Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Lucero.

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. Lidar mapping has revealed extensive ancestral settlement patterns signifying a low-density urban system. Maya archaeologists are tasked with interpreting how the ancestral Maya interacted and kept this system working for over 1,000 years (ca. 100 BCE–900 CE) in the southern Maya lowlands of Central America. It was a complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Dueppen.

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. The archaeology and ethnohistory of western Burkina Faso provide myriad insights into the ways that social and political identities can be simultaneously strong, anchored, and flexible: communities can be simultaneously autonomous, connected, and engaged in collective action; and hierarchies can exist while being extensively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helina Woldekiros. A. Catherine D'Andrea.

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. Early agricultural systems relied on plants and animals originally carried thousands of miles by land and sea. Due to a lack of data and a greater emphasis on domestication processes, early agricultural complexes are less investigated than their domestication counterparts. This paper examines the introduction and evolution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Willeke Wendrich.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Olajide.

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. Despite the fact that the need to study early indigenous agricultural systems in Africa has long been recognized and reaffirmed in recent archaeological discussions, African agricultural practices are still being modeled using concepts, terminologies, questions, lines of evidence, and methods derived from research elsewhere in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olanrewaju Lasisi.

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. Since the discoveries of the astronomical orientation of Stonehenge in the 1960s, several scholarships have employed skyscape archaeology to answer questions about state formation and consolidation of complex societies. The majority of these works have focused outside Africa, particularly on cultures in Latin America, China,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Schmidt.

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. I was trained at Northwestern University by Stuart Struever, a student of L. Binford. I was nurtured on a positivist paradigm and force-fed like a goose on the 1960s New Archaeology. I was gratefully cured of these limitations by elders in East Africa who taught me deep respect for historical perspectives on the past. Because I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Jennings.

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. One of the consequences of European colonialism is the narrowing of the world’s political imagination. When colonists began to carve up Africa in the late nineteenth century, they were met with a dizzying range of governance systems—systems most famously pondered by academics in Fortes and Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) *African...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Mills. Sarah Herr. Matthew Peeples.

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. Igor Kopytoff’s (1987) model of the African Internal Frontier has impacted archaeological research in many areas of the world, including the US Southwest. His model has undergone considerable rethinking, such as Akinwumi Ogundiran’s (2014) work on the historical period of southwest Nigeria. We revisit the internal frontier model...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoë Crossland.

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. In this presentation I explore the ways in which African perspectives on ancestrality can inform archaeological approaches to the past. In historic Madagascar, the works and inheritance of the ancestors were fundamental to the building of political sovereignty, just as they are fundamental to the practice of archaeology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abidemi Babalola.

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. Technology transfer is a popular concept in the studies of pyro-technologies globally. This concept has been used uncritically in discourses on the origins and development of sophisticated technologies in sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of continuous patronage of this inherently derogatory concept in sub-Saharan African archaeology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akin Ogundiran.

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. Women’s work and administrative leadership were essential to the running of the Oyo Empire (ca. AD 1570–1836). As wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, enslaved and free bureaucrats, traders, artisans, and laborers, women played a wide range of roles in palace administration and in financing and reproducing the state (materially...