Preparing for Fieldwork in Tanzania

As I have covered packing for fieldwork I thought I would cover some of the logistical issues one has to deal with when coming to Tanzania. I also thought this might be of interest to friends and family who just see me come and go each year and may not actually know all the work involved. Some of these tips will be useful for travel to other parts of the world but most are specific to Tanzania.

Before you go:

Apply for funding. This is a whole other world of pain and you will often be applying for funding before, during, and after fieldwork.

Apply for research clearance from COSTECH (The Tanzanian Commission on Science and Technology) for all participants. This should be done approximately 6 months you go. It costs $50 USD to apply (one fee for the single application, does not matter how many people are associated with the project) and $300 USD per person for the permit once approved. It helps to notify the Director of the Department of Antiquities (Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism) that you are applying for COSTECH clearance as they will be reviewing your file. You will not be able to receive an excavation permit without COSTECH clearance and will not receive COSTECH clearance without approval of Antiquities. You are required to have a local collaborator for your COSTECH application so it is best to have positive working relationships with your Tanzanian colleagues. http://www.costech.or.tz

Once you have received notice of approval from COSTECH you can apply for your visa from the Tanzanian High Commission in Ottawa. You will have to have a Tanzanian colleague located in Tanzania assist you as you will need to include copies of your COSTECH permits with this application. Your colleague can pick them up at COSTECH and pay for them ($300 USD per person) then scan them in and email the scans to you. Single entry visas cost $75 CND and multiple entry cost $150 CND http://www.tzrepottawa.ca/home.htm

Book your flights. This can occur at any point during the planning process.

Get vaccinations and get prescriptions for anti-malarial pills. If you have not travelled to Tanzania, it is best to go to the Traveler’s Health Clinic as they are specifically trained for informing you about what is required and other associated travel health risks. If you just require an anti-malarial prescription, it is best to just visit your family doctor as the Traveler’s Health Clinic will charge you a $48 fee.

Check in with the appropriate people in your department, and any other appropriate office at your University.

Return any collections you may have borrowed for study in previous years.

Register with the Canadian High Commission in Dar es Salaam via their webpage (www.travel.gc.ca). This ensures that should any issue arrive which may prove a concern to your safety, the High Commission can contact you and get you out if necessary.

Get USD. Traveler’s cheques are becoming difficult to change anywhere in Tanzania but Dar es Salaam. US dollars in $20, $50, and $100 denominations work best. Do not worry about getting Tanzanian shillings (TSH) before you go. You can readily change