African Archaeological Review最新文献

The Tichitt culture of the Ceramic Late Stone Age is known for its large settlement sites, built from dry stone walls. It is centered on the cliffs of southeastern Mauritania, but its links to the Middle Niger and the later urban developments there have long been a topic of research. This article adds a further piece of evidence linking the two regions. The available evidence for a set of stone-walled features is presented, around 300 sites of varying sizes and complexity. They lie on and around the sandstone massifs of the Malian Lakes Region. The evidence is so far tentative as no dating or material culture is available, but the sites are presented as a research priority for the future.

The site of Jebel Moya, situated in the center of the southern Gezira Plain in southcentral Sudan, has an occupational sequence spanning at least five millennia until around 2000 years ago. Renewed excavation is shedding new light on its occupational chronology and socioeconomic history, including activities such as burial, savanna herding, and domesticated sorghum cultivation practices dating to at least the mid-third millennium BC. In the present study, predominantly final phase pottery sherds from the first millennium BC to the start of the first millennium AD (Assemblage 3) have been analyzed via a combination of thin section petrography and instrumental geochemistry to determine their raw materials and place of manufacture and reconstruct their manufacturing technology. Organic residue analysis was also conducted to identify the products processed within vessels found at the site. The results suggest the existence of a well-developed local ceramic craft tradition that persisted for over one thousand years. Pots from Assemblage 3 were used to process, store, and consume animal and plant products, thus reinforcing emerging evidence for early agro-pastoral activities.

Ongoing research continues to show that ancient Africans had their own versions of science that were embedded in local contexts. The apparent lack of writing systems in most of the continent, especially south of the Sahara, was used to undermine the continent’s scientific achievements. Rather than relegate Africa to a simple receiver of science and technology, ancient Africans should be celebrated for their successful improvisation and experimentation. We discuss processes of metal and glass production in western and southern Africa to reveal key aspects of the scientific method in these ancient African technologies and situate the knowledge within an appreciation of inclusive education that embraces diverse ideas and practices of science and technology.

The dating and meaning of petroglyphs constitute a challenge in African rock-art research. In this article, we present and discuss a recently found rock-art assemblage from the Shaqadud site complex (Sudan), a site aggregation that nicely documents Holocene prehistoric cultural adaptations in non-aquatic, deep-savanna environments in what is today the Eastern Sahel. The rock-art corpus contains 120 identifiable motifs with a clear predominance of giraffes (n = 113, 94.2%) that are of small dimensions (< 50 cm) and are shown in a limited number of compositions. The thematic and technological compactness of the assemblage suggests a chronological integrity of the local figurative rock art and a coherent thematic and technological mindset of its creators. The archaeological context and the general characteristics of the assemblage place the local figurative rock art between the beginning of the Holocene and the Late Neolithic, in absolute dates between ca. 8748–1639 cal BC. However, spatial and visual connections could suggest a narrower dating of the assemblage, to the late Khartoum Mesolithic, around 6421–6088 cal BC. The predominance of the giraffe in the Shaqadud rock art suggests that this species may have carried a special significance for the local prehistoric communities. At the same time, the lack of hunting scenes in the figurative assemblage indicates that the importance of the giraffe motif goes beyond subsistence.

In the Global North, death is often treated as the departure of a person. However, across Africa, families and communities often include living and dead members, usually called “ancestors.” In this article, we use archaeology to support educators in communicating key aspects of deathways and the study of ancestors in Africa. We do this through an example drawn from the ancient kingdom of Aksum in Ethiopia (50–800 CE). Archaeologist Dilpreet Singh Basanti previously analyzed human remains from Aksum and reconstructed an ancient community’s burial and ongoing engagement with a young woman. Artist Naomi Mekonen has created a surrealist lens to present this woman’s story of death in this article’s figures. Surrealism is a rising perspective in modern art from the Tigray region and is used here to shift the tone from death as a grim tale of loss to death as a love story. We show how ongoing actions around the young woman’s tomb relate to her continued role in her family and community. Our example illustrates that ancestors are elements of healthy community life. Ancestors provide a guiding voice that helps to define people’s values and experiences of the world. In this way, ancestors are inseparable from “culture,” and exploring these themes helps us to appreciate the role of culture as a guiding way that connects generations of loved ones, living and dead.

Through the stories of four people who carried or traded cowrie shells, this article examines the connections between various parts of the world from a thousand years ago to the present. These connections spanned great distances, linking communities in West Africa and the Indian Ocean islands of the Maldives, and they bring to light the vast land and sea links that connected different regions of the African continent to the wider world in this period. We use cowrie shells to explore how objects participate in creating social relations, shaping senses of self and identity. When viewed in relation to the theme of connections, this offers a springboard for thinking about how things and their biographies fit within our lives today.

As an educator (Allison Balabuch) and an archaeologist (Ann Stahl), we consider how models drawn from archaeology, anthropology, and Indigenous principles of learning can help inform a shift from a “head” model of education to embodied learning through a Know-Do-Understand model. Learning in apprenticeship models has been an integral part of human history across the globe. Apprenticeship models echo Indigenous principles of learning, such as connections to place, relationality, and holistic, experiential learning. We also make a case for how learning through archaeology’s diverse and interdisciplinary subject matter can provide teachers with knowledge and skills to enrich formal classroom settings. By re-examining school pedagogy to consider models that include all of the learner—mind, body, and community—and through ongoing collaborations between archaeologists and educators, we can develop a more culturally inclusive and responsive model of education.

Weaving provides an access point to teach students about the heritage and the dynamic cultural importance of weaving practices in Africa. Weaving education teaches patience and perseverance. It also teaches math from a practical and problem-solving stance, which values ethnomathematical knowledge and skills. Weaving teaches science through the understanding and environmental sustainability of local plants and their practical uses. Throughout this article, we have interwoven our own teaching stories from Canada and Ghana (Allison Balabuch) and Madagascar (Bako Rasoarifetra) through the themes of heritage, mathematics, science, and the development of the self. This article discusses the importance and value of including weaving education into the classroom.

Gishimangeda Cave, near Lake Eyasi in northern Tanzania, exemplifies many challenges inherent in studying poorly documented “legacy collections” in African archaeology. The archaeological assemblage of at least twelve human individuals and associated artifacts was excavated in 1967 for primarily physical anthropological purposes. However, it has been difficult to link the materials to archaeological contexts or chronology. Recently, ancient DNA analysis of eleven individuals, eight of whom yielded direct dates of the later third millennium and early second millennium BP, has reinvigorated interest in what the site can reveal about social processes during the Pastoral Neolithic era (~5000–1200 years before present) and the transition to food production in eastern Africa. Here, we present an in-depth investigation of the history of research and excavation, and we provide descriptions of the human skeletal remains and material culture at Gishimangeda Cave and their archaeological contexts reconstructed using archival documents and photographs. Osteological analyses reveal individuals’ lived experiences and health. Three individuals have bilateral lesions on their petrous pyramids consistent with chronic otitis media, a condition that has yet to be archaeologically documented in eastern Africa. Through the analysis of the artifacts, we establish connections between Gishimangeda Cave and broadly contemporaneous herder and forager communities in the Lake Eyasi Basin. This case study illustrates the challenges and potential benefits of working with legacy collections in African archaeology. The article contributes to wider discussions in archaeology and museum studies about museum collections and the evolving ethical and scholarly obligations to them.