northeastern africa
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Northeastern Africa. Wadi Kubbaniya (Egypt) - wild grasses and grinding stones (16-15,000 BC) sickles (13-9,000 BC) for harvesting wild grasses. Nabta Playa, Eastern Sahara Southern Egypt. - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Northeastern Africa
• Wadi Kubbaniya (Egypt) - wild grasses and grinding stones (16-15,000 BC)
• sickles (13-9,000 BC) for harvesting wild grasses
Nabta Playa, Eastern SaharaSouthern Egypt
• 7-6,000 BC – early pottery making culture based on hunting and harvesting wild grasses (including sorghum) and fruits, recovered from 100+ hearths and other cooking features;
• sorghum, at least, in possible early stage of domestication, although debated by some who feel wild sorghum only domesticated much later (4000-2000 BC);
• Possible domesticated African cattle, or at least hard for wild cattle to survive independent of humans in this area
Bir Kiseiba, Egypt (Eastern Sahara)
Early evidence of domesticated cattle in Africa (Bos primigenius), ca. 7-6000 BC
By ca. 6000 BC sheep and goats introduced from Near East and incorporated into Saharan Pastoral Neolithic
Nomadic Pastoralism dependence upon domesticated stock and a mobile lifestyle
NeolithicTethering
Stones
Farming communitiesin lower Nile (Egypt)ca. 5000 BC
Merimde (18 ha; 45 acres)Fayum
Near Eastern Complex of Wheat, Barley, Goats, and Sheep
Fertile Crescent
Expansion of Near EastFarming complex into Africa, notably wheats,
Barley, goats, and sheep
Nabta Playastone circle
Neolithic Megaliths (astronomical alignment)
ca. 5000 BC
After ca. 3000 BC Spread of Pastoral
Neolithic & Farming (?) into Sahel/E Africa
(Following Tsetse Fly-free regions)
WET
DRY
Modern Distribution of Tsetse Fly
Distribution of wild ancestors of Sub-Saharandomesticated African Plants suggests one broad region
encompassing 3 Domestic Complexes
Savanna complex: sorghum, African rice, peanuts, millets, watermelonForest margin complex: millets, beans, robusta coffee, oil palm, yams
Ethiopian complex: millet, tef, noog, arabica coffee, enset (“false banana”), chat
Forest margin
savanna
Ethiopian
Root Crop Agriculture (yams) and Arboriculture
(oil palm) in Tropical Forest and Woodland
Areas of Western, Central, and Southern Africa (how old?, likely
2,000 to 1,000 BC or earlier)
Continuation of Hunting and Gathering in some areas until historic times(trade and colonialism)
Yam “barn” in Nigeria forest regionOil palm
Abelam (Sepik River, New Guinea, decorated yams)
Bantu-speakers
British-AmericanEnglish
12
3
• Bantu farming people expanded relatively quickly into lands occupied by hunter gatherers, displacing or absorbing them and, in some areas, developing complementary trade relations between foragers and early farmers.
• Bantu speakers now number about 60 million,
and most of sub-Saharan Africa now speaks some version of the Niger-Congo language family.
Tropical linguistic diaspora (beginning ca. 1,000 BC)
Arawak &others
Austronesian
Bantu
Ancestral Bantu Society
• Economics: Food production (yams and oil palm), with hunted, fished, and foraged foods (livestock complex of Saharan Africa did not do well in tropical forested areas; introduced later in eastern and southern Africa)
• Technology: Ceramics, iron (later), settled villages• Settlement: settled plaza villages composed of “Houses”
(kingroups based on lineal descent), and organized into districts of related houses
• Social political organization: hierarchical (conical clan) chiefship, matrilineal descent groups, initiation and elite life crisis rites, in-law avoidance
Chifumbaze ceramic complex of central and southern Africa
(e.g., Urewe, Kwale, Matola wares);
Spread by iron working farmers
Modern Bantu pottery
Pottery and iron artifacts used to track Bantu dispersals
Iron-working• Diffusion from SW Asia and Mediterranean or independent
indigenous development?
• Neolithic to Iron Age with no transitional bronze production, to some means that technology diffused from SW Asia fully developed.
• The primitive iron-smelting furnaces at Taruga (Nigeria) date from 400 BC, oldest evidence in West Africa (as early as Meroë in Sudan; seen by diffusionists as the staging point for spread of iron-working into tropical Africa from Egypt);
• Sites in Rwanda/Burundi possibly earlier, before 1000 BC• Iron first seems to be used for ceremonial, decorative, and
high-value artifacts, later becoming increasingly important as weapons and utilitarian tools
Terra-cotta statues, 500 BC-AD 200, made byearly iron-working farmers
Nok site, near Taruga, on western
slopes of Jos plateau (Nigeria)
Bantu homeland inNigeria/Cameroon
Kingdom of Kongo, 1711
Major Bantu-speaking urban settlement, after ca. AD 1200-1500
As many as 18,000 people
Gedi, Kenya
Origins of the urban sites on the Swahilicoast and adjacent parts of the interior
are clearly indigenous (Bantu) developments, but subsequent growth between AD 1000-1500
due to trade in Indian Ocean, which laterinvolved conversion to Islam
Niger-Congo
Middle Niger (Inland Delta)
Middle Niger
• Prior to 300 BC, higher annual floods in Inland Delta area of the middle Niger River in the Sahel, just south of Sahara, meant little high land for permanent occupations;
• Wetter conditions also meant insect-born diseases, especially tsetse fly, discouraged settled occupation;
• 200 BC to AD 100, region (Sahel) became drier and herders and farmers of southern Sahara desert moved into area;
• Initial occupation of important site of Jenné-jeno, which became important urban and trade center during first millennium AD.
Jenné-jeno• Large community (12 ha; 30 acres) of round houses with mud
foundations by AD 100, reaching its maximum extent of by AD 850, which included town area of over 40 ha (100 acres), with a mud-brick wall about 2km long
• Multi-centric urban settlement composed of occupation areas clustered around ecological features: rice-growing soils, levees for wet-season pasture, basins for dry-season pasture, access to major river channels for communication and trade.
• Evidence of North African or Islamic influences appears at Jenné-jeno in the form of brass, spindle whorls, and rectilinear houses, ca. AD 1200.
• After this point, Jenné-jeno begins decline and is abandoned by 1400, as neighboring historical city of Djenné becomes regional center.
Multi-centric Urbanism
Round house at Jenné-jenoExcavation of Jenné-jeno Mound
Djenné
Djenné, Mali
Koumbi Saleh, Ancient Ghana,
starting after AD 500
Timbuktu, Trans-Saharan caravan trade &
Songhai empire, 1500s
Benin empire, 16th to 18th century
Brass portrait head
Benin City, ca. 1600
Benin City, 1891
Oba (king) of Edo people
Igbo-Ukwu, late 1st millennium ADburial and related features of a “priest-king,”
included 685 copper and brass wealth items and165,000 stone and glass beads
Trade was critical, which included ivory and slaves
Nubia & Ethiopia
• Kerma, Meroë, Napata, Aksum (covered during lecture on Egypt, on test 2)
• Pages 356-369; 383-390 on test 1