During the Mapping Ancient Africa writing workshop in Kenya (3-6 June 2024) Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr conducted a series of short interviews with the scientists attending. Below you can find part 2 (of 2) of the interviews with the participants in the workshop. Watch the videos to find out their scientific stories and top tips for academic writing. Watch all the Mapping Ancient Africa videos on the Mapping Ancient Africa YouTube Playlist.
The participants (part 2 of 2)
Ruth Kiely (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Husna Mashaka (Arizona State University, USA & National Museums of Kenya, Kenya)
During the Mapping Ancient Africa writing workshop in Kenya (3-6 June 2024) Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr conducted a series of short interviews with the scientists attending. During the interviews she asked the participants and instructors to describe their scientific background, what had motivated them to take part in the writing workshop, and what they thought the most important thing they had gained from it. You can now meet the first four of these scientists now by watching the videos below, or catch up with all the latest videos on the Mapping Ancient Africa YouTube Playlist.
The participants (part 1 of 2)
Olugbenga Boboye (University of Ibadan, Nigeria)
Angela Effiom (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)
Heijink, B.M., Zwarts, A., Witteveen, N.H., Watson, J., Ebbenhorst, A., Veenman, F., Kessel, M., León-Yánez, S., Guevara-Andino, J., Endara, M., Rivas-Torres, G., Bush, M.B. & McMichael, C.N.H. (2024) Past fire and vegetation change in the hyperdiverse forests of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Plants 13. DOI: 10.3390/plants13152048
On the 25 July 2024 the 19th Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) seminar, entitled Climate frameworks for the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in Northwest Africa, was delivered by Solène Boisard (University Montreal). In the seminar Solène presented two lines of evidence for past climate change in north-western Africa over the last c. 70,000 years. One from mechanistic climate models (via the PastClim package, for more details see: Leonardi et al. 2023) and one from reconstructions based on archaeological evidence. She found good agreement between the two approaches and linked climatic changes to the transition from Middle Stone Age to Late Stone Age technologies.
On the 20 June 2024 the 18th Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) seminar was delivered by Kumar Akhilesh (Sharma Centre for Heritage Education). This seminar was a little different to most MAA seminars in that it focused on another INQUA project, rather than a specific research line. In the talk Kumar outlined the INQUA funded “PalaeoHome” project and highlighted work on hominin evolution in the Indian sub-continent.
Title: Climate frameworks for the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in Northwest Africa
Related publication: Boisard, S. & Arous, E.B. (2024) A critical inventory and associated chronology of the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in Northwest Africa. Journal of Open Archaeology Data 12, 5. DOI: 10.5334/joad.121
The seminar will be delivered via Zoom. The link for the seminar can be obtained from the MAA Slack channel or by contacting the chair of this seminar (William Gosling). If you want to know more about the Mapping Ancient Africa project visit our web pages and please do not hesitate to get in contact if you want to get involved.
The “Fire in Human Evolution” international Symposium will take place at the University of Leiden (10-11 June 2024). The meeting is being organized by Femke Reidsma and Amanda Henry. The meeting will include talks and discussion on:
As part of my MSc Biological Sciences (University of Amsterdam) research project entitled “Assessing the effect of human induced fire regime changes on vegetation in the Drakensberg mountains” (for further details click to see previous post). I’ve travelled to Africa, where I’ll be staying a month. During this mini blogpost series I’ll take you with me on my travels!
During the first poster session, I presented my poster which went into detail on how we are developing a proxy to reconstruct past fire using micro-Fourier Transformed Infrared Spectroscopy (µFTIR). These reconstructed fire temperatures can then be compared with phytolith or pollen data to assess the effects of different fire temperatures on local vegetation over time. The presentation and poster were well received!
After my poster presentation there were two more congress days which were filled with interesting talks and beautiful posters.
Ecology of the past 