Lithic Microwear Analysis of Middle Stone Age Artifacts from White Paintings Rock Shelter,Botswana

Abstract

Excavations conducted at the White Paintings rock shelter in the NW Kalahari Desert have uncovered seven meters of Later and Middle Stone Age deposits. Lithic microwear evidence was found on 15 artifacts representing five of the major archaeological subdivisions in the sequence and revealed work in wood, hide, and bone, as well as butchering and impact damage. Middle Stone Age points found in deposits bracketed by TL dates to between approximately 66,400 ± 6500 and 94,300 ± 9400 B.P. were of special interest because of the possible association of the Middle Stone Age with the origin of anatomically modern humans and because little, if any, micro-wear evidence has been published on Middle Stone Age points. Five out of 10 points examined revealed impact damage consistent with their use as projectiles, most likely as spear points. We present a model of the use of such points for hunting medium-sized mammals with spears, an interpretation that is largely consistent with faunal remains observed in South African cave sites.     

Technological successions in the Middle Stone Age sequence of Diepkloof Rock Shelter,Western Cape,South Africa

The southern African MSA comprises a series of phases of unique technological innovations that fuel current models on the evolutionary processes of Anatomically Modern Humans. However, the nature and variability of these technological phases remain poorly documented. This study reports on the previously unpublished sequence of Diepkloof Rock Shelter (South Africa) and investigates the main technological changes therein, particularly emphasizing the emergence, succession and disappearance of the Still Bay (SB) and the Howiesons Poort (HP). We argue for technological change that occurred at different rates and under the influence of variable driving factors. Our model implies that the SB and the HP are not related to the influx of new populations but have regionally specific origins. Unlike the other techno-complexes, the HP at Diepkloof is subdivided into different phases (Early, Intermediate and Late) but only the upper phases resemble the so-called “classic” HP. Finally, the technological sequence of Diepkloof questions the homogeneous picture which has been so far assumed for the southern African MSA and places emphasis on the importance of exploring long regional sequences.     

一脉相承的邳州民间艺术--彩陶、汉画像石和农民画

从史前的彩陶到汉代的画像石,直至当今的农民画,邳间民间工艺始终散发着浓郁的乡土气息,生机勃勃。     

Rock Art and Ritual: An Archaeological Analysis of Rock Art in Arid Central Australia

Rock art researchers throughout the world have explicitly or implicitly invoked ritual as an activity associated with the production of rock art but the articulation between the structure and composition of rock art assemblages and ritual behaviour remains poorly understood. Anthropologist, Roy Rappaport (1999) argued that all ritual, whatever the content or focus, has a universal structure. We review this proposition in the context of ritual studies and propose a method aimed at assessing the potential for identifying ritual structure in rock art assemblages. We discuss an archaeological analysis undertaken on the rock art assemblages in arid Central Australia, which aimed at distinguishing such a ritual structure among engraved assemblages, likely to have a Pleistocene origin, as well as more recent painted, stencilled and drawn assemblages. This analysis, despite its limitations, provides the foundation for developing a model, which will enhance the understanding of the relationship between the production of rock art and ritual.     

广西左江岩画的艺术特征及其价值

左江沿岸保存着许多古代壮族先民骆越人的珍贵化遗产——岩画,左江岩画有她自己的模式、风格、特征,当把这些共同的特征结合起来后,可以形成一个整体的概念。     

Death by Water: Boats and Footprints in the Rock Art of Western Sweden

This paper considers two of the key images in the Bronze Age rock carvings of Bohuslän in relation to the wider landscape. It compares the distribution of cairns on islands off the west coast of Sweden with that of similar monuments on low hills surrounded by drawings of boats. These are often in areas which had previously been occupied by the sea. Perhaps the drawings of boats evoked an expanse of water separating the world of the living from the burial places of the dead. If so, the lines of footprints leading between these two areas may also refer to the passage between life and death.     

Kaparlgoo Blue: On the Adoption of Laundry Blue Pigment into the Visual Culture of Western Arnhem Land,Australia

International Journal of Historical Archaeology - It has been argued that laundry blue (whitener) was introduced into western Arnhem Land in the second half of the 1920s by missionaries, where it...     

An Independent Confirmation of the 4 ka Antiquity of a Beeswax Figure in Western Arnhem Land,Northern Australia

Critical to any chronology is reliability in the determination of age for a distinctive artefact that is related to other components in a series. Therefore, the independent testing and verification of the antiquity of an apparent anomalous measurement for an old beeswax figure in northern Australia is of fundamental interest in rock art studies. Replication of the radiocarbon dating process has confirmed that one exceptional figure in early X‐ray style at the Gunbilngmurrung site in western Arnhem Land is indeed c. 4–4.5 ka. The result also confirms the great antiquity of paintings over which the beeswax was applied.     

