User:MatildaStar/sandbox

Ideas for my "Archaeology of Malawi" Article

Karonga is in the Northern Region of Malawi in the Malawi Rift. This region contains the site of Mwanganda's Village. This site is known for the findings of an elephant butchery site. Here they have found associated animal bones and stone artifacts. In Area 1 of the Village, there was evidence of a single elephant carcass. The elephant bones were broken and dispersed into three main concentrations. This has been dated back to the the late Middle or early Upper Pleistocene times. Area 2 of the village contained evidence for other hunting activities, presumably on different occasions. (Wright, 2013)

Mwana wa Chentcherere II rock shelter is a site that has evidence for rock art. This is one of the largest rock painting sites in Malawi and it was excavated by Professor J. Desmond Clark in 1972. It is a Later Stone Age site that shows evidence as to how the hunter-gatherers persisted into the Iron Age. Many of the paintings were motifs for sexuality and fertility which shows a very intimate side of women that is not shown much in the ancient times. The art shows that the people really focused on the body and what they represented in terms of fertility and even had a ceremony called Chinamwali Chachikulu or the "great initiation" when women were experiencing their first pregnancy. (Zubieta, 2006)

The Namaso Bay Area is a very familiar area for archaeological research. This region is on the southern shore of Lake Malawi on the edge of the Nankumba peninsula. While excavating, this area was studied to determine the lake levels to check whether similar levels occurred in the earlier times. The beaches were dated using radiocarbon dating and were then connected to the archaeological samples obtained in the study. Comparing the pottery, they determined a new intermediate phase of ceramics proving there was continuity from the Early Iron Age to the Late Iron Age. Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers first occupied the area. (SEITSONEN, 2004)

Some other sites/areas I may write about are Uraha Hill, a site where a jawbone was found, Mankhamba, a site where fauna material was found and is an early settlement of the Maravi people, Nkudzi Bay, which is a proto-historic cemetery, and Mtemankhokwe I which is a burial site where human remains were found. Mtemankhokwe I is a Late Iron Age cemetery in the Mangochi district of Southern Malawi.

I have all the citations on my computer and will add the full sources later on.

@MatildaStar: Nice job so far! You're making good progress, and you've found good refs. I might suggest breaking the article down into sections by time period - Early Stone Age, Middle Stone Age, Later Stone Age, Neolithic, Iron Age, etc. You'll find the most research for the MSA and the Iron Age, I think - but worth looking around for other refs too. You'll also want to add a sentence or two on the "History of Malawi" page that link to your new article. Let me know how else I can help! Ninafundisha (talk) 20:43, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

Addition to the African Archaeology Page

Even though hominin species' brains were reorganized and modernized at a fast rate, the behavior of these hominins did not adapt quite as fast. This caused the hominin species to be quite primitive.