NEW RADIOCARBON DATES FROM ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES IN PARTS OF IGBOLAND, SOUTHEASTERN NIGERIA

ABSTRACT This paper presents new results of radiocarbon (14C) ages from archaeological sites in northern Igboland. The study was designed to shed more light on early human occupation and activities in the study area based on sediments from cave and iron-smelting sites. The approach consisted of ethnographic, archaeological, palynological, and slag analyses; these were complemented with 14C dates. The technology adopted as well as the paleoenvironmental conditions that prevailed during the period of human settlement in both sites was revealed. These data, complemented by 14C dates, highlight the human behavioral and subsistence patterns within the region and are comparable to those from similar sites in southeastern Nigeria.

Some of the geological challenges and opportunities associated with the dynamics of the Cenozoic East African Rift System

The Cenozoic East African Rift System (EARS) is the largest continental rift valley system on Earth. Extending over a total distance of approximately 4,500 km, and with an average width of about 50 km, it is home to some of East Africa's largest urban populations and some of its most important transport, energy and water supply infrastructure. Rifting commenced during the Early Miocene and crustal extension has continued to the present day, posing seismic and volcanic hazards throughout its history of human occupation. Deep-seated landslides also present significant challenges for public safety, land management and infrastructure development on the flanks of rift margins. The rift floor itself poses a range of geohazards to community livelihood and engineering infrastructure, including ground fissuring and cavity collapse, flooding and sedimentation. On the positive side, the development of the EARS has created hydrocarbon and geothermal energy resources, and geomaterials for use as aggregates and cement substitutes in road and building construction. Optimising the use of these resources requires careful planning to ensure sustainability, while land use management and infrastructure development must take full consideration of the hazards posed by the ground and the fragility and dynamism of the human and physical environment.

Intra-Site Structure of the Early Ahmarian Site of Al-Ansab 1, AH 1 (Jordan)

The Early Ahmarian represents an Early Upper Palaeolithic cultural unit, which spans throughout the Levant to the Sinai Peninsula. At least 40 sites belong to this unit. Both open-air and cave sites provide different amounts of archaeological material at various spatial resolutions. The team of the Collaborative Research Centre 806 “Our Way to Europe” excavated the site of Al-Ansab 1, Wadi Sabra, since 2009. The site provides one of the largest lithic assemblages of the Early Ahmarian. Analysis of intra-site distributions and patterns has been conducted for a small number of sites, providing scarce information on the spatial makeup of Early Ahmarian occupation layers. The internal structure testifies to repeated settlement without task specialisation. While this has been described for the sites on the Sinai Peninsula, the situation has been unclear for locations placed in the escarpments of the Transjordanian Highlands. At Al-Ansab 1, we can observe the repeated, relatively ephemeral occupation of a specific location in the Wadi Sabra for the execution of various tasks such as processing of faunal elements and raw material exploitation. Our results correlate to a pattern of mobility observable at other Early Ahmarian sites such as Abu Noshra II. These sites are usually attributed to relatively small and highly mobile bands of hunter-gatherers. Analysing these patterns of intra-site and regional spatial behaviour in the context of environmental patterning highlights potential external drivers to the expression of human occupation at sites such as Al-Ansab 1, archaeological horizon 1.

Inhabiting the World’s Largest Tropical Delta: Understanding Human-Environment Relationship from a Century-Long Archaeological Quest in Bangladesh

Due to the exceptionally rich tropical resource, the Lower Ganges-Brahmaputra basins have attracted people of diverse ethnic and geographical backgrounds for millennia. So far 524 protected sites in present Bangladesh indicate the busy human occupation in the world’s largest delta at least from 5th century BCE. Although systematic archaeology began in the 1870s there is still a paucity of knowledge about past human land use and livelihood strategies across this area, which is especially prone to floods, cyclones, and river migrations. Here we attempt a systematic survey of human-environment interactions in ancient deltaic Bangladesh. Revisiting the fragmentary information from archaeological records and epigraphic references produced through over a century-long archaeological legacy, this study is the first attempt at a synthesis of the changing relationships between ancient people and their environment elements including land, water bodies, flora and fauna.