Empowering the Local Saharawi People: Training for Rock Art Documentation in Western Sahara (DARSSO Project)

The former Spanish Sahara is the last remaining colony in Africa. Most of the local people have been living in refugee camps in Algeria for the last 40 years and this situation has largely conditioned the archaeological research in the territory for a long time. In spite of the Saharawi Ministry of Culture in exile occasionally collaborating with European academic institutions for the study of its huge archaeological heritage, the training of local archaeologists or initiatives exclusively aimed at targeting the self-management of the Saharawi Archaeology are rarely carried out. This could be due to the difficulties in getting funds for long-term projects in this area, among other factors. However, today’s technological revolution has come to the desert including mobile telephones, televisions, computers and even an incipient Internet connection. At the same time, current digital technology has encouraged the development of new methods of documenting rock paintings, which might be appropriate and more accessible for the Saharawi technicians. This paper discusses the successful and failed aspects, as well as future perspectives, of a training course in rock art documentation intended for empowering local archaeologists who are living in very unfavourable circumstances.     

西周时期周天子拥有土地法权的意义

在西周土地关系问题上,周天子作为全国最高的统治者,其土地所有权无疑是最重要的一环。周天子所拥有的土地法权具有非常重要的实际意义,成为西周推行其他各项政策和制度的前提,体现并维护着周天子作为天下共主的地位和权利。     

Impact of Pollution at a Stone Age Rock Art Site in Oslo, Norway, Studied using Lead and Strontium Isotopes

Naturally occurring strontium and lead isotopes were used to study the impact of anthropogenic pollution on a c. 4500-year-old rock carving in Oslo, Norway. Strontium analyses have shown that road-salt from de-icing of a nearby road has accumulated in the soil surrounding the carving. Upon rainfall this salt is redissolved and drains over the rock carving. Analyses of the lead isotopic system have confirmed the impact of traffic from the nearby road on the rock carving site, but also indicate other sources of lead in the Oslo area and pollution in general. The rock carvings at Ekeberg are at high risk as, apart from natural weathering, they are exposed to the deposition of road salt, emissions from nearby traffic, local and long distance atmospheric pollution and meteorological inversion effects during the winter.     

Rock Art: A Potential Source of Information about Past Maritime Technology in the South-East Asia-Pacific Region

It is possible that most or all boats and rig-types used in prehistoric times in the South-East Asia-Pacific region have completely disappeared from the record, and that those recorded by Europeans in the 17th century may have been relatively recent innovations. The purpose of this paper is to introduce to the literature a new source of information on ancient boat and rig designs. This source is the information encoded in rock-art depictions of watercraft. This paper provides a technical appraisal of 18 images of watercraft from the Tutuala region of East Timor.
© 2007 The Authors     

Boats on Bark: an Analysis of Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Bark-Paintings featuring Macassan Praus from the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition, Northern Territory, Australia

This paper examines a group of Aboriginal bark-paintings featuring Macassan prau s that were collected in 1948 during the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. These paintings were studied in an effort to understand issues related to Aboriginal and Macassan cross-cultural interaction, stylistic adaptation and change, and maritime technologies. Furthermore it is one example in which the collaborative efforts of maritime and Indigenous archaeologies can achieve a more holistic technological and stylistic cross-analysis of watercraft imagery.
© 2009 The Authors     

Approaching the Hatch Jasper Quarry From a Technological Perspective: A Study of Prehistoric Stone Tool Production in Central Pennsylvania

Abstract

Mitigation of the Hatch jasper quarry, a “prospect site” in Central Pennsylvania, has enabled the reconstruction of a local system of stone tool acquisition and production. Artifacts from the quarry and the nearby Houserville habitation complex were analyzed using an attribute-based stage typology. This technological approach permitted the separation of geofacts from artifacts, and revealed evidence suggesting that Houserville knappers obtained tool stone from the quarry. Attention was also given to the study of how systematic heat treatment was used to enhance the flaking characteristics of the Hatch quarry jasper. This research highlights the benefits that a technological analysis of flake artifacts, in addition to finished tools, can provide for understanding stone tool production at quarry localities.     

