1,720,979 research outputs found
People in spaces : early second millennium AD occupation sequences at the Mbere Complex
No full textDissertation (MA (Archaeology))--University of Pretoria, 2023.Interactions between foragers and farmers in southern Africa has been extensively researched. Their social relations of these two groups, included the introduction of new settlement and subsistence patterns, as well as identities. In the middle Limpopo Valley (MLV), these changes were most evident from the second millennium AD, when farmer society developed new political, social, and economic systems leading to the establishment of state-level society. One notable change that appeared around AD 1000 is the occurrence of forager toolkits in erstwhile farmer settlements. This may indicate that settlement shifts took place at a time when social upheaval in the valley was driving change. To investigate this further, the Mbere Complex (MBC) was excavated. The site contains two distinct spatial areas: a large shelter with Later Stone Age and Iron Age assemblages and features, and an external homestead dating to the Zhizo and K2 periods, from AD 900 to 1220. The aim of this research project is to examine whether foragers residing at the MBC assimilated into farmer society, shared space, or abandoned the site soon after the migration of farmers. A secondary aim is to understand the cultural sequence present at the MBC and contrast it to other shelter assemblages in the area. The findings suggest that foragers were agentive and regulated their settlement patterns to interact with farmers and participate in socio-economic relations.Paleontological Scientific TrustAnthropology and ArchaeologyMA (Archaeology)UnrestrictedFaculty of HumanitiesSDG-04: Quality Educatio
The stone tool sequence at little muck shelter, middle Limpopo valley : pre- and post-contact forager technologies
Get PDFDissertation (MA (Archaeology))--University of Pretoria, 2023.The Later Stone Age of the middle Limpopo Valley is known through several excavated shelters and subsequent lithic analyses. Scholars have argued that it demonstrates a series of changes that appear linked to shifts in the local peopling of the region, in particular the arrival of farmer groups. Little Muck Shelter was one of the first excavated sites in the region with preserved forager material culture and it was studied because of its proximity to Leokwe Hill, an Iron Age site, with the intention of understanding local social relations. The shelter’s occupation dates from the last centuries BC until AD 1300, with several notable changes. However, the sequence was not fully studied, contributing to the site's re-excavation in 2020. This report presents the first analysis of stone tools retrieved from this renewed interest in the site, with two primary goals in mind: first, to compare the assemblage to other assemblages around southern Africa of a similar age and assess if the site’s stone toolkit is similar to other Wilton-period assemblages, including Amadzimba and Bambata, and second, to examine change in stone tools across the contact divide. This is achieved by examining the stone tools using comparable typologies and contrasting stone tool types between different periods and across southern Africa. The study shows that although a number of similar tool types in comparable frequencies were recovered from Little Muck, the site has certain differences to other Wilton assemblages. Of interest is a change in certain tool forms that occurs in the early first millennium AD, but which are morphologically consistent with Wilton tool types, when farmer groups appear in the region. The study concludes by arguing that forager toolkits were equipped to deal with shifts in behaviour and activity patterns in the middle Limpopo Valley.Palaeontological Scientific Trust (PAST)Dr Tim ForssmanAnthropology and ArchaeologyMA (Archaeology)RestrictedFaculty of Humanitie
Foragers and trade at Little Muck Shelter, middle Limpopo Valley
Get PDFDissertation (MA (Archaeology))--University of Pretoria.Southern African trade has primarily been examined through farmer archaeological sequences. One reason for this approach is that trade opportunities along the East African coastline, and the subsequent appearance of trade wealth in the interior, are thought to have been a factor that prompted structural changes within farmer communities. For example, in the middle Limpopo Valley trade was one of the main factors that led to the emergence of a state-level society at Mapungubwe Hill, c. AD 1220. Foragers, who were present during this period, are generally not considered participants of, or contributors to, the socio-political and economic changes that occurred on the southern African landscape. However, research at shelter sites such as Little Muck and Dzombo challenges the notion of foragers’ exclusion from the regional economy. Instead, evidence suggests an intense forager involvement in the socio-economic landscape. The presence of trade wealth at these shelters, its continued growth alongside forager occupation, and its impact on forager society remains under-developed. But recent analyses on the appearance of exotic goods, local trade goods and craft production processes at Little Muck provide a better understanding of the shelter’s resident forager community and their participation in local trade economies throughout the first millennium AD. This is associated with a notable intensification and specialisation of craft goods until around AD 900, where after the expansion of regional and international trade networks around AD 1000 coincided with a rapid decline in forager-associated sequences at the shelter. These findings also show a different use of Little Muck compared to other forager-occupied sites, particularly Dzombo, and demonstrate variable access to wealth. And while it is unclear to what extent foragers contributed to larger socio-economic structures across the landscape, it is evident that foragers, at least at Little Muck, were economically resilient and actively participating in the local market throughout the first millennium AD. Challenging doctrines surrounding foragers, particularly their exclusion from local and international economies, allows for a more nuanced, regional perspective and emphasises the role that southern Africa’s indigenous communities occupied within the broader socio-economic landscape of the first millennium AD.PAST - Palaeontological Scientific TrustAnthropology and ArchaeologyMA (Archaeology)UnrestrictedFaculty of Humanitie
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
An archaeological landscape study of forager and farmer interactions at the Motloutse/Limpopo confluence area South Africa
Get PDFDissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2016.Our understanding of the Later Stone Age on the Greater Mapungubwe Landscape has, until recently, been focused on specific forager camp types, namely shelters. This does not place significance on the range and variability of forager expressions distributed across the landscape. In this region expanding our approach to forager studies is especially important because they partook in the development of the Mapungubwe state between AD 900 and 1300, altering their cultural behavior. Foragers engaged and adapted to the changing social and cultural environment present on the landscape and shifted their settlement patterns, cultural signatures and material remains. Cultural change is expressed as a mosaic across the region with differences such as the production of specific tool types or activity patterns noted between sites. Single site analysis therefore fails to give a comprehensive insight into changing forager lifeways.
Parts of the landscape have seen considerable attention and research, yet other important portions remain unstudied. For example, the Motloutse/Limpopo confluence area has seen little research despite being rich in archaeological material and having a number of known sites in this region. It also lies between van Doornum's (2005) and Forssman's (2014) doctoral research areas and may demonstrate a linkage between these areas. To asses this, a landscape approach is utilised in this study in which all archaeological traces distributed across the study region were considered. This will provide important data that may or may not relate to these other two research areas. However, the primary focus in this research was forager and farmer sites and specifically sites that contained mixed forager-farmer assemblages. Euphorbia Kop, a K2 site with a mixed forager-farmer assemblage was selected for excavation through the survey, in order to show contemporaneity between the two cultural signatures. The excavations revealed that foragers moved into the settlement around c. AD 1000. It is also shown that the forager and farmer sequence at the site is contemporaneous with other mixed forager-farmer settlements in the region, but Euphorbia Kop provided the first secure dates demonstrating this settlement shift.
By implementing a landscape study, a combination of multiple and disparate archaeologies were examined, thus, better contextualizing the multi-cultural nature of the landscape and assisting in the chronological and cultural placement of Euphorbia Kop into this sequence. This research also links forager studies in the Northern Tuli, Botswana, and northern South Africa creating a more detailed picture of forager settlement across the Greater Mapungubwe Landscape. Therefore, it provides a more holistic understanding of the cultural sequence and spatial change on the landscape and the phases of forager-farmer interaction that occurred post AD 900.Anthropology and ArchaeologyMAUnrestricte
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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