Late Stone Age Shell Middens on the Red Sea Coast of Eritrea

Daniella E. Bar‐Yosef Mayer · Amanuel Beyin

19 citations0/0 files storedThe Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Maritime and Coastal Archaeology Archaeology and ancient environmental studies Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

Abstract

A pioneer survey of the Red Sea Coast of Eritrea revealed three shell middens dated to the mid-Holocene that reflect the exploitation of different coastal environments. Misse East and Gelalo Northwest were both dated to the eighth millennium BP. The former is dominated by Atactodea striata, a small bivalve that burrows in intertidal sands, the latter by Terebralia palustris, a large gastropod living in mangrove swamps. Gelalo Northwest also included a relatively large number of shell beads. Asfet, dated to the sixth millennium BP, was also dominated by Terebralia palustris. This coastal settlement is probably the result of adverse climatic conditions that prevailed in the hinterland during that period. Change in the regime of monsoons in the Sahara and northeast Africa may have caused human populations to settle in better-watered areas, the Red Sea Coast among them, and to adapt to the new conditions by exploiting the marine environment.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

References

2000The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior 2007Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene 1990Archaeological method and theory 2001The Archaeology of Aquatic Adaptations: Paradigms for a New Millennium 2004Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 1978The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture 2008Archaeology of the continental shelf: Marine resources, submerged landscapes and underwater archaeology 2000Early human occupation of the Red Sea coast of Eritrea during the last interglacial

Cited by

2013A surface Middle Stone Age assemblage from the Red Sea coast of Eritrea: Implications for Upper Pleistocene human dispersals out of Africa 20144200 New Shell Mound Sites in the Southern Red Sea 2020Shellfish resilience to prehistoric human consumption in the southern Red Sea: Variability in Conomurex fasciatus across time and space 2011Early to Middle Holocene human adaptations on the Buri Peninsula and Gulf of Zula, coastal lowlands of Eritrea

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.