African archaeology (Other Keyword)
1-5 (5 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology throughout the African continent in the last few decades has provided important insights into questions that are relevant to archaeology worldwide. Yet, these new theoretical perspectives and datasets have not been widely incorporated into scholarship elsewhere in the world, perhaps a latent effect of lingering...
Experimental Iron Smelting at Meroe, Sudan (2017)
The Royal City of Meroe, situated 250km north of Khartoum in the Republic of Sudan, was a capital of the Kingdom of Kush from the 4th Century BC. Famed for its pyramids and other monumental architecture, Meroe was also home to extensive bloomery ironworks exemplified by numerous slag mounds scattered across the site. Superficial investigation of furnace and slag remains were undertaken in the 1980’s and raised numerous questions about the technology. New archaeometallurgical research was...
Grounded in the Past, Looking Forward: Reflections on Archaeological Practice in the New Millennium (2016)
The plenary theme asks us to reflect on the question “what pasts for Africa?” This is a very big question, with many possible responses. The ones that I sketch are shaped by my position as a graying, North American-based scholar, where archaeology is practiced as a subfield of anthropology and a discipline among the social sciences. This location has substantially shaped my approach to our field, in terms of the questions that intrigue me, the combination of ‘science’ and ‘art’ through which my...
Hearth Features at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1, Southern Coast of South Africa (2017)
The Agulhas Bank Paleoscape (ABP), a broad coastal plain that is now a submerged continental shelf off the south coast of Africa, would have presented early modern humans with a variety of potential foraging options. A rich Middle Stone Age record documents the presence of early coastal foragers as well as terrestrial hunter-gatherers in the ABP. At Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1, both strategies are represented in a sequence spanning the end of the Middle Stone Age (about 40 ka) through to the end...
Rescue Excavations at Mai Adrasha (Ethiopia) (2016)
The combination of gold and archaeology is never a good one. The site of Mai Adrasha is under imminent threat of total destruction because of large scale panning of natural gold traces by the local population living near to the largest Axumite site West of Axum. In December 2015 a team from UCLA started a community project to work with the local population in safeguarding and excavating this important site. The research focus of the work is to establish the lay-out, development and function of...