Recent Advances in Material Sourcing and Provenience Studies in Africa

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Recent Advances in Material Sourcing and Provenience Studies in Africa" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Africa preserves the deepest history of raw material exploitation in the world and compositional sourcing techniques have been central to the practice of archaeological science on the continent for over half a century. The goal of this symposium is to bring together a wide range of research into the procurement, movement, and transport of raw materials across the African continent. The papers in this session range from new studies of material procurement in understudied regions, to recent advances in compositional sourcing techniques, to discussions of what provenience and sourcing studies can reveal about the diverse ways people and things have moved across natural and social landscapes through time.