Spatial Approaches in African Archaeology

Dr. Cameron Gokee is an anthropological archaeologist who studies the interplay between community and landscape. Building on nearly two decades of collaborative research in francophone West Africa, Dr. Gokee currently directs the Bandafassi Regional Archaeological Project to map shifting relations of village life and ethnic identity in a “shatter zone” on the upper Gambia River over the past thousand years. Locally, he also co-directs two projects to explore the historical landscapes of Indigenous and Black communities in southern Appalachia—the Linville Gorge Archaeological Survey and the Junaluska Community Archaeology Project. Finally, Dr. Gokee collaborates with the Undocumented Migration Project to address structural violence against migrants moving across the US-Mexico borderlands.  Dr. Carla Klehm is Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas. She is an anthropological archaeologist working at the intersection of inequality, long-distance trade, and human-environmental relationships. Funded by NSF, NEH, NGS, and Wenner-Gren, among others, she directs international, multidisciplinary projects that span from the outskirts of the earliest polities in southern Africa and the riverine fortress networks of Bronze Age Europe to mortuary assemblages at some of East Africa’s earliest megalithic monuments. Her projects have incorporated a range of geospatial techniques, including geophysics, UAV-based sensors, and predictive modeling using multispectral satellite imagery, derived from her long-standing relationship with CAST. Dr. Klehm also collaborates directly with local museums and communities and incorporates indigenous perspectives in the narratives she presents to both academic and popular audiences.

Geospatial Analysis in African Archaeology: Current Theories, Topics, and Methods.- Aerial and Spaceborne Remote Sensing in African Archaeology: A Review of Current Research and Potential Future Avenues.- From the Bottom Up: Assessing the Spectral Ability of Common Multispectral Sensors to Detect Surface Archaeological Deposits Using Field Spectrometry and Advanced Classifiers in the Shashi-Limpopo Confluence Area.- Water, Geography, and Aksumite Civilization: The Southern Red Sea Archaeological Histories (SRSAH) Project Survey (2009–2016).- Capturing People on the Move: Spatial Analysis and Remote Sensing in the Bantu Mobility Project, Basanga, Zambia.- Mapping the Villagescape: An Archaeological Approach to Political Ecology Along the Falemme River, AD 1000–1900.- Sensory Synaesthesia: Combined Analyses Based on Space Syntax in African Urban Contexts.- Collaborative Mapping of Sacred Forests in Southern Ethiopia: Canopies Harboring Conflict Landscapes?.- R. N. E. Barton, A. Bouzouggar, S. N. Collcutt, and L.T. Humphrey (Eds): Cemeteries and Sedentism in the Later Stone Age of NW Africa: Excavations at Grotte des Pigeons, Taforalt, Morocco.- Kathleen Bickford Berzock (Ed.): Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa.- Scott MacEachern: Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa.