Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa
Title | Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa PDF eBook |
Author | Amanuel Beyin |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Pages | 2194 |
Release | 2023-08-17 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 3031202902 |
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.
The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology
Title | The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology PDF eBook |
Author | Peter Mitchell |
Publisher | OUP Oxford |
Pages | 1077 |
Release | 2013-07-04 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0191626147 |
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.
Before Modern Humans
Title | Before Modern Humans PDF eBook |
Author | Grant S. McCall |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 587 |
Release | 2020-09-10 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 1000158012 |
This fascinating volume, assessing Lower and Middle Pleistocene African prehistory, argues that the onset of the Middle Stone Age marks the origins of landscape use patterns resembling those of modern human foragers. Inaugurating a paradigm shift in our understanding of modern human behavior, Grant McCall argues that this transition—related to the origins of “home base” residential site use—occurred in mosaic fashion over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. He concludes by proposing a model of brain evolution driven by increasing subsistence diversity and intensity against the backdrop of larger populations and Pleistocene environmental unpredictability. McCall argues that human brain size did not arise to support the complex patterns of social behavior that pervade our lives today, but instead large human brains were co-opted for these purposes relatively late in prehistory, accounting for the striking archaeological record of the Upper Pleistocene.
Creating the Human Past
Title | Creating the Human Past PDF eBook |
Author | Robert G. Bednarik |
Publisher | Archaeopress Publishing Ltd |
Pages | 188 |
Release | 2013-06-15 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1784910732 |
This book examines systematically both the theoretical and practical issues that have characterized the discipline over the past two centuries. Some of the historically most consequential mistakes in archaeology are dissected and explained, together with the effects of the related controversies.
Pleistocene Archaeology
Title | Pleistocene Archaeology PDF eBook |
Author | Rintaro Ono |
Publisher | BoD – Books on Demand |
Pages | 205 |
Release | 2020-12 |
Genre | Geology, Stratigraphic |
ISBN | 1838803572 |
This book presents an overview of recent research in the field of Pleistocene Archaeology around the world. The main topics of this book are: (1) human migrations, particularly by Homo sapiens who have migrated into most regions of the world and settled in different environments, (2) the development of human technology from early to archaic hominins and Homo sapiens, and (3) human adaptation to new environments and responses to environmental changes caused by climate changes during the Pleistocene. With such perspectives in mind, this book contains a total of nine insightful and stimulating chapters on these topics, in which human history during the time of the Pleistocene is reviewed and discussed.
History and Selection in the Late Pleistocene Archaeology of the Western Cape, South Africa
Title | History and Selection in the Late Pleistocene Archaeology of the Western Cape, South Africa PDF eBook |
Author | Dr. Alex Mackay |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Archaeology and history |
ISBN |
Archaeology Africa
Title | Archaeology Africa PDF eBook |
Author | Martin Hall |
Publisher | James Currey Publishers |
Pages | 289 |
Release | 1996 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0852557353 |
Martin Hall explains how archaeologists find sites, design an excavation, date finds, and write history. The reader is given an outline of the history of the African continent, from the early hominids to the present. South Africa: David Philip/New Africa Books