Prehistoric Stone Tools Of Eastern Africa

A detailed overview of the Eastern African stone tools that make up the world's longest archaeological record.

"Stone tools are the least familiar objects that archaeologists recover from their excavations, and predictably, they struggle to understand them. Eastern Africa alone boasts a 3.4 million-year-long archaeological record but its stone tool evidence still remains disorganized, unsynthesized, and all 8 but-impenetrable to non-experts, and especially so to students from Eastern African countries. In this book, John J. Shea offers a simple, straightforward, and richly illustrated introduction in how to read stone tools. An experienced stone tool analyst and an expert stoneworker, he synthesizes the Eastern African stone tool evidence for the first time. Shea presents the EAST Typology, a new 15 framework for describing stone tools specifically designed to allow archaeologist to do what they currently cannot: compare stone tool evidence across the full sweep of Eastern African prehistory. He also includes a series of short, fictional , and humorous vignettes set on an Eastern 20 African archaeological excavation, which illustrate the major issues and controversies in research about stone tools"--

This book surveys the archaeological record for stone tools from the earliest times to 6,500 years ago in the Near East.

An exploration of how the evolution of behavioral differences between humans and other primates affected the archaeological stone tool evidence.

The goal of this volume is to impart an appreciation of the many facets of East Africa's cultural and archaeological diversity over the last 2,000 years. It brings together chapters on East African archaeology, many by Africa-born archaeologists who review what is known, present new research, and pinpoint issues of debate and anomaly in the relatively poorly known prehistory of East Africa.

"This volume covers the period from the end of the Neolithic era to the beginning of the seventh century of our era. This lengthy period includes the civilization of Ancient Egypt, the history of Nubia, Ethiopia, North Africa and the Sahara, as well as of the other regions of the continent and its islands."--Publisher's description

Summarizes recent anthropological discoveries in East Africa and assesses their significance.