Project description
Listening to the voices of stone
For centuries, southern Africa’s hunter-gatherers have spoken through stone (etched in rock art, buried in ancient tools, echoed in oral tradition). Yet, despite this wealth of evidence, archaeologists have long leaned on a narrow slice of local ethnography to understand these image-making societies. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the SAHUD project is weaving together data from archaeology, rock art, and ethnography, and it explores whether cultural differences among these groups overshadow their shared beliefs and practices. Drawing on archives from South Africa and the UK, SAHUD will create a rich new database that could reshape the global understanding of hunter-gatherer life, offering a more textured, human story stretching back 8 000 years.
Objective
Project SAHUD uses a regional case study to advance the global understanding of small-scale image-making societies. The rich and mutually illuminating relationships between ethnographic, rock art and excavated archaeological data in southern Africa are unavailable to rock art researchers in most other contexts, such as the European Upper Palaeolithic, where analogies often employ southern African ethnographies. However, despite the potential offered by this wealth of data, previous southern African archaeological research has focused on an overly small sample of local ethnographies to interpret inter-group differences in technological and subsistence adaptations to a range of environments and wild plants and animals. Simultaneously, ethnographic and rock art evidence has been used to emphasise practices and beliefs that transcend multiple hunter-gatherer groups across time and space. A novel, holistic integration is needed that is sensitive to all the available evidence and varied theoretical frameworks. The project’s key question is: does the evidence for diversity across ethnographic and mid- to late Holocene archaeological hunter-gatherers in southern Africa eclipse the widespread parallels and continuities in beliefs and practices? This question will be addressed in three interrelated ‘work packages’ that draw on published literature and archives in the United Kingdom and South Africa. The project uniquely analyses diversity across three traditionally independent research fields. The outcomes — including a novel database of ethnographic southern African hunter-gatherer diversity for archaeological investigations, and testing its potential for guiding studies of rock art diversity and for enriching discussion of archaeological diversity among southern African hunter-gatherers — will collectively constitute a new integrated synthesis of southern African hunter-gatherers between ~8,000 and 2,000 years ago.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
OX1 2JD Oxford
United Kingdom
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.