Download or read book Under the Mopane Tree Holocene Settlement in Northern Namibia written by Ralf Vogelsang and published by Heinrich Barth Institut. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main research focus of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 389 ACACIA (Arid Climate Adaptation and Cultural Innovation in Africa), established at the University of Cologne in 1995, was the interaction between man and arid environments in Africa (KUPER et al. 2007). An important part was played by the diachronic examination of these processes and their development during the Holocene period in Northeast and Southwest Af ri ca. A longterm aim of the interdisciplinary research projects was the comparison of the Holocene settlement history and palaeoecology and the identification of common and divergent developments in both hemispheres. The volume at hand describes some results of the project B4: “Palaeoecology and the Late Holocene Occupation of Northern Namibia”. Regional focus is the northern part of the Kunene Region, the Opuwo District (former Kaokoland), a region in the arid limits between the Namib Desert and the savanna of the interior highlands. Three different scientific fields – namely prehistoric archaeology, archaeobotany and archaeozoology – cooperated in the fieldwork and analysis to reconstruct the prehistoric cultures and environment in the research area during the Holocene time period. Unfortunately, the archaeozoological results are still missing and not included in this book.
Download or read book Shaping the African Savannah written by Michael Bollig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an 'Arid Eden' in recent literature, as one of Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a 'last frontier' by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia's Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this 'Arid Eden' came into being, how this 'last frontier' was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.
Download or read book Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa written by Amanuel Beyin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-08-17 with total page 2194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Radiocarbon Dates Stone Tools and the Origin of Herding on the West Coast of South Africa written by Karim Sadr and published by Africa Magna Verlag. This book was released on 2014-08-12 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph makes a significant contribution to answering some long standing questions in the Later Stone Age prehistory of southern Africa and to archaeological methods in general. The Vredenburg Peninsula Survey project originally set out to confirm that the first herders at the south-western Cape were immigrant Khoekhoe-speakers who had migrated from farther north about two thousand years ago. It failed to find evidence to support this hypothesis and instead ended up making a solid contribution to documenting the regional transition from formal, microlithic technology to the informal stone tool repertoire that marks the immediately Pre-Colonial period. It also throws light on another regional question concerning the rise and fall of stone adze technology. Its contribution to survey methodology is of worldwide importance and this is the first time an archaeologist has gambled on dating surface shell on a large scale and it has paid off handsomely. Coastal archaeologists on all continents should take note of this, and be rightly encouraged.
Download or read book Pastoralism in Africa written by Michael Bollig and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pastoralism has shaped livelihoods and landscapes on the African continent for millennia. Mobile livestock husbandry has generally been portrayed as an economic strategy that successfully met the challenges of low biomass productivity and environmental variability in arid and semi-arid environments. This volume focuses on the emergence, diversity, and inherent dynamics of pastoralism in Africa based on research during a twelve-year period on the southwest and northeast regions. Unraveling the complex prehistory, history, and contemporary political ecology of African pastoralism, results in insight into the ingenuity and flexibility of historical and contemporary herders.
Download or read book Theology and Evolutionary Anthropology written by Celia Deane-Drummond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sets out some of the latest scientific findings around the evolutionary development of religion and faith and then explores their theological implications. This unique combination of perspectives raises fascinating questions about the characteristics that are considered integral for a flourishing social and religious life and allows us to start to ask where in the evolutionary record they first show up in a distinctly human manner. The book builds a case for connecting theology and evolutionary anthropology using both historical and contemporary sources of knowledge to try and understand the origins of wisdom, humility, and grace in ‘deep time’. In the section on wisdom, the book examines the origins of complex decision-making in humans through the archaeological record, recent discoveries in evolutionary anthropology, and the philosophical richness of semiotics. The book then moves to an exploration of the origin of characteristics integral to the social life of small-scale communities, which then points in an indirect way to the disposition of humility. Finally, it investigates the theological dimensions of grace and considers how artefacts left behind in the material record by our human ancestors, and the perspective they reflect, might inform contemporary concepts of grace. This is a cutting-edge volume that refuses to commit the errors of either too easy a synthesis or too facile a separation between science and religion. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of religious studies and theology – especially those who interact with scientific fields – as well as academics working in anthropology of religion.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Southern Africa written by Peter Mitchell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-06 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Food fuel and fields written by Katharina Neumann and published by Heinrich-Barth-Institut. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on papers from the 3rd International Workshop on African Archaeobotany, Frankfurt, Germany, July 5-7, 2000
Download or read book Shaping the African Savannah written by Michael Bollig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of 150 years of social-ecological transformations in the arid savannah landscape of Namibia.
