Download or read book African Pottery Roulettes Past and Present written by Anne Haour and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2010-07-10 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Pottery Roulettes Past and Present considers ethnographic, museological and archaeological approaches to pottery-decorating tools called roulettes, that is to say, short lengths of fibre or wood that are rolled over the surface of a vessel for decoration. This book sets out, for the first time, a solid typology for the classification of African pottery decorated with such tools, and forges a consensus on common methodology and standards. It gives an overview of history of research into roulette decoration in Africa and elsewhere Jomon Japan, Neolithic Europe, Siberia, and New York among others; outlines the contemporary distribution of roulette usage in sub-Saharan African today, a 'success story' from Senegal to Tanzania; and proposes methodologies for the identification of selected roulette decoration types in the archaeological record. By achieving standardisation in pottery analysis, this book will help researchers make meaningful comparisons between different sites of West Africa, and thus guide further research on the West African past. As roulette decoration has been such a global phenomenon in the past, the book will also be of interest to all researchers with an interest in ceramics from different parts of the world.
Download or read book Griot Potters of the Folona written by Barbara E. Frank and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-02 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Griot Potters of the Folona reconstructs the past of a particular group of West African women potters using evidence found in their artistry and techniques. The potters of the Folona region of southeastern Mali serve a diverse clientele and firing thousands of pots weekly during the height of the dry season. Although they identify themselves as Mande, the unique styles and types of objects the Folona women make, and more importantly, the way they form and fire them, are fundamentally different from Mande potters to the north and west. Through a brilliant comparative analysis of pottery production methods across the region, especially how the pots are formed and the way the techniques are taught by mothers to daughters, Barbara Frank concludes that the mothers of the potters of the Folona very likely came from the south and east, marrying Mande griots (West African leatherworkers who are better known as storytellers or musicians), as they made their way south in search of clientele as early as the 14th or 15th century CE. While the women may have nominally given up their mothers' identities through marriage, over the generations the potters preserved their maternal heritage through their technological style, passing this knowledge on to their daughters, and thus transforming the very nature of what it means to be a Mande griot. This is a story of resilience and the continuity of cultural heritage in the hands of women.
Download or read book Ceramics and Society written by Valentine Roux and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pottery is the most ubiquitous find in most historical archaeological excavations and serves as the basis for much research in the discipline. But it is not only its frequency that makes it a prime dataset for such research, it is also that pottery embeds many dimensions of the human experience, ranging from the purely technical to the eminently symbolic. The aim of this book is to provide a cutting-edge theoretical and methodological framework, as well as a practical guide, for archaeologists, students and researchers to study ceramic assemblages. As opposed to the conventional typological approach, which focuses on vessel shape and assumed function with the main goal of establishing a chronological sequence, the proposed framework is based on the technological approach. Such an approach utilizes the concept of chaîne opératoire, which is geared to an anthropological interpretation of archaeological objects. The author offers a sound theoretical background accompanied by an original research strategy whose presentation is at the heart of this book. This research strategy is presented in successive chapters that are geared to explain not only how to study archaeological assemblages, but also why the proposed methods are essential for achieving ambitious interpretive goals. In the heated debate on the equation stating that “pots equal people”, which is a rather fuzzy reference to assumed relationships between (mostly) ethnic groups and pottery, technology enables us to propose with conviction the equation “pots equal potters”. In this way, a well-founded history of potters is able to achieve a much better cultural and anthropological understanding of ancient societies.
Download or read book Gobero written by Elena A. A. Garcea and published by Africa Magna Verlag. This book was released on 2013 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sahara-Sahel borderland occupies a critical geographical position due to its recurrent latitudinal shifts, continually having a strong impact on humans, animals and plants. Gobero is located at the southern limits of the present Sahara, in Niger. The archaeological record at this site encompasses the re-occupation of the Sahara ca 10,000 years ago until approximately 2000 years ago. During this long period, Gobero witnessed significant fluctuations in climate and water resource availability that resulted in cycles of human occupation, abandonment and re-occupation around a natural basin occupied by a palaeolake, until desertification became an irreversible process and the area turned into a no-return frontier for its occupants. This book presents the archaeological, anthropological and environmental data collected during the 2005 and 2006 field seasons at Gobero. Various factors highlight the extraordinary significance of this site. Thanks to its geographical position, straddling the ancient shifting border(s) of the Sahara and the Sahel, the Gobero's archaeological record reveals critical population movements in this part of Africa and different economic and technological strategies its inhabitants employed to adapt to changing environmental conditions. The presence of both settlement and burial features at Gobero gives a comprehensive view of the cultural, social, economic and funerary traditions of the people who lived and died at this site during almost the entire Holocene. The results from these archaeological investigations provide a term of reference for future research and interpretations of past human occupations in the Sahara, as well as North and West Africa.