Working on Rock Art in the Dakhleh Oasis: Some Thoughts on Threats to Petroglyphs and Possibilities of Research in the Western Desert,Egypt

The rock art in Dakhleh, despite being known for more than a century, has been thoroughly investigated only since the late 1980s, and remains far from being well known especially outside of Egypt. At the same time, the consecutive seasons of fieldwork conducted by the Petroglylph Unit (part of the international Dakhleh Oasis Project) have produced a great number of findings and substantially enhanced our knowledge of the petroglyphs of this area. Here, rather than focusing on interpretive aspects of the research, I wish to discuss the threats endangering the petroglyphs in the Oasis. Dakhleh has developed very intensively in the last 100 years. It is, however, the twenty-first century which seems to pose some serious threats to archaeological heritage. Hence, in this paper I wish to report on what has been done so far to document rock art in the Oasis, and try to establish the priorities for potential future work. The agricultural and infrastructural development in the area, and the uncertain political climate in the country, heavily influence the state of rock art preservation and the possibilities of research. The need for documentation and preservation of rock art is larger than ever before, because many changes in the local landscape cannot be stopped. The time is pressing, because more and more rock art is disappearing due to the reasons discussed in this paper. Threats to Egyptian rock art in general will form a background for considerations concerning petroglyphs from the Western Desert.     

Introduction to the project and excavation of Diepkloof Rock Shelter (Western Cape,South Africa): a view on the Middle Stone Age

This introduction presents the background to the present research project at Diepkloof Rock Shelter, initiated in 1998. It is followed by a series of original papers that were presented in November 2010 at the join 13th PAA Congress (Panafrican Association of Prehistory and Associated Disciplines) and 20th conference of SAfA (Society of Africanist Archaeologists) at the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar (Senegal). These papers were presented in a “Symposium on the MSA sequence of Diepkloof Rock Shelter: a view on the cultural evolution of southern African modern humans” organized by Pierre-Jean Texier, Guillaume Porraz, John Parkington and Jean-Philippe Rigaud. This series of papers is a first attempt at a multidisciplinary reconstruction of the way Middle Stone Age people inhabited the site of Diepkloof and the way they interacted with their environment. The resultant narrative outlines artifactual change through the sequence and discusses the factors that might underlie it.     

崖壁上的佛国 大足石刻佛教造像

在重庆大足地区的险峻山崖上,保存着世界上罕见的系列石刻,时间跨度从公元9世纪到1 3世纪。这些石刻以其极高的艺术品质、丰富多变的题材闻名遐迩,从世俗文化到宗教文化,它们鲜明地反映了我国在这一时期佛教、道教和儒家思想和谐相处的局面。1999年,大足石刻因其珍贵的价值列入《世界遗产名录》。     

Continental Patterns in Stone Tools: A Technological and Biplot-Based Comparison of Early Late Pleistocene Assemblages from Northern and Southern Africa

The technology of the end products i.e. blades and points in Late Pleistocene stone artefact assemblages from Klasies River, South Africa, and the Nile Valley, Egypt, are compared. The comparison includes univariate and multivariate analysis of metrical attributes enhanced by graphical biplot displays. The end products in these assemblages are either dominantly points or blades and this is related to the core reduction strategy adopted. The MSA 11 from Klasies River and the Nubian Complex industry from the Nile Valley are point industries made in the Levallois tradition, while the MSA 1 from Klasies River and the Taramsan from the Nile Valley may be non-Levallois or adapted Levallois blade industries. Dating of the assemblages shows the changes between dominant core reduction strategies are sequential and time restricted in both South and North Africa. It is concluded that variability of the same kind occurs in Middle Stone Age and Middle Palaeolithic assemblages south and north of the Sahara in the early Late Pleistocene.Dans cet article, les technologies des produits recherchés, des lames et des pointes, pour certains ensembles lithiques de Klasies River, Afrique du Sud et la Vallée du Nil, Egypte, sont comparées. Cette comparaison implique des analyses univariées et multivariées de variables métriques biplot. Les produits recherchés sont bien des pointes que des lames, selon les stratégies dexploitation adoptées. Le MSA II de Klasies River et le Complexe nubien de la Vallée du Nil sont des industries à pointes issues de la tradition Levallois. Par contre, le MSA I de Klasies River et le Taramsien de la Vallée du Nil évoquent une technologie de production non-Levallois ou Levallois modifiée. Les éléments de datation disponibles indiquent que les changements dans la prépondérance des stratégies dexploitation senchaînent dans une séquence chronologique bien identifiable, aussibien dans lAfrique du Sud que lAfrique du Nord. On arrive à la conclusion quune variabilité du même caractère est attestée dans les ensembles du Middle Stone Age et du Paléolithique moyen au sud et au nord du Sahara, pendant le Pléistocène supérieur ancien.