Fire, Food, Farms, and Fortifications: Recent Advances in the Archaeology of Africa
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
In this session, we present results of new and emerging work focusing on the African continent. Papers represent the wide range of periods and diversity of research topics in Africanist archaeology. Major themes include early fire and tool use; the beginnings of food production; and socioeconomic and settlement shifts during the Atlantic era. Regions covered span the continent, including Egypt and the Horn, as well as North, East, West, and Southern Africa.
Other Keywords
Settlement patterns •
Africa •
Middle Stone Age •
Political economy •
Geoarchaeology •
Architecture •
Lithic Technology •
Lithics •
Site Formation •
Environmental Change
Geographic Keywords
AFRICA
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- Documents (15)
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Cereals and agricultural risk management in northern Sudan, past and present (2016)
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Nubian agricultural practices are rapidly altering due to infrastructure development, as well as technological and environmental changes. We have been interviewing Nubian farmers about crop choices, land-use and irrigation. Farmer interviews have focused on a car- and electricity-free Nile island, Ernetta, where many 'traditional' practices have continued for a comparatively long time. We are also interviewing farmers in other villages throughout the north to understand variability. This...
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Cereals and Ceramics: Another Look at the Late Neolithic Development of the Butana Group in Eastern Sudan during the 4th Millennium BC (2016)
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This paper will discuss the new findings of domesticated sorghum along with the ceramics associated with the Butana Group at an archaeological site called, KG23. The Butana Group represents a cultural manifestation in the southern Atbai of the far eastern Sahel that dates around 3500-3000 BC, and was contemporary with other groups such as the Late Neolithic groups in the central Nile Valley, the pre-Kerma culture in Upper Nubia, the A-Group in Lower Nubia, and the Egyptian Predynastic cultures...
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Cinciliths: A new term describing systematic small-unretouched tool production (2016)
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The term “microlith” has grown to include a range of small tool technologies beyond those for which it was originally intended (small retouched geometrics). This definitional dilemma has resulted in a loss of precision in studies of technological miniaturization. Miniaturization includes the production and use of small-unretouched flakes from small cores. This paper proposes a new term for this phenomenon, Cinci-liths (Cinci: isiXhosa for small) that solves the problem of distinguishing these...
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Coastal marine resource exploitation during the Late Pleistocene at Contrebandiers Cave (Temara, Morocco) (2016)
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Increasingly, researchers have considered the role of coastal marine resource exploitation in influencing the trajectory of human behavioral and biological evolution, specifically relating to modern human origins. However, these models have focused almost exclusively on the relatively rich and well-documented record from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) of coastal South Africa. Here, we present data on coastal marine resource exploitation during the Late Pleistocene at Contrebandiers Cave [La Grotte...
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Earthen dwellings from Banda, Ghana: Geoarchaeological analyses of archaeological and modern structures (2016)
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West African earthen architecture is among the most elaborated in the world as recognized by the World Heritage site status of Asante buildings at Kumasi. However, its history is poorly known. This study begins to redress this gap by employing bulk sediment analyses and soil micromorphology to characterize building remains recovered at the Ngre Kataa site, in Banda, Ghana and a contemporary earthen compound in the region. The study was conducted in tandem with archaeological and...
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Fieldwork on Iron Age sites of the Benoué Valley, Cameroon, in 2014 (2016)
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Iron Age settlements in the Benoué River Valley around Garoua in northern Cameroon were dispersed across the landscape, taking advantage of different eco-climatic zones to exploit a variety of natural resources. Fieldwork undertaken in 2014 located numerous mound sites in the area around Garoua, with occupation histories spanning multiple centuries. In particular, the site of Langui Tcheboua displays evidence for rapid accumulation of sediments approximately 700 years ago, which may have been a...
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Identifying fire in Early Stone Age: A study of site FxJj20 AB, Koobi Fora, Kenya (2016)
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Fire use by human ancestors may explain changes seen in Homo erectus and be responsible for the development of later human species. Anthropogenic fire claims in the Early Stone Age (ESA) are disputed because many of these sites are in secondary deposits and contain no association between human behavior and fire evidence. Careful excavation producing high-resolution spatial data, detailed micromorphological analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR), and high-resolution spatial...
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Late Holocene Foraging and Early Farming in Northwestern Zimbabwe: Excavations and Analysis of Rock Shelters and an Open‐Air Village Site (2016)
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Archaeological sites in Hwange National Park, northwestern Zimbabwe, record how and when food production expanded into this part of southern Africa. An examined early farming village contains diagnostic comb-stamped and channeled thickware pottery and copper bangles dated to 1800 and 1200 cal BP. This earliest farming community supplemented crops with hunted local wild game, but left no evidence of direct contact with indigenous hunter‐gatherers who had repeatedly occupied rock shelters 30 km...
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Late Pleistocene lithic technological patterns in East Africa (2016)
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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....
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"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)
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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...
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Relocate, Aggregate, or Fortify?: Exploring Local Responses to Atlantic Era Entanglement in Southeastern Senegal (2016)
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The 16-19th centuries in West Africa marked a period of dramatic social and cultural change fueled, in part, by the opening of Atlantic markets and the rise of predatory states. The responses of societies peripheral to these political economic processes often involved strategic shifts in the production of space—including relocation to highland refuge areas, aggregation into larger villages, increases in residential mobility, and fortification of elite houses and/or entire settlements. In this...
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A report of recent excavation at Okete-Kakini palace precint, Idah, Niger-Benue Confluence, Nigeria (2016)
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This paper will report the recent excavation at Okete-Kakini site near the king’s (Attah) palace in Idah. Okete-Kakini was the residential area of Attah’s eunuchs (amonoji), one of the two major palace officials who carried out various functions for the Attah. The aim of the investigation is to identify the activities of the palatine elites through an examination of their material culture found in archaeological excavations. It is thought that the members of the palatine groups, like the formal...
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Rescue Excavations at Mai Adrasha (Ethiopia) (2016)
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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...
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Scaling Food Practices: Contextual Comparison of Animal and Plant Remains from Banda, Ghana, during the Early Atlantic Era (2016)
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In this paper, we examine food practices in Banda, Ghana, during the tumultuous 15th to 17th centuries AD, as global scale political economic shifts collided with local economies. In Banda, significant involvement in northward-looking Niger trade began to erode as attention shifted towards emerging Atlantic networks. At the same time, paleoenvironmental records indicate a severe, multi-century drought. How did people negotiate these pressures in their everyday food practices? To address this...
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Ye Olde Fishing Hole: A Late Paleolithic Fishing Camp, Wadi Kubbaniya, Egypt (2016)
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WK26 is a Late Paleolithic occupation consisting of a sparse lithic scatter, hearths, postholes, storage features, a possible living floor, and faunal remains in which fish predominate. The site lies on the west side of Wadi Kubbaniya, north of Aswan, Egypt, and opposite the Late Paleolithic dune field the Combined Prehistoric Expedition investigated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Radiocarbon dates and stratigraphic position indicate that WK26 dates to the end of the Late Paleolithic. Few...