Download or read book Outsiders and Strangers written by Anne Haour and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asking what archaeology can bring to the debate on liminal peoples in West African societies, and drawing together for the first time the extensive literature on the subject of outsiders, this volume looks in detail at the role outsiders played in the past 1000 years of the West African past, in particular in the construction of great empires.
Download or read book Two Thousand Years in Dendi Northern Benin written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 819 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a study of archaeological sites, standing remains, oral traditions and craft industries, Two Thousand Years in Dendi, Northern Benin offers the first account of a West African region often described as a crossroads of medieval empires.
Download or read book Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past written by Francois G Richard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collective inquiries in this volume address ethnicity in ancient Africa as social fact and political artifact along numerous dimensions. Is ethnicity a useful analytic? What can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions which scholars have asked of identities in Africa? Eleven authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade. They examine how these intersect with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning from prehistory to the colonial period.
Download or read book A Day in a Working Life 3 volumes written by Gary Westfahl and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 1424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideal for high school and college students studying history through the everyday lives of men and women, this book offers intriguing information about the jobs that people have held, from ancient times to the 21st century. This unique book provides detailed studies of more than 300 occupations as they were practiced in 21 historical time periods, ranging from prehistory to the present day. Each profession is examined in a compelling essay that is specifically written to inform readers about career choices in different times and cultures, and is accompanied by a bibliography of additional sources of information, sidebars that relate historical issues to present-day concerns, as well as related historical documents. Readers of this work will learn what each profession entailed or entails on a daily basis, how one gained entry to the vocation, training methods, and typical compensation levels for the job. The book provides sufficient specific detail to convey a comprehensive understanding of the experiences, benefits, and downsides of a given profession. Selected accompanying documents further bring history to life by offering honest testimonies from people who actually worked in these occupations or interacted with those in that field.
Download or read book Capitalism and Cloves written by Sarah K. Croucher and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of nineteenth-century clove plantations on Zanzibar provides an important contribution to debates in global historical archaeology. Broadening plantation archaeology beyond the Atlantic World, this work addresses plantations run by Omani Arab colonial rulers of Zanzibar. Drawing on archaeological and historical data, this book argues for the need to examine non-Western contexts of colonialism and capitalism as coeval with those in the North Atlantic World. This work explores themes of capitalism, colonialism, plantation landscapes, African Diaspora communities, gender and sexuality, locally produced and imported goods in historic contexts, and Islamic historical archaeology.
Download or read book A History of Water Series III Volume 3 written by Terje Tvedt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-31 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major changes in policy and management , across the entire agricultural production chain, will be needed to ensure the best use of available water resources in meeting growing demands for food and other agricultural products. This new volume in the successful History of Water Series focuses on the African continent to address this key issue. Humanity has its roots in Africa and many of our food systems developed there. All types of agricultural production are present and the sheer size of the continent offers wide ecological variation from extreme desert to dense rainforest. Drawing together leading international contributors from a wide variety of disciplines Water and Food offers new insights into the evolution of food systems, from early hunter gatherers to the global challenges of the modern world.
Download or read book Landscapes Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-13 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past outlines new directions in the historiography of West Africa. Its chapters explore new trends across regional and disciplinary fields with a focus on how political conjunctures influence source production and circulation.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology written by Peter Mitchell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 1080 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa has the longest and arguably the most diverse archaeological record of any of the continents. It is where the human lineage first evolved and from where Homo sapiens spread across the rest of the world. Later, it witnessed novel experiments in food-production and unique trajectories to urbanism and the organisation of large communities that were not always structured along strictly hierarchical lines. Millennia of engagement with societies in other parts of the world confirm Africa's active participation in the construction of the modern world, while the richness of its history, ethnography, and linguistics provide unusually powerful opportunities for constructing interdisciplinary narratives of Africa's past. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. As well as covering almost all periods and regions of the continent, it includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates, and situates the subject's contemporary practice within the discipline's history and the infrastructural challenges now facing its practitioners. Bringing together essays on all these themes from over seventy contributors, many of them living and working in Africa, it offers a highly accessible, contemporary account of the subject for use by scholars and students of not only archaeology, but also history, anthropology, and other disciplines.
