An ethnoarchaeological study of hafting and stone tool diversity among the Gamo of Ethiopia.

The significance of flaked stone tool variation has been a source of great archaeological debate for over 100 years. Even though evidence for stone tool hafting exists as far back as the Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age, there is a dearth of information concerning how hafting affects stone tool technology. This ethnoarchaeological study of hafted stone scrapers among the Gamo of southern Ethiopia examines why a single cultural group utilizes two different hafts, which generate different lithic morphologies, technologies, and spatial distributions. The relationships between history, environment, and social group membership are explored to demonstrate how these associations create variation in technological practices

Collaborative Mapping of Sacred Forests in Southern Ethiopia: Canopies Harboring Conflict Landscapes?

The Boreda elders of southern Ethiopia requested that we create maps highlighting the locations of their historic settlements and sacred groves. Community elders led us along winding footpaths that ascended to nine mountaintops that had been occupied since the early thirteenth century and were abandoned nearly 100 years ago. Surrounding these historic communities are Boreda sacred groves with springs, caves, and boulders that are physical evidence in their Indigenous religion of the animation of the non-human world. Yet, the tree canopies also harbor walls, berms, and trenches that suggest a history of conflict. Thematic maps of these places and their landscapes illustrate the strategic alignment of Boreda sacred-fortified forested monuments, which spatially correspond to their oral traditions and histories recounting their resistance against neighboring slave raiders and the Northern Ethiopian state. By integrating precise spatial relationships with community knowledge of places and histories, we demonstrate the power of this knowledge in documenting precolonial histories

Collaborative Mapping of Sacred Forests in Southern Ethiopia: Canopies Harboring Conflict Landscapes?

The Boreda elders of southern Ethiopia requested that we create maps highlighting the locations of their historic settlements and sacred groves. Community elders led us along winding footpaths that ascended to nine mountaintops that had been occupied since the early thirteenth century and were abandoned nearly 100 years ago. Surrounding these historic communities are Boreda sacred groves with springs, caves, and boulders that are physical evidence in their Indigenous religion of the animation of the non-human world. Yet, the tree canopies also harbor walls, berms, and trenches that suggest a history of conflict. Thematic maps of these places and their landscapes illustrate the strategic alignment of Boreda sacred-fortified forested monuments, which spatially correspond to their oral traditions and histories recounting their resistance against neighboring slave raiders and the Northern Ethiopian state. By integrating precise spatial relationships with community knowledge of places and histories, we demonstrate the power of this knowledge in documenting precolonial histories

The lives of stone tools: Crafting the status, skill, and identity of flintknappers.

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/books/1018/thumbnail.jp

Who’s “That Girl”: British, South African, & American women as Africanist archaeologists in colonial Africa (1860s to 1960s).

This paper reviews the accomplishments of British, South African, and American women Africanist archaeologists who worked between the 1860s and the 1960s. Despite their many significant contributions to African archaeological method and theory, especially those exposing the importance of indigenous populations to their own cultural development, the work of these women tends to be either appropriated or ignored by their contemporaries and by present day archaeologists. A postcolonial feminist analysis draws on the colonial context in which African archaeology developed and the continued Western domination of the discipline to provide a background for understanding how and why these women are omitted from historiographies of African archaeology

Feminine knowledge and skill reconsidered: Women and flaked stone tools.

Archaeologists continue to describe Stone Age women as home bound and their lithic technologies as unskilled, expedient, and of low quality. However, today a group of Konso women make, use, and discard flaked stone tools to process hides, offering us an alternative to the man-the-toolmaker model and redefining Western “naturalized” gender roles. These Konso women are skilled knappers who develop their expertise through long-term practice and apprenticeship. Their lithic technology demonstrates that an individual\u27s level of skill and age are visible in stone assemblages. Most importantly, they illustrate that women procure high-quality stone from long distances, produce formal tools with skill, and use their tools efficiently. I suggest in this article that archaeologists should consider women the producers of Paleolithic stone scrapers, engaged in bipolar technology, and as such perhaps responsible for some of the earliest-known lithic technologies