Climatically Driven Landscape Evolution in the High-Mountainous Russian Altai and Its Human Occupation Over the Past 20 Thousand Years

Multidisciplinary studies of various natural archives indicate contrasting changes in the human habitat in the high-mountainous southeastern part of the Russian Altai during the last 20,000 years. This period includes the final stage of the last glaciation and its degradation, the formation of the last giant ice-dammed lakes in the intermountain basins and their cataclysmic draining, considerable transformation of glacial landscapes to modern diverse and mosaic structure. Warmer and more humid climate in the first half of the Holocene was followed by cooling and repeated advances of mountain glaciers. The general trend to cooling and aridization in the second half of the Holocene is the most pronounced during the last two millennia. Deglaciation and final drying of intermountain basins boosted a renovation of the local ecosystems and established an environmental baseline of human occupation in the region. The arid climate, widespread permafrost and low population density determined a good preservation of archaeological heritage in the region, which is located at the crossroad between East and West, North and South. This paper presents the analysis of previously published and new data including newly obtained 14C and OSL dates, which allow to correlate climatically driven landscape transformations with habitat of ancient communities and cultures shifting in the region during the last 20, 000 years, as well as to assess the anthropogenic impact on the environment.

Nazugum, a new 4000 year old rockshelter in the Ili Alatau, Tien Shan

The PALAEOSILKROAD project has been conducting field surveys in Kazakhstan to explore the regional Palaeolithic record by targeting primarily caves and rockshelters. However, the survey also discovered numerous sites that were occupied during the Holocene. In this paper, we present our preliminary findings from the Nazugum rockshelter, a new archaeological site located in south-eastern Kazakhstan (Almaty region). The stratigraphic sequence demonstrates the transition from fluvial channel deposits without artifacts to aeolian loess deposits with lithics, charcoal remnants, and fragments of animal bones. The lithics recovered from the sediment wall are dominated by bladelet technology, characteristic for Holocene assemblages. Radiocarbon dates from adjacent charcoal samples yielded an age of 2461-2347 cal. years BC attributing the human occupation to the transitional period of late Eneolithic and early Bronze Age. Our study provides new data for the use of rockshelters in Kazakhstan during the late Holocene and lays the groundwork for future salvage work in Nazugum rockshelter due to the active erosion of the archaeological record.

Magnetometer surveys in archaeological research in Papua New Guinea: Keveoki 1, Gulf Province

A magnetometer survey was conducted on the abandoned village site of Keveoki 1, near the Vailala River, Gulf Province, PNG. The survey, using a single sensor proton precession magnetometer, was successful in locating and defining the boundaries of areas confirmed by excavation to contain dense assemblages of pottery. The combination of geophysical and excavation results allowed a broader understanding of the spatial distribution of human occupation at Keveoki 1 than would have been possible based on excavation or visual field walking alone. We suggest this technique should be applied more regularly. Archaeological geophysical prospection techniques have not previously been applied as part of archaeological investigations in Papua New Guinea (PNG), despite an extensive history of archaeological research in this area (e.g. Bulmer 1978; Frankel and Vanderwal 1985; White and O'Connell 1982). In part, this deficiency may be explained by the perceived high cost of geophysical survey as well as the difficulties associated with operating and transporting electronic equipment to the often remote, extremely rugged, wet tropical and inaccessible archaeological sites of the region. Nevertheless geophysical techniques have a demonstrated history of making an important contribution to archaeological investigations world-wide (e.g. Witten 2006; Conyers 2004; Gaffney and Gater 2003) and have the potential to answer important archaeological questions in PNG also. In particular, they have the potential to extend site information beyond the limited spatial extent usually obtained through excavation, and thus promise to enable understandings of village sites as spatially extensive landscapes rather than more restricted spatial nodes (Kvamme 2003). This is particularly apt for PNG where thick vegetation and swampy conditions can make site discovery through more conventional field walking very difficult.The archaeological record in many coastal parts of PNG is particularly amenable to geophysical investigations because here can be found extensive sites with dense ceramic deposits as well as numerous sub-surface structural features such as postholes, human burials and earth ovens. Since electromagnetic induction (EMI) and magnetic susceptibility in particular can directly detect pottery (Clark 1990) as well as the remnants of burning (Linford and Canti 2001) and anthropogenically-induced microbial activity (Linford 2004), geophysical prospecting evidently has great potential in such archaeological contexts. Other techniques, such as ground penetrating radar (GPR) (Conyers 2004) and direct current resistivity (Witten (2006) may find less regular application in this area, but could contribute where favourable site conditions exist.

