Kevin C. MacDonald’s research while affiliated with University College London and other places

... A number Fig. 12 An example of the medallions issued by Henry Wellcome. I-Phone image capture by Isabelle Vella Gregory, 2023 of Dinka inhabit the fringes of the village, and the Umda invited them to the heritage festival, seeing it as an opportunity to create more connections between the different groups. Another effect of sharing photographs is a new understanding of the surrounding landscape. ...

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Capturing Empire Through the Lens: Colonial Narratives and Power Structures in Henry Wellcome’s Expedition to Jebel Moya, Sudan

... Extra-linguistic In terms of the grain's providence, Purseglove (1985) In fact, in the Niger Inland Delta in Mali … fonio (Digitaria exilis) appears from 400 cal ad (McIntosh, 1995), although the latter has been mentioned in contexts dated around 800 cal bc. takezawa and cisse, 2004 Excavations at Tongo Maaré Diabal, a site located near today's city of Douentza located at the northwestern tip of the Bandiagara Escarpment, and Sadia, on the Seno Plains to the east of the Escarpment, find a predominance of pearl millet until about 1000 years ago when other crops, including fonio, were introduced (Champion and Gestrich et al., 2021;. Champion (2020) explicitly disagrees with Blench's postulation that fonio is indigenous to Mali based on its widespread common linguistic forms. ...

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Layers of Lexical Borrowing in Long-Term Contact Rooted among Ancient Crops from Mali’s Bandiagara Region

... Moya (3000-100 BC), which lies approximately 250km south of Khartoum and is affiliated with eastern Sahel cultures, serves as an outlier for analyses (Irish & Konigsberg 2007;Brass et al. 2019). Located 20km from Nabta Playa and 80km from Bir Kiseiba, the later Neolithic sample from Gebel Ramlah is tentatively cast as a descendent population of the groups who putatively initiated the Nubian Pastoral Neolithic. ...

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Do cultural and biological variation correspond in the Middle Nile Valley Neolithic? Some insights from dental morphology

... Most studies replicating likely charring conditions have focused on stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in grains of C3 plants (DeNiro and Hastorf 1985;Bogaard et al., 2007;Fiorentino et al., 2012;Fraser et al., 2013;Nitsch et al., 2015;Stroud et al., 2023b) and C4 plants (Yang et al., 2011;An et al., 2015;Styring et al., 2019;Dong et al., 2022;Varalli et al., 2023). In contrast, the representation of oxygen stable isotopes ( 18 O/ 16 O; δ 18 O) has received limited attention (Marino and DeNiro 1987;Williams et al., 2005), despite their importance as indicators of hydroclimate and plant physiological activity (Barbour, 2007;Siegwolf et al., 2023). ...

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Preservation of stable isotopic composition in charred grains: Implications for paleoenvironmental and archeological research

... Furthermore, as soon as in-person fieldwork becomes a viable option for this region of Mauritania, we call for the integration of desk-based approaches with collaborative, community-centred fieldwork and suitable data-sharing solutions. This will improve data resolution, social impact, and data sovereignty/capacity building potential for archaeological heritage in Mauritania, as demonstrated for other countries in Africa and elsewhere in the world (e.g., Clack and Brittain, 2011;Rayne et al., 2017;MacDonald et al., 2018;Davis et al., 2020;Klehm and Gokee, 2020;Linares-Matás and Lim, 2021;Lim et al., 2021;Lim et al., 2022;Ochungo et al., 2022). One priority target for future collaborative community-led projects in the context of the Tabarit-East tumulus field would be to obtain accurate architectural measurements to assess the reliability of our remote sensing reconstructions, as well as to retrieve construction dates for the monuments through scientific or relative techniques. ...

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Dunes, death, and datasets: Modelling funerary monument construction in remote arid landscapes using spaceborne stereo imagery

... Pottery from different areas varies in its forming techniques, its shapes (though most pottery is globular or ovoid in its basic shape) and its decorative practices. Occasionally, as at Tongo Maaré Diabal (Gestrich and MacDonald 2018) or Kumbi Saleh ( van Doosselaere 2014), different productions can be clearly separated. The mechanisms underlying these differences have been the subject of extensive ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research by the University of Geneva. ...

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Pottery décor as networks on the Middle Niger, Mali

... Finally, it mobilizes collective labor, thus buttressing intragroup cooperation-which may, or maybe not, capitalized by a king or an elite. Interestingly, shifting sedentism does not only occur in the margins of Sahelian state formations, but also at the very centers and capitals of the Mali and Ghana empires also shifted (MacDonald, 2012). It could be hypothesized that this phenomenon, which is particular to the region, might be the result of a tradition of equality: a memory that went back to the time of heterarchical urbanism in the first millennium CE and that saw a new way of expressing itself under very different political conditions. ...

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Traditions of Equality: The Archaeology of Egalitarianism and Egalitarian Behavior in Sub-Saharan Africa (First and Second Millennium CE)

... Based on available long-term archeological evidence in western Africa, the post-domestication evolution includes reduced husk and bristle length, leading to free-threshing pearl millet . Three important domestication syndromes in pearl millet are (a) the evolution of non-shattering spikes, making seed dispersal reliant on human harvesting, threshing, and sowing (Fuller et al., 2021); (b) an increase in seed size and volume by increasing breadth and thickness, resulting in club-shaped seeds of domesticated pearl millet (Zach & Klee, 2003); and (c) floret duplication, resulting in two spikelets in involucres compared with the single-spikelet involucre in P. violaceum (Fuller & MacDonald, 2007). Clotault et al. (2012) estimated the domestication date of pearl millet around 4,800 years ago, using a set of 20 random genes in 33 cultivated and 13 wild pearl millet accessions. ...

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Growth and Development of Pearl Millet

... The involucres, which contain spikelets and bristles, change from being sessile and shed when mature to being non-shedding and stalked in the domesticated form (Fig. 7.5;also, Brunken et al., 1977;Poncet et al., 2000;D'Andrea et al., 2001;Zach and Klee, 2003;Fuller et al., 2007b). Evidence for the early occurrence of domesticated, stalked involucres comes from impressions in ceramics of pearl millet chaff that had been mixed with clay during pottery production (Amblard and Pernes, 1989;MacDonald et al., 2003;Klee et al., 2004;Fuller et al., 2007b). These impressions can preserve the threshed involucre stalks ( Fig. 7.6), of which the earliest are now from 2500 BC to 2200 BC at Karkarichinkat (unpublished data of Fuller and K. Manning; cf. ...

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Seed Dispersal and Crop Domestication: Shattering, Germination and Seasonality in Evolution Under Cultivation

... Despite good results, and the completion of a report to the British Academy (MacDonald n.d.), publication of the work on TMD has remained sporadic. Material from the site has appeared in various journal articles and book chapters (MacDonald 1992;MacDonald et al. 1994;MacDonald 1995;MacDonald & MacDonald 2000;Bedaux et al. 2003;MacDonald & Camara 2011;MacDonald 1997/98), but the research was never completed to a point of full publication. ...

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On the Margins of Ghana and Kawkaw: Four Seasons of Excavation at Tongo Maaré Diabal (AD 500-1150), Mali