Download or read book African Archaeology Without Frontiers written by Chapurukha M Kusimba and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, contributors to African Archaeology Without Frontiers argue against artificial limits and divisions created through the study of ?ages? that in reality overlap and cannot and should not be understood in isolation. Papers are drawn from the proceedings of the landmark 14th PanAfrican Archaeological Association Congress, held in Johannesburg in 2014, nearly seven decades after the conference planned for 1951 was re-located to Algiers for ideological reasons following the National Party?s rise to power in South Africa. Contributions by keynote speakers Chapurukha Kusimba and Akin Ogundiran encourage African archaeologists to practise an archaeology that collaborates across many related fields of study to enrich our understanding of the past. The nine papers cover a broad geographical sweep by incorporating material on ongoing projects throughout the continent including South Africa, Botswana, Cameroon, Togo, Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria. Thematically, the papers included in the volume address issues of identity and interaction, and the need to balance cultural heritage management and sustainable development derived from a continent racked by social inequalities and crippling poverty. Edited by three leading archaeologists, the collection covers many aspects of African archaeology, and a range of periods from the earliest hominins to the historical period. It will appeal to specialists and interested amateurs.
Download or read book Materializing Colonial Identities in Clay written by Jon Bernard Marcoux and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers case studies of colonoware in Indigenous, enslaved, and European contexts in the Southeast
Download or read book Knowledge in Motion written by Andrew P. Roddick and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirit mediums of East Africa. Healers and fishermen of the Amazon River Basin. Potters of the American Southwest. People contending with climate change long ago. All share “knowledge in motion,” a process of drawing on experiences past and present while engaging in daily practice in relation to contexts of time, place, and power. In the last twenty-five years, scholars from a number of disciplines have explored “situated learning,” specifically investigating how learning relates to social reproduction and daily life. In Knowledge in Motion, contributors focus on learning through time and at a variety of scales, particularly as they relate to power and politics, with implications for emergent communities and constellations of practice. This volume brings together archaeologists, historians, and cultural anthropologists to examine communities engaged in a range of learning practices around the globe, from Africa to the Americas. Contributors draw on the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on situated learning to explore those processes in relation to power and broader forces that shape knowledge during times of turbulent change. Enriching the diversity of regions and disciplines, Knowledge in Motion focuses on how learning, knowledge transmission, and the emergent qualities of communities and constellations of practice are shaped by changing spheres of interaction or other unstable events and influences. The contributions forge productive theories and methodologies for exploring situated learning and its broad-ranging outcomes.
Download or read book Contribution of Ceramic Technological Approaches to the Anthropology and Archaeology of Pre and Protohistoric Societies Apport des approaches technologiques de la c ramique l anthropologie et l arch ologie des soci t s pr et protohistoriques written by François Giligny and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reconstruction of the technical systems of ceramic production and of its ‘chaîne opératoire’ is a means of exploring certain social structures in time and space. Papers here highlight the contribution of technological approaches to ceramics, both in archaeology and in ethnology, to the analysis of pre- and protohistoric societies.
Download or read book Balkan Dialogues written by Maja Gori and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatial variation and patterning in the distribution of artefacts are topics of fundamental significance in Balkan archaeology. For decades, archaeologists have classified spatial clusters of artefacts into discrete “cultures”, which have been conventionally treated as bound entities and equated with past social or ethnic groups. This timely volume fulfils the need for an up-to-date and theoretically informed dialogue on group identity in Balkan prehistory. Thirteen case studies covering the beginning of the Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age and written by archaeologists conducting fieldwork in the region, as well as by ethnologists with a research focus on material culture and identity, provide a robust foundation for exploring these issues. Bringing together the latest research, with a particular intentional focus on the central and western Balkans, this collection offers original perspectives on Balkan prehistory with relevance to the neighbouring regions of Eastern and Central Europe, the Mediterranean and Anatolia. Balkan Dialogues challenges long-established interpretations in the field and provides a new, contextualised reading of the archaeological record of this region.
