The third instalment of interviews with Mapping Ancient Africa scientists is now available. Watch ‘the final four’ below, and check out the other videos by clicking on the names below:
Mapping Ancient Africa participants on the Rome workshop (2023)
The Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project has an open call for contributions to a Special Issue of Quaternary International; the journal of our funder the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA). The concept for the special issue is agreed in principle with the journals editor-in-chief so now it is our task to collate a collection of manuscripts suitable to published in this international peer reviewed journal. The special issue will be based around papers discussed and presented at the MAA workshop in Rome and session at the INQUA congress in Rome in July 2023, but we are also happy to consider other manuscripts that fit within the MAA project area.
To find out if your manuscript idea might fit either explore the MAA web pages or contact a member of the editorial team:
The Society for Tropical Ecology‘s 7th European Conference of Tropical Ecology will be hosted by the University of Lisbon in 2024. Entitled “Tropical ecosystems in a fast-changing planet” the conference will take place fromMonday 12 to Friday 16 February 2024. The call for sessions is now open (deadline 7 September 2023). So add the date of the congress to your diary and submit your exciting ideas for a session now…
For more details visit the conference web pages here.
The Palaeoecology Research Group within the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany is pleased to announce a new vacancy for a Doctoral student exploring long-term human-environment interactions in the Caribbean. The position will be for a period of 3 years with the option for extensions based in Jena, Germany and supervised by Dr. Yoshi Maezumi. The position will be linked with the Department of Ecosystem & Landscape Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam. Deadline: 30 August 2023
The next four interviews with scientists who participated in the Mapping Ancient Africa workshop in Rome (2023) are now online (see below). You can find more interviews with scientists by clicking the names below:
During the Mapping Ancient Africa workshop in Rome I conducted short interviews with the scientists involved. The first of these, Alfred Houngnon can be viewed here, below are four more, and more will follow as I get them uploaded. I hope they provide interesting insights into the diverse range of skills and backgrounds our scientists have.
Interview 2: Busisiwe Hlophe (University of the Witwatersrand)
Interview 3: Angela Effion (University of the Witwatersrand)
Interview 4: Bahru Zinaye Asegahegn (University of Cologne)
Interview 5: Michela Leonardi (University of Cambridge)
To find out more about the Mapping Ancient Africa project click here.
The second part of the Mapping Ancient Africa session at the INQUA Rome congress contained eight talks. Busisiwe Hlophe (University of the Witwatersrand) kicked us off by showing us the power of looking at wood anatomy preserved in charcoal microfossils to determine the nature of past vegetation and climate. RahabKinyanjui (National Museums of Kenya) presented phytolith work from archaeological sites revealing a mixed woody and grassy vegetation associated with archaic Homo sapiens in Kenya.
Three talks from the Cape Region in South Africa then followed with Saul Manzano (University of Leon), StellaMoscher (University of Utah), and Asithandile Ntsondwa (Nelson Mandela University) using various palaeo ecological approaches to explore climate, vegetation and fire regime shifts during the Holocene. Adele Julier (University of Portsmouth) then took us a little further north to Namibia to think about the challenges of parameterising modern pollen-vegetation relationships in arid regions. The final southern African talk was given by Gemma Poretti (University of Cape Town) explored a new approache to tracking change in past rainfall patterns using charcoal material.
On Wednesday 19 July 2023 the Mapping Ancient Africa session of the INQUA Rome congress took place. We were delighted to have an full program of speakers despite some late cancellations. The first session featured seven speakers.
No panic as we set up for session 1…
The first two talks focused on southern Africa. The first talk by Liviu Giosan (Woodshole Oceanographic Institute) focused on new sediment cores extracted from the Okavango – Makgadikgadi region and new efforts to obtain sediment cores that can provide information on the dispersal of hominins. Brian Chase (CNRS) then looks us to the Karoo highlighting recent findings that suggest that this currently arid region was more habitable in the past and that a proliferation of stone tools suggests past peoples utilised the region extensively (Carr et al., 2023).
McMichael, C.N.H., Bush, M.B., Jiménez, J.C. & Gosling, W.D. (2023) Past human-induced ecological legacies as a driver of modern Amazonian resilience. People and Nature. DOI: 10.1002/pan3.10510
Ecology of the past 