The stone circle sites of Komaland,northern Ghana,in West African archaeology

An Iron Age complex which flourished around the fifteenth to the seventeenth century AD is currently under investigation in Komaland, northern Ghana. The complex is known chiefly from its numerous burial sites characterized by stone circles and earth mound superstructures, and containing human and animal burials, domestic pottery, milling stones, metal implements and cast figures, together with ubiquitous and distinctive terracotta sculptures. This paper discusses the findings from the first season's excavation and their significance in West African archaeology.

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Résumé Des recherches actuellement en cours portent sur un complexe de l'Age du Fer, qui a prospéré entre le 15e et le 17e siècle après J.C., en Komaland, au nord du Ghana. Le complexe est connu surtout par ses nombreux sépultures caractérisées par des cercles de pierres, avec comme superstructures des tumulus de terre où se trouvent des inhumations de humains et d'animaux, de la céramique domestique, des molettes, des outils en métal, et des figures coulées, avec des sculptures en terre cuite ubiquistes et distinctives. Cet article présente des résultats de la première saison de fouilles, et discute de leur signification dans l'archéologie de l'Afrique Occidentale.

     

Hunter-gatherer adaptations and assemblage structure

There is a growing tendency to conceive of hunter-gatherer adaptations as points on a yardstick, with foragers at one end and collectors on the other. Such a view limits our perspective and may trap anthropologists into seeing these categories as steps in an evolutionary progression. It is more productive to think of human adaptation as an N-dimensional space, with individual cases occurring at the intersections of the various dimensions. When this viewpoint is taken, it becomes clear that a search for a single dimension in archaeological data that can be used to characterize all prehistoric adaptations is unlikely to be fruitful. This paper explores the multidimensionality of hunter-gatherer adaptive behavior and reviews those archaeological manifestations that are empirically or logically linked with various dimensions of three components of adaptation: mobility, predation, and technology. Those manifestations with the greatest potential for characterizing prehistoric hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies are identified as measures of mobility type, frequency, stability, scheduling, demography, and range; predation mode, breadth, and scheduling; and the time budgeting and storage dimensions of technology. A subset of these measures is evaluated by comparing assemblages from the late prehistoric Columbia Plateau with expectations derived from ethnographies written on the same local area.     

Constructing clandestine communities: oaths of collective secrecy and conceptual boundaries in the late antique Mediterranean

This article explores fourth- to seventh-century narratives about oaths of collective secrecy, which our sources typically frame negatively. By examining the terminology used in reference to these promises, the dynamics inherent in the practice and its relationship to oath-taking customs in other contexts, and the influence of Christianity on the discourses around such pledges, we can see that late antique authors routinely frame the swearing of these pacts as a transition to a liminal state of existence. Through this rhetoric, church and state authorities constructed conceptual boundaries between those who agreed and disagreed with their definitions of acceptable behaviours.