Gledswood Shelter 1: Initial radiocarbon dates from a Pleistocene aged rockshelter site in northwest Queensland

Like elsewhere in Australia, the archaeology of northwest Queensland has focused on the antiquity of occupation and the continuity of that occupation through the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), in an attempt to better understand the adaptive capabilities and strategies of early humans. Veth (1989, 1993) has hypothesised that the northwest Queensland savannah, as an important ‘corridor’ for the colonisation of Australia (e.g. Bird et al. 2005; Horton 1981), should contain ‘early’ sites; and furthermore that with the climatic deterioration associated with the LGM, such sites should fit one of two patterns: (1) they will be abandoned and display a cultural hiatus; or, (2) if located in resource-rich zones within catchments (‘local refuges’), they will continue to be utilised, though subsistence strategies will be modified to rely more heavily on locally available resources. The northwest Queensland sites of Colless Creek at Lawn Hill (Hiscock 1984, 1988), and GRE8 near Riversleigh (Slack 2007:218-251; Slack et al. 2004), both fit the second pattern, i.e. persistent occupation through the LGM with altered strategies to cope with increased aridity. However, outside these local refugia, sites pre-dating the LGM have not yet been located in the northwest Queensland savannah. For example, Mickey Springs 34 (Porcupine Gorge) provides evidence for human occupation from c.10,000 BP (Morwood 1990, 1992, 2002) and Cuckadoo Shelter in the Selwyn Ranges (Davidson et al. 1993) provides a near basal date of 15,270}210 BP; Veth (1989:87) argued that such sites reflect the post-LGM expansion of groups from refuges. The evidence available to date raises the question as to whether the wider northwest Queensland savannah corridor was indeed occupied in the pre-LGM period, when rainfall levels were higher and there was greater availability of surface water and food resources (cf. Hiscock and Wallis 2005).

How do we distinguish termite stone lines from artefact horizons? A challenge for geoarchaeology in tropical Australia

Can we distinguish stone lines created by termite bioturbation from genuine artefact horizons? This is a challenge for field archaeology and geoarchaeology in northern Australia, where termites are abundant. We review published data to (a) present a model of the evolution of stone lines and (b) develop guidelines for recognizing these bioturbation products in archaeological contexts. In case studies, we examine Madjedbebe and Nauwalabila, two sites in northern Australia. The early occupation levels at these sites are pivotal to ideas about initial human occupation of the Australian landmass but there are claims these are unrecognized stone lines. Our assessment is that neither Madjedbebe nor Nauwalabila contain termite stone lines, although both sites may have complex geomorphic and taphonomic histories.

Dating painted Panel E1 at Nawarla Gabarnmang, central-western Arnhem Land plateau

IntroductionThe southern Arnhem Land plateau contains a rich mosaic of thousands of rock art sites located in outcrops of Proterozoic Marlgowa Sandstone of the Kombolgie formation (Carson et al. 1999) (Figure 11.1). Within this region in Jawoyn Country can be found Nawarla Gabarnmang, an impressive rockshelter exhibiting a gridded network of pillars that supports a thick ceiling of 10 cm to 40 cm thick cross-beds of hard sandstone and quartzite (Figures 11.2 and 11.3; see also Chapter 10). The inter-layer joints and fissures between these compact and poorly soluble quartz-rich sandstones and quartzites have witnessed geologically slow dissolution of the bedrock, resulting in a hollowing out of the rock in a process known as ‘ghost rock’ formation or ‘phantomisation’ (Quinif 2010), a particular cave-forming process causing the regular gridshaped structure of underground cavities and pillars (for details of site formation processes, see Chapter 13).The remnant pillars supporting ceiling rock strata at Nawarla Gabarnmang are an anthropic cave structure (Delannoy et al. 2013; see Chapter 10): in addition to the slow geological dissolution of the rock along layer planes and fissure lines, people have also entirely or partially removed individual pillars, and possibly ceiling strata, over a period commencing sometime after the site was first occupied around 50,000 years ago (e.g. David et al. 2011, completed manuscript). What catches one’s attention at Nawarla Gabarnmang are the voids between the pillars, typically c. 1–2 m apart in the southwestern corner of the site, but more than 8 m apart in the central eastern portion. In that noticeably more open central-eastern area, a large, sub-horizontal and flat ceiling is supported by some 20 sparsely distributed pillars. Here, as in most other parts of the site, the floor of the sheltered area is generally flat and sub-horizontal, consisting of ashy sand with sparsely scattered, relatively small blocks of rock originating from the ceiling but not in their original fallen positions (these blocks have all, without exception, been moved by people). Within the fill across the site are rich archaeological deposits including stone artefacts, ochre pieces and animal bones, as revealed in the archaeological excavations (David et al. 2011; Geneste et al. 2012). What we see today in the shelter are the results of tens of thousands of years of human occupation, modification of rock surfaces and site use that express well the notion of ‘dwelling’ and ‘inhabitation’ (e.g. David et al. 2013, 2014; Delannoy et al. 2013; Geneste et al. 2010; cf. Ingold 2000; Thomas 2008).