By the time the “Scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers began in the late
nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries. Its gold had …

The Material‐Cultural TurnEvent and Effect | The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies |
Oxford Academic Skip to Main Content Advertisement Oxford Academic Search Menu …

Money is one of the most timeless, all-pervading, and arbitrary inventions in human history.
Its ubiquity in time and space offers great scope for comparative archaeological research …

The Yoruba: A New History is the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year
journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue …

Scholars of the Atlantic slave trade have not systematically addressed the question of what
material objects or personal belongings captive Africans took aboard the slave ships and …

A Material Culture focuses on objects in Swahili society through the elaboration of an
approach that sees both people and things as caught up in webs of mutual interaction. It …

Personal ornaments have become a key cultural proxy to investigate cognitive evolution,
modern human dispersal, and population dynamics. Here, we reassess personal ornaments …

The rapid diffusion of farming technologies in the western Mediterranean raises questions
about the mechanisms that drove the development of intensive contact networks and …

Originating in the sea, especially in the waters surrounding the low-lying islands of the
Maldives, Cypraea moneta (sometimes confused with Cypraea annulus) was transported to …

How people engaged with materials such as clay or stone, why people dug features such as
pits, why they decorated their bodies, or treated their dead in certain ways, were all …