An archaeological investigation of the Kansyore, Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers in East Africa.

详细信息   

• 作者：Dale ; Darla Darlene.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2007
• 导师：Marshall, Fiona B.
• 毕业院校：Washington University in St. Louis
• 专业：Anthropology, Archaeology.
• ISBN：9780549070580
• CBH：3268023
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：16085970
• Pages：325

文摘

Humans have spent much of their history as hunter-gatherers. For this reason, understanding the nature of hunting and gathering societies and the underlying reasons for variation among contemporary groups has been a focus of anthropological research. Hunter-gatherer studies have been uneven in geographic scope, however, and much of what we know about hunter-gatherer socio-economic behavior comes from research conducted in high latitudes. Studies of hunter-gatherer complexity have also been limited, with much attention focused on historic groups and little on prehistoric complexity and/or variation.;In this dissertation I examine the social and economic organization of the Kansyore, a mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer group who lived near the shores of Lake Victoria. Kansyore hunter-gatherers are of considerable anthropological interest because they are associated with highly decorated and abundant ceramics prior to the beginnings of food production in this region (c. 5-4000 bp). This is unusual in Africa, and is otherwise not known from East Africa. They are also associated with a relatively intensive lacustrine-based subsistence pattern and relatively intense occupations. The Kansyore stand in contrast to other better known Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers, like the Eburran of the Central Rift Valley, with land-based and less intensive subsistence patterns, low density occupations, and few ceramics.;I use archaeological data recovered from Siror, a large, open site in western Kenya, to clarify what is known about the Kansyore, to consider the nature of hunter-gatherer variation, and to understand better ceramic-using hunter-gatherers generally and in an African context. Excavation of Siror yielded an abundance of well-preserved ceramics, fauna, and lithics, as well human bone and significant amounts of charcoal. Ceramics are the focus of this thesis and one of the primary goals of my research was to develop a methodology for consistently classifying the variation that characterizes Kansyore pottery. I adapted Isabella Caneva's ceramic classification for Sudanese and Saharan ceramics, which uses a chaine operatoire approach.;The timing of Kansyore is unclear. Mixing of levels and unreliable dating materials has contributed to the perception among East Africanists that the Kansyore chronology (～8000-3000 bp) is incorrect. I was able to date directly Kansyore materials from Siror. These are the only direct dates obtained for Kansyore levels. Using a combination of ceramic results, artifact densities, and stratigraphic information, I argue for an Early and Late chronology for the Kansyore. As part of this argument I discuss migration, interaction, and exchange as possible factors relating to the identity of the makers of Kansyore pottery. I also discuss possible connections between North and East Africa and explore the idea of an 'African Aqualithic' first proposed by John Sutton in 1974, but still a topic of discussion today (see Holl 2005).