Download or read book The Archaeology and Ethnography of Central Africa written by James Denbow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first detailed description of the prehistory of the Loango coast of west-central Africa over the course of more than 3000 years.
Download or read book Only in Africa written by Norman Owen-Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates how Africa's physical features, savannas and abundant grazers enabled frugivorous apes to become savanna-living hunters.
Download or read book Bioclimatology and Biogeography of Africa written by Henry N. Houérou and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering an area of over 130 million km2 spanning the Mediterranean, equator and tropics, the African continent features a spectacular geographic diversity. Consequently, it is characterised by extremely variable climatic, edaphic and ecological conditions, associated with a wide range of natural vegetation and wildlife, as well as human population density, crops and livestock. In this book, Henry Le Houérou presents his bioclimatic and biogeographic classification of Africa. The extensive data provide the basis for comparisons between various African regions, and with regions on other continents such as Latin America or the Indian subcontinent. The results constitute a rational basis for national, regional and sub-regional rural development planning, and for agricultural research dealing with aspects such as plant and animal introductions, the extrapolation or interpolation of experimental or developmental findings, and ecosystems dynamics. Possible problems of applications are also examined.
Download or read book The Regional Impacts of Climate Change written by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Working Group II. and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Download or read book The Conservation Biology of Tortoises written by IUCN/SSC Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group and published by IUCN. This book was released on 1989 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wired for Culture Origins of the Human Social Mind written by Mark Pagel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating, far-reaching study of how our species' innate capacity for culture altered the course of our social and evolutionary history. A unique trait of the human species is that our personalities, lifestyles, and worldviews are shaped by an accident of birth—namely, the culture into which we are born. It is our cultures and not our genes that determine which foods we eat, which languages we speak, which people we love and marry, and which people we kill in war. But how did our species develop a mind that is hardwired for culture—and why? Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel tracks this intriguing question through the last 80,000 years of human evolution, revealing how an innate propensity to contribute and conform to the culture of our birth not only enabled human survival and progress in the past but also continues to influence our behavior today. Shedding light on our species’ defining attributes—from art, morality, and altruism to self-interest, deception, and prejudice—Wired for Culture offers surprising new insights into what it means to be human.
Download or read book Livelihood and Landscape Change in Africa Future Trajectories for Improved Well Being under a Changing Climate written by Sheona Shackleton and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is based on a Special Issue of the journal LAND that draws together a collection of 11 diverse articles at the nexus of climate change, landscapes, and livelihoods in rural Africa; all explore the links between livelihood and landscape change, including shifts in farming practices and natural resource use and management. The articles, which are all place-based case studies across nine African countries, cover three not necessarily mutually exclusive thematic areas, namely: smallholder farming livelihoods under new climate risk (five articles); long-term dynamics of livelihoods and landscape change and future trajectories (two articles); and natural resource management and governance under a changing climate, spanning forests, woodlands, and rangelands (four articles). The commonalities, key messages, and research gaps across the 11 articles are presented in a synthesis article. All the case studies pointed to the need for an integrated and in-depth understanding of the multiple drivers of landscape and livelihood change and how these interact with local histories, knowledge systems, cultures, complexities, and lived realities. Moreover, where there are interventions (such as new governance systems, REDD+ or climate smart agriculture), it is critical to interrogate what is required to ensure a fair and equitable distribution of emerging benefits.
Download or read book Inselbergs written by S. Porembski and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inselbergs are isolated rock outcrops that stand out abruptly from surrounding plains. Despite the widespread occurrence of granite inselbergs throughout all climatic and vegetational zones, their remarkably rich plant life was largely neglected in the recent literature. This richly and partly in color illustrated volume provides a detailed survey of all major abiotic and biotic features characteristic for inselbergs. The extreme environmental conditions on inselbergs are described in depth as well as specific adaptive traits of rock outcrop plants including their morphological, anatomical and physiological responses. The diversity and structure of inselberg plant communities are examined on a global scale with detailed regional accounts for different tropical and temperate zones.
