analyses was used to examine over 18,000 pieces of debitage from...
Don’t Take it for Granite! Reestablishing the Geochemistry of Granite from the Maya Mountains (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Toolstone and Mineral Geography Across Time and Space" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya exploited three geochemically distinct granite sources from the Maya Mountains for a variety of ground stone tool and construction purposes. Previously, we sampled these sources and provided signature ranges of important elements that differentiate them. Here, we discuss recent field work that targeted the...
The earliest phases of occupation at Klasies River Main Site, southern Cape coast, South Africa (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Klasies River main, a well-known site in South African Middle Stone Age research, contributed significantly to palaeoanthropological evidence on early humans, and to knowledge of early human behaviour and palaeoenvironments. The earliest layers in Cave 1 at Klasies River is known as...
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...
How Things Change: Exploring Long-Term Patterns in Use of Quarried Chert in Neolithic Southern Germany (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Toolstone and Mineral Geography Across Time and Space" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Quarries and mines used to obtain silicites are known from Neolithic cultural landscapes across Europe, representing a common pattern of localized, repeated use of selected sources. Though common, Neolithic quarry sites are challenging to interpret in broader sociocultural context due in part to the chronological and regional...
Hunter-gatherer mobility and lithic procurement in the southern Cape: Results of artefact provenance from MSA Blombos Cave, South Africa (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Toolstone and Mineral Geography Across Time and Space" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in the southern Cape of South Africa continues to emphasize the region’s crucial role in understanding the emergence of cultural modernity among early modern humans. However, certain aspects of subsistence behavior, particularly the strategies for procuring raw materials and the associated patterns of...
"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...