Journal of African Archaeology 12 (1) PDF Download

Author: Peter Breunig
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783937248424
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description

Author: Graham Connah
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316462412
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427

View

Book Description
This new revised edition of African Civilizations re-examines the physical evidence for developing social complexity in Africa over the last six thousand years. Unlike the two previous editions, it is not confined to tropical Africa but considers the whole continent. Graham Connah focuses upon the archaeological research of two key aspects of complexity, urbanism and state formation, in ten main areas of Africa: Egypt, North Africa, Nubia, Ethiopia, the West African savanna, the West African forest, the East African coast and islands, the Zimbabwe Plateau, parts of Central Africa and South Africa. The book's main concern is to review the available evidence in its varied environmental settings, and to consider possible explanations of the developments that gave rise to it. Extensively illustrated, including new maps and plans, and offering an extended list of references, this is essential reading for students of archaeology, anthropology, African history, black studies and social geography.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Africa
Languages : en
Pages : 304

View

Book Description

Author: Amanuel Beyin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031202902
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 2194

View

Book Description
This handbook showcases an Africa-wide compendium of Stone Age archaeological sites and methodological advances that have improved our understanding of hominin lifeways and biogeography in the continent. The focal time spans the Pleistocene Epoch (c. 2.5 million–11,700 years ago) during which important human traits, such as obligate bipedalism that freed the hands to engage in creative activities, a large brain relative to body size, language, and social complexity, developed in the general forms that they are found today. The handbook is the first of its kind, and it is expected to play a significant role in human evolutionary research by: ❖ Collating the African Stone Age record, which exists in a fragmented state along the lines of national boundaries and colonial experiences. ❖ Showcasing emerging conceptual and methodological advances in African Pleistocene archaeology. ❖ Providing reference datasets for teaching and researching African prehistory. ❖ Making Africa’s Stone Age record accessible to researchers and students based in Africa who may not have access to journal publications where most new field discoveries are published. The Handbook features 128 chapters, of which 116 are site entries grouped by the host countries and presented in an alphabetical order. A number of those site-related entries examine multiple archaeological localities lumped under specific projects or study areas. The rest of the contributions deal with methodological topics, such as luminescence and radiocarbon dating, field data recovery, lithic analysis, micromorphology, and hominin fossil and zooarchaeological records of Pleistocene Africa. The introductory chapter provides an historical overview of the development of Stone Age (Paleolithic) archaeology in Africa beginning in the mid-19th century, and paleoenvironmental and chronological frameworks commonly used to structure the continent’s Pleistocene record. By making a good amount of African Stone Age literature accessible to researchers and the public, we wish to promote interest in human evolutionary research in the continent and elsewhere.

Author: Benjamin Collins
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805394614
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

View

Book Description
The human body is both the site of lived experiences and a means of communicating those experiences to a diverse audience. Hominins have been culturing their bodies, that is adding social and cultural meaning through the use pigments and objects, for over 100,000 years. There is archaeological evidence for practices of adornment of the body by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hominins, including personal ornaments, clothing, hairstyles, body painting, and tattoos. These practices have been variously interpreted to reflect differences such as gender, status, and ethnicity, to attract or intimidate others, and as indices of a symbolically mediated self and personal identity. These studies contribute to a novel and growing body of evidence for diversity of cultural expression in the past, something that is a hallmark of human cultures today.

Author: Andrew M. Reid
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0306479966
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 420

View

Book Description
This volume explores the range of interactions between the historical sources and archaeology that are available on the African continent. Written by a range of experts on different aspects of African archaeology, this book represents the first consideration of historical archaeology over the African continent as a whole. This seminal volume also explores Africa's place in global systems of thought and economic development and is of interest to historical archaeologists and historians.

Author: Peter Mitchell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009324764
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 586

View

Book Description
Some of humanity's earliest ancestors lived in southern Africa and evidence from sites there has inspired key debates on human origins and the emergence of complex cognition. Building on its rich rock art heritage, archaeologists have developed theoretical work that continues to influence rock art studies worldwide, with the relationship between archaeological and anthropological data central to understanding past hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and farmer communities alike. New work on pre-colonial states contests models that previously explained their emergence via external trade, while the transformations wrought by European colonialism are being rewritten to emphasise Indigenous agency, feeding into efforts to decolonise the discipline itself. Inhabited by humans longer than almost anywhere else and with an unusually varied, complex past, southern Africa thus has much to contribute to archaeology worldwide. In this revised and updated edition, Peter Mitchell provides a comprehensive and extensively illustrated synthesis of its archaeology over more than three million years.

Author: Timothy Insoll
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191062227
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

View

Book Description
How people engaged with materials such as clay or stone, why people dug features such as pits, why they decorated their bodies, or treated their dead in certain ways, were all meaningful in the African past. However, these are subjects that have been generally neglected by archaeologists working in Africa until recently. Material Explorations in African Archaeology examines materiality in African archaeology by exploring concepts of material agency and material engagement and entanglement in relation to their manifest presence in persons, animals, objects, substances, and contexts. It investigates the magnificent and complex world of past African materiality by considering a range of case studies. These include, for example, why standing stones were erected, the potential meanings of bodily alteration practices such as scarification and dental modification, and why, recurrently, Africans in the past gave ritual importance to objects, materials, and locations thought of as exotic or different. Adopting a multidisciplinary focus, the volume draws not only on archaeology but also, among other areas, ethnography and history, discussing themes such as bodies, landscape, healing and medicine, and divination, as well as concepts such as memory and biography, transformation, and metaphor and metonym.

Author: Chris J Stevens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315434008
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

View

Book Description
The first major synthesis of African archaeobotany in decades, this book significantly advances our knowledge of relationship between agriculture and social complexity.

Author: Lars Werdelin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520257219
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1008

View

Book Description
"This impressively comprehensive volume is a long-awaited and worthy successor to the now outdated 1978 classic, Evolution of African Mammals. A must-have reference work for everyone interested in mammalian evolution." David Pilbeam, Harvard University and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology --