African Archaeological Review最新文献

Archaeological field surveys in Zanzibar, Tanzania point to the role of specific rural agricultural regions in shaping social transformations across the East African coast and the Indian Ocean world. From 1000 to 1400 CE, small rural communities developed within fertile soil zones in response to local social demands for grain and other agricultural products. The abandonment of rural inland villages following the end of occupations at the elite center of Tumbatu to the north likely reflects a return to coastal subsistence in the fourteenth or early fifteenth century, in parallel with other systemic changes across the East African coast during this time. Newcomers to these same rural areas resumed the production of agricultural surpluses in the late colonial period (1830–1964) during the development of the plantation system on the island. Settlement patterns, ceramic analyses, and architectural patterns attest to the significant entrainment of these rural spaces within emergent global economic networks. Though power accumulated in towns and urban centers, rural agricultural landscapes on the island were places where elites mobilized and converted social dependency and slavery into both social prestige and commodified, economic wealth multiple times over the last millennium. As venues for agricultural production, specific rural landscapes helped produce the transformations that altered social dynamics in East Africa, the Indian Ocean, and beyond.

Abstract 

In southern Africa and elsewhere, the archaeological study of ceramics largely relies on two approaches that tend to be treated separately: technology and style. While the emphasis of Iron Age archaeology has been on the range of shapes and decorative characteristics of pots and how these are determined or illustrative of cultural identities, little is known about the technological processes of ceramic production. This article uses ethnoarchaeological methods to examine the chaine operatories of ceramic production in specific sociocultural contexts among the Nguni-speaking (Zulu) peoples in the Upper and Lower uThukela Basins in KwaZulu-Natal. The study focuses on social and technical decisions for ceramic production and documents production stages and attributes, design, style, and functional components. Moreover, the social characteristics of production stages are used to understand various techniques, processes, tools, and materials involved in ceramic production, including distribution and apprenticeship. The social and operational attributes of ceramic production discussed in this article are potential sources for developing models that would bridge the gaps between the technology and style approaches in the archaeological study of Iron Age ceramics in southern Africa.

In West Africa, there is a disjuncture between historical processes in the second millennium BC and late first millennium AD due to a comparative lack of archaeological data. In the Mouhoun Bend of western Burkina Faso, recent research has found that beginning in the second quarter of the first millennium BC, a landscape emerged of dispersed agricultural homesteads spaced 1–3 km apart. This paper synthesizes published data from the basal levels (Yellow I subphase) of the site of Kirikongo, adds new survey and excavation data from three sites identified by the Kirikongo Regional Project, and integrates data from previous archaeological research in the region. During Yellow I, Mouhoun Bend residents lived in economically generalized multi-family houses that produced their own material culture (ceramics, iron), farmed, kept domestic animals, fished, hunted, and managed wild plants. Funerary rituals involved the creation of earthen structures and the ritualized deposition of material culture and food remains in pits or concavities. Comparing these sites with contemporary and earlier communities in the region including Kintampo, Rim, and Jenne-jeno, we argue that West Africa from the second millennium BC through the early first millennium AD was home to a complex and culturally diverse interconnected network of dispersed farming societies. The capillary network they created facilitated broader trade and exchange including transfers of technologies and new economic resources throughout the region. The emergence of early marketplace centers was supported by and served these networks and may have been linked to mineral salt production and/or exchange.

The lack of vertical stratigraphic sondages and open area excavations constitutes a challenge to understanding Mauritanian urbanism. This makes the characterization of the spatio-temporal evolution of Mauritanian towns a difficult task. Systematic excavations carried out in Tamuda by several research teams in the twentieth century provided vertical and horizontal views of Mauritanian urbanism. Our study offers, for the first time, a high-resolution geoarchaeological analysis of Tamuda’s urban sequence (third through first century BC). The microfacies analysis, by means of micromorphology and µ-XRF of Spaces E18 and E20 of the Eastern Quarter revealed a complex interaction of deposits and site formation processes that resulted from changes in everyday urban life. In this respect, the overlap of different construction phases and the alternation of episodes of active use and abandonment is highly significant. This study examines the functional characterization of urban spaces, including the identification of midden activities, a roasting pit, and a milling site (possibly) linked to fish flour production. These activities leave traces on beaten floors and occupation surfaces, and several features indicate abandonment periods between short-term occupations. The result is a complex urban biography of this Mauritanian town, in which human occupation was not constant over time.

Kom W, a Neolithic site on the north shore of Lake Qarun in the Fayum in the Western Desert of northern Egypt, is well known for the excavation by the British archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson in the early twentieth century. Since then, scholars have repeatedly investigated Kom W, and new information and interpretations about the site have been published. This article aims to throw light on the neglected aspects of Kom W. It will first provide an overview of the research history of Kom W and its surrounding area and the culture history of the prehistoric Fayum. This broad context is necessary for the interpretation of how Kom W and its surrounding area were inhabited in the past. It will then reconsider Kom W and its surrounding area on the basis of research on Caton-Thompson’s lithic finds, which were only partially published by her and are presently housed in museums in the UK. Finally, the article will address some of the arguments and misrepresentations in a recent publication by J. Emmitt and colleagues (Emmitt et al., 2021).