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Recent archaeological research has firmly established eastern Africa's offshore islands as important localities for understanding the region's pre-Swahili maritime adaptations and early Indian Ocean trade connections. While the importance of the sea and small offshore islands to the development of urbanized and mercantile Swahili societies has long been recognized, the formative stages of island colonization—and in particular the processes by which migrating Iron Age groups essentially became "maritime"—are still relatively poorly understood. Here we present the results of recent archaeological fieldwork in the Mafia Archipelago, which aims to understand these early adaptations and situate them within a longer-term trajectory of island settlement and pre-Swahili cultural developments. We focus on the results of zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, and material culture studies relating to early subsistence and trade on this island to explore the changing significance of marine resources to the local economy. We also discuss the implications of these maritime adaptations for the development of local and long-distance Indian Ocean trade networks. ; The Sealinks Project is funded through a grant toNicole Boivin from the European Research Council (StarterGrant 206148) under the "Ideas" specific Programme of the 7th Framework Programme (FP7). Additional funding includes: postdoctoral fellowships from the British Academy (2010–2013) and the University of Queensland (2015–2017) to Alison Crowther; a Fondation Fyssen Postdoctoral Grant toEr´endira Quintana Morales; and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Government of the Balearic Islands (Conselleria d'Educaci´o) and the European Social Fund to Llorenc¸ Picornell-Gelabert. Fieldwork was carried out under COSTECH Research Permit no. 2012-303-ER-2011-85 and the Division of Antiquities (Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, Tanzania) excavation license no. EA.402/605/01 issued to Alison Crowther, and with the support and permission of theRegionalAdministrative ...

The Middle to Later Stone Age transition in Africa has been debated as a significant shift in human technological, cultural, and cognitive evolution. However, the majority of research on this transition is currently focused on southern Africa due to a lack of long-term, stratified sites across much of the African continent. Here, we report a 78,000-year-long archeological record from Panga ya Saidi, a cave in the humid coastal forest of Kenya. Following a shift in toolkits ~67,000 years ago, novel symbolic and technological behaviors assemble in a nonunilinear manner. Against a backdrop of a persistent tropical forest-grassland ecotone, localized innovations better characterize the Late Pleistocene of this part of East Africa than alternative emphases on dramatic revolutions or migrations. ; Funding was provided by the SEALINKS project under a European Research Council (ERC) grant (no. 206148) awarded to N.B. Permission to conduct the research was granted by the Office of the President of the Republic of Kenya through affiliation with the National Museums of Kenya (NMK). We are grateful for the support of the NMK and the British Institute in Eastern Africa. P.R. was funded by NERC and the Boise Fund (University of Oxford). S.J.A. and F.D. acknowledge support from the Research Council of Norway, through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) (no. 262618). FD and AP were funded by the ERC grant, TRACSYMBOLS (no. 249587), and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-10- LABX-52), LaScArBx Cluster of Excellence. A.P.M. holds a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellowship (2014 BP-A 00122) from the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants, Government of Catalonia. A.C. and H.S.G. were funded by the British Academy. Additional support has been provided by the McDonald Institute for Archeological Research (University of Cambridge) and the Max Planck Society. For assistance in the field and with artifact analyses, we wish to thank Jackson Mupe, Yahya ...

This paper describes the results of 2017—2020 fieldwork at the Upper Palaeolithic site of Kostenki 17 (Spitsynskaya). This work established the presence of five new horizons of finds, in addition to the two cultural layers known since the 1950s. Given the thickness of the Upper Humic Bed, it is clear that the horizons of finds are separated by sterile layers, and correspond to the existence of different sites on this part of the promontory. Despite the small number of finds, the contents of each horizon differ in both the composition of faunal remains and lithic artefacts, as well as raw materials, state of preservation and degree of weathering. The investigated area of the lower (second) cultural layer demonstrates a complex nature of the post-deposition processes that influenced its preservation. A sharp slope of the Lower Humic Bed and a significant difference in the depth of the finds indicate a partial displacement along the slope of some sections of the cultural layer, which was not recorded in previous excavations. The present publication includes a stratigraphic characterization of deposits, a description of the occurrence of the cultural layers and horizons of finds, preliminary results of a technical and typological study of new collections of stone tools and ornaments from cultural layer II, and the results of radiocarbon dating.