Matthew C. Curtis

Seniority through ancestral landscapes: Community archaeology in the highlands of southern Ethiopia

ABSTRACT This article focuses on our collaboration with the Boreda of southern Ethiopia to document the ways in which their cultural heritage knowledge is entwined with Ochollo Mulato, one of their nine tangible senior ancestral landscapes or Bayira Deriya. Through the interface between oral traditions, life histories, and the archaeological record, we grew increasingly aware of the descendant community’s wide range of alternative but equally valid memories and attachments to their ancestral lands. Articulated through the landscape at Ochollo Mulato, Boreda demonstrated to us the various historical paths for defending assertions of seniority between youths and elders and between farmers and craft-specialists.

Foundations of an African civilisation: Aksum and the northern Horn 1000 BC – AD 1300

chimpanzees as referential models for understanding specific aspects of early hominin behaviour using non-trivial analogies (the italicised text is key). Again, Pickering and Domínguez-Rodrigo’s chapter is an expansion of another recently published article; while dismissing the feasibility of early hominin scavenging, they present a reasonable hypothesis of Mio-Pliocene early hominin hunting and non-tool-mediated processing of small mammals based on a variety of data. They admit this hypothesis is unfortunately difficult to test, though they end by suggesting some future research avenues. Pickering and Bunn (Chapter 5) also dismiss the feasibility of early hominin scavenging, exploring possible modes of procurement of whole animal carcasses to which hominins may have had early access (but mainly focusing on hunting), discussing spear-mediated hunting by chimpanzees and the archaeological and morphological evidence for early humans hunting with spears and culminating in a hypothesis of ambush predation by early Homo. They suggest that only the regularity of hominin carcass acquisition changed over time— not the method (hunting). Building on the recent recognition of behaviourally modified stones resulting from chimpanzee percussive technology and further discussions of ‘chimpanzee archaeology’ that arose during the last decade, Carvalho and McGrew synthesise a remarkable amount of data on the visibility of the lithic traces of nut-cracking by chimpanzees in West Africa, reporting the (low) density of excavated artefacts (hammers and anvils) per nutcracking site and comparing this density to many Oldowan sites. They end by noting the regional diversity in the technology and typology of chimpanzee stone tools. Stone Tools and Fossil Bones: Debates in the Archaeology of Human Origins is not a synthetic review of zooarchaeological and lithic data from the Oldowan and Acheulean (of the kind provided by Plummer 2004); the focus on debates, as the title states, leads to only a minority of the chapters presenting novel data. Still, some of the chapters do present useful updated summaries and/or synthetic reviews of interpretations of the meaning of butchered bones and stone tools and suggestions for some future studies that might advance our understanding of early hominin lifeways using these two important lines of evidence.