African Archaeology throughout the Holocene

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Fenn.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the commodities heading south across the Saharan Desert over the past 2000+ years was glass. The typical form was as beads, but vessel glass and other forms also have been recorded. Glass not only was imported but at some point in the past also was produced by indigenous populations for local and regional consumption. Advances in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomos Evans.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the city of Ile-Ife (Nigeria) in 1953, three foreign archaeologists (Bernard Fagg, AJH Goodwin, and William Fagg), with the permission of the Oni of Ife, conducted several months of fieldwork in the old city. With the aim of uncovering evidence relating to Ile-Ife’s early industries (including exquisite brass and terracotta artworks), they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Coutros. Brooke Luokkala.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Worked bone has a long history across the African continent, occurring as early as the Middle Stone Age in eastern and southern Africa. However, since the beginning of the Holocene, barbed and un-barbed points – associated with the so-called ‘African Aqualithic’ peaking at 9,000 BP – have likewise been recovered from sites within Sahelian and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Ellrich.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last decade, heritage research in Kagera Region of NW Tanzania has responded to community-driven initiatives focused on preservation, tourism, and museum development. This attention to heritage-related programs has fostered several projects that continue to enhance our understanding of appropriate methods for preserving local and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mica Jones. Steven Brandt.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environmental changes during the African Humid Period (~11,000-5,000 BP) are associated with the emergence of new social and economic strategies among some hunter-gatherers in northern and eastern Africa. In response to Early Holocene climatic amelioration, foragers in southwestern Libya and the Lake Victoria Basin decreased their mobility and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anneke Janzen. Mary Prendergast. Katherine Grillo.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. East African pastoralists today rely on extensive social networks through which livestock are exchanged to maintain herds. The role of such animal exchange networks among ancient pastoralist communities can be revealed through stable isotope analysis. Pastoral Neolithic sites are broadly distributed across southern Kenya and northern Tanzania....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dave Schmitt. Karen Lupo. Jean-Paul Ndanga. D. Craig Young. Christopher Kiahtipes.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recently, Lupo and colleagues (2018) reported data on the nature and timing of late Holocene human occupation in the northern Congo Basin rain forest, southern Central African Republic and this paper presents new archaeological and chronometric information. Field reconnaissance identified 25 new archaeological sites, including additional iron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Klehm. Mark Helper. Elisabeth Hildebrand.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beads play a prominent role in personal ornamentation in life and death: desired, exploited, and widely traded throughout prehistory. Although manufacture and use provide important social context, evaluating the materials used and their source locations is a crucial component of understanding how these industries arise. This paper features an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Goldstein. Natalie Mueller. Elizabeth Sawchuk. Emmanuel Ndiema. Christine Ogola.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The domestication of African cereals and origins and spread of plant agriculture in eastern Africa remain poorly understood. Questions about the timing of farming, crop packages, and correlations with migration events, endure largely due to a lack of paleobotanical recovery and high-resolution dating on inland eastern African sites. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Kay.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Situated within the Great Rift Complex of northwest Kenya, the Elgeyo Escarpment and surrounding region has been home to Marakwet communities for the last three hundred years. Many of these communities inhabit settlements which span diverse ecosystems, from semi-arid bush to highland forests. In tandem with changes in local lifeways and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorraine Hu. Fiona Marshall. Henry Saitabau. Angela Kabiru. Stanley Ambrose.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The spread of food production in East Africa c. 5000-1000 BP involved peoples with diverse subsistence patterns, material culture repertoires and identities. Pastoral Neolithic burial traditions include monumental pillar sites in northern Kenya, cremations in rockshelters in the southern highlands of Kenya and northern Tanzania, and widespread...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Gomes. Mussa Raja. Célia Gonçalves. Nuno Bicho. Jonathan Haws.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Contrasting with other areas of the globe, there are few palaeoenvironmental studies in Africa and in particularly in Mozambique. However, the knowledge about Quaternary palaeoenvironmental changes and their forcers (e.g. climate and sea level changes) is essential to understand the environmental context of human occupation of the Inhambane...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Madagascar constitutes a major anomaly in the history of human colonization: 400 km from the African mainland, but with a population whose culture, language, and genes derive substantially from Indonesia, more than 7000 km away. Recently, the argument has gained ground that the island was settled (perhaps from Africa) significantly earlier...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kefilwe Rammutloa.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of the trade and exchange networks systems in Southern Africa during AD 700 to AD 1300 has mostly been drawn from sites located in the Shashe Limpopo Confluence Area (SCLA); a drainage basin that is positioned on the borders of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. This has led to bias interpretations and conceptualisation on...