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This paper examines preliminary research findings emanating from investigations carried out on the marginalised landscapes and relics of slavery in the Three-Town area of southeastern Ghana. It dis...

Using both archaeological and historical data, this paper examines the consequences of the British presence at Dixcove in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and how their encounter with local ...

Boomplaas Cave, South Africa, contains a rich archaeological record, with evidence of human occupation from >66,000 years ago until the protohistoric period. Notwithstanding a long history of research at the site, its existing chronology can benefit from revision. Many of the site’s members are currently delimited by only a single conventional radiocarbon date and some of the existing dates were measured on materials now known to be unsuitable for radiocarbon dating. Here we present the results of an ongoing effort to redate key late/terminal Pleistocene sequences in southern Africa. This paper presents a Bayesian-modelled radiocarbon chronology for the late/terminal Pleistocene horizons at Boomplaas. Our model incorporates previously published radiocarbon dates as well as new accelerator mass spectrometry ages. We also present archaeological evidence to examine in greater detail than was previously possible the nature of occupation patterning across the late/terminal Pleistocene and to assess technological change across two of the site’s Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) members. The new dates and archaeological data confirm that the site was occupied in a series of low intensity events in the early LGM and immediately thereafter. The site was occupied intensively in the terminal Pleistocene in line with major changes in palaeoenvironments and sea-level fluctuations. The lithic data show the use of variable technological strategies in contexts of shifting mobility and site occupation patterns. Our discussion informs upon hunter-gatherer behavioural variability that did not, and should not be expected to, reflect the strategies adopted and adapted by a handful of well-known arid-zone hunter-gatherers in the twentieth-century Kalahari.

Lithic miniaturisation, the systematic production of small tools from small cores, is a pervasive trend in Pleistocene lithic technology. Miniaturised stone tools are reported from nearly every con...

The Kintampo Tradition (c. 3600–3200 BP) of Ghana is associated with the earliest manifestations of figurative art, personal adornment, semi-sedentary ‘village’ settlements and food production in the Late Stone Age (LSA) of the savanna-forest/forests of West Africa. Despite decades of research, fundamental questions regarding this tradition remain unresolved and discussion of it remains heavily structured by notions of diffusion or migration. This study synthesises the available data with a comprehensive comparative analysis of Kintampo material culture in order to explore and evaluate this tradition's temporal and spatial patterning, as well as theoretical issues regarding identity and the socioeconomic and technical practices associated with the appearance of food production. Available data evince the existence of a unique adaptation that confounds attempts to interpret it within traditional socio-economic categories such as ‘Neolithic’. The Kintampo is recast here as a distinctive and durable archaeolo...

Summary Although Nsongezi rock shelter has been the object of numerous investigations and publications, very little has been written about the “Later Stone Age” industry represented at this and other excavated sites in southern Uganda. This article provides a descriptive analysis of a stratified series obtained from the most recent excavations at Nsongezi rock shelter. The artefacts recovered from these excavations represent a “Wilton” industry and are dominated by microliths and a wide variety of scrapers. Outils ecailles, becs and burins are also common. The most interesting feature of the industry, however, is the markedly fluctuating frequencies of scrapers and microliths in the four Occurrences at the site. These fluctuations are closely correlated with changes in mean flake size and suggest that activity phases may be differentiated in the stone tool kit. Analysis of the stone implements also sheds some light on two outstanding problems. First, no evidence was found to support O'Brien's proposed “Ka...