Africa (Other Keyword)
26-50 (63 Records)
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...
The Intersection of Natural and Cultural Distributions of Toolstone in Path Valley, Pennsylvania (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 archaeological resources of Path Valley in Pennsylvania contain a limited number of toolstone types. The primary toolstone is chert, native in the valley bedrock and readily accessible from both primary and secondary geologic contexts throughout the valley. Crystal quartz was used less often but is also locally available in the...
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...
Justification for the comparative analysis of occupations of the coast in South Africa and Morocco during the Middle Stone Age (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. Twenty years ago, discussions of coastal resource use in paleoanthropology were largely limited to a handful of papers. Today, the antiquity of coastal resource use and its significance is a vigorously debated research question in paleoanthropology. Coastal resources are important for...
Last Interglacial environments of the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain: plant wax biomarkers from Knysna Easterns Heads 1, Cape 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. <html> The South Cape region of South Africa, part of the Cape Floristic Region, is a crucial area for investigating Pleistocene ecosystems and human evolution dynamics. The transition from the Middle to the Later Stone Age in this region coincides with the exposure of the...
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....
The Liberian Kru in the Atlantic World: A Visual Historical-Archaeological Timeline (2025)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Kru of Liberia are famous in history for their maritime activity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These sailors were integral parts of the British and American antislavery blockade, and they sailed on vessels in every ocean across the planet, forming new communities called ‘Kru Towns’ in major port cities like Liverpool, Cape Town, Accra, and Freetown, among others....
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...
Middle and Late Pleistocene human occupation in Morocco and cultural evolution of early Homo sapiens (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. Even though the archaeological record left by groups of earlier Homo sapiens can be found across the African continent, more substantive knowledge of human biological and cultural evolution comes only from few regions, one of which is northwest Morocco. Stratified deposits, most...
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...
More Than Axes to Grind: Ground Stone Tool Production and Use by the Maritime Archaic of Newfoundland (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 Maritime Archaic people of Newfoundland were a coastal culture whose primary economic activity was focused on sea mammals, fish, and seabirds in nearshore environments and offshore islands. It is assumed that they had seaworthy watercraft that allowed them to travel efficiently along the coast and to smaller islands in...
Non-invasive Chemical Investigation of Stone Ornaments from the Kashiwagi-B Site in the Late Jomon of Central Hokkaido Utilizing Portable X-Ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy (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 goal of this paper is to better understand variability in raw materials of stone ornaments recovered from burials at the Kashiwagi-B site, which cosists of shuteibo (a type of communal cemetery characterized by a circular embankment constructed in the latter half of the Late Jomon of central Hokkaido) and non-shuteibo burials....
North African Atlantic coast: A major refuge during the Late Pleistocene (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. North Africa holds a central position in the debate on the emergence and evolution of our species, thanks to numerous archaeological discoveries, especially the unearthing of the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens in Morocco, dated to 300 ka. Additionally, the discovery of various...
Paleoclimate Proxy Data and the Human Scale: Late Pleistocene Climate Variability and Forager Subsistence at La Grotte des Contrebandiers, 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> Understanding the climatic context of the human occupations of coastal landscapes in the Middle Stone Ages of North and South Africa is a necessary first step towards contextualizing early proliferations in these two regions of symbolic and functional technologies commonly...
Prey size in the MIS 5 and early MIS 4 levels at Pinnacle Point 5-6N, South Africa, and a comparison to regional prey size trends in South Africa and 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. Debates about the origins of precocious cultural behaviors appearing in Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 5 and 4 in Africa often center on changes in subsistence strategies or demographic pressures. Patterns of prey size reconstructed from archaeofauna can be a useful proxy in detecting...
A proposed comparative research strategy to investigate the heat treatment of stone raw material in northern and southern 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 heat treatment of stone is thought to be an important proxy for human cognition and social learning due to the complex sequence of events that combines multiple unrelated processes and objects. As early as 162,000 years ago humans on the south coast of South Africa were heating a...
Provisioning Production: Obsidian Sources and Industries at Cotzumalhuapa Lithic Workshops (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 sourcing studies have a long history in Mesoamerica, but few have concentrated on the Pacific Slope of Guatemala. Here, I present the results of sourcing analyses of obsidian artifacts excavated from Late to Terminal Classic (650-950 CE) manufacturing contexts at Cotzumalhuapa and its hinterland in Guatemala. Chemical...
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...
Reconstructing the Paleoenvironment at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, during the Technological Evolution of the Oldowan to Acheulean: A Geochemical and Geoarchaeological Study (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research focuses on deciphering the paleoenvironments associated with lower Bed II (1.8 - 1.6 Ma) of Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania in Eastern Africa. This dynamic time period includes multiple tectonic and volcanic events, the Oldowan to Acheulean technological transition, and the arrival of Homo erectus on the landscape. While research has been conducted...
Reevaluating the dietary role of coastal resources in Later Stone Age Hunter-Gatherers of Northwest Morocco: Insights from isotopic 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. <html> Archaeological sites in Northwest Morocco have provided valuable insights into early modern human behavior, particularly regarding the role of coastal resources, such as shells, in symbolic practices. Although some sites contain mollusc and fish remains, determining the exact...