Prospect Farm and the Middle and Later Stone Age Occupation of Mt. Eburru (Central Rift, Kenya) in an East African Context Abstract Located within the Nakuru-Naivasha basin on the northern slope of Mt. Eburru, the open-air site of Prospect Farm (Central Rift, Kenya) is one of the few East African sites that have yielded a stratigraphic sequence containing archaeological levels dating from the late Middle Pleistocene to the Holocene. Excavations at the site by Barbara Whitehead Anthony and Glynn Isaac in 1963–1964 exposed Pastoral Neolithic (Stone Bowl culture) and Later Stone Age (LSA; Kenya Capsian) levels overlying four Middle Stone Age (MSA) levels attributed to the Prospect Industry, a local expression of the Kenya Stillbay. This paper integrates the information currently available for the site and discusses its relevance in a wider East African context. Furthermore, it presents the results of a density survey completed in 2014, mapping the spatial distribution of artifacts along the northern slope of Mt. Eburru and providing data on the landscape setting of the site. The survey identified marked differences in the distribution of diagnostic MSA vs. LSA artifacts: whereas MSA finds cluster at two particular mid-altitude locations (2,102–2,108 m and 2,138–2,140 m a.s.l.) corresponding to the position of Anthony’s Localities I and II, LSA finds tend to show a much broader spatial distribution including both higher and lower altitudes.

Correction to: Usable Pasts Forum: Critically Engaging Food Security The article Usable Pasts Forum: Critically Engaging Food Security.

Correction to: The Transition from Hunting–Gathering to Food Production in the Gamo Highlands of Southern Ethiopia The article The Transition from Hunting–Gathering to Food Production in the Gamo Highlands of Southern Ethiopia

Food Security, Food Sovereignty, and Indigenous Knowledge

Bernard Clist, Pierre de Maret, and Koen Bostoen (Eds.): Une archéologie des provinces septentrionales du royaume Kongo

Joanne Clarke and Nick Brooks (Eds.): The Archaeology of Western Sahara

Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Adria LaViolette (Eds.): The Swahili World

Usable Pasts Forum: Critically Engaging Food Security

A Case for Springbok Hunting with Kite-Like Structures in the Northwest Nama Karoo Bioregion of South Africa Abstract In the Levant and some arid zones of Central Asia, desert kites are well-known hunting structures often thought to have been used for the large-scale harvesting of gazelles during the Holocene. Until recently, such structures were unknown from the southern hemisphere. However, three kite sites have now been identified in Keimoes in the arid hinterland north of the Gariep River where the northwest Nama Karoo (the geographic area and ecology otherwise known as Bushmanland [Mucina and Rutherford 2006]) and Kalahari Duneveld bioregions meet. Here we use aspects of gazelle behavior, and local ethnographical and ethno-historical records, to explore the possibility that the stone-built kites or funnel chains of South Africa may have been used to hunt springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis), southern Africa’s only gazelle. We argue that seasonal herds of gazelles, colloquially known as trekbokken (large springbok herds on the march), were a possible target of precolonial hunters who used their intimate understanding of the animals and their landscape to design the kites.

The African Incense Trade and Its Impacts in Pharaonic Egypt Abstract Among ancient Egypt’s most prized imports were resins and other aromatics obtained mainly from or through Nubia and Punt, an area that included the African and Arabian shores of the southern Red Sea. Egyptian texts emphasized the association between these places and the imports of aromatics, indicating that the use of incense and other types of aromatics was likely a foreign introduction to ancient Egypt. This paper surveys the Egyptian terminology for specific and general forms of incense and proposed modern identifications. It presents the evidence for Egyptian contact with Punt in the context of the incense trade and shows the importance of African aromatics within several spheres of Egyptian culture from the late Predynastic to Ptolemaic times. Egyptian religious practices embraced incense as a signifier of the divine, and Nubian gods in the Egyptian pantheon were intimately associated with incense. Apart from religion, aromatics played important roles in the political realm, and both the aromatics trade and processing were a state enterprise. We explore the political, economic, and commercial networks that shaped the importation of aromatics in ancient Egypt and the implications for understanding cultural appropriation and intercultural entanglement between Egypt and its southern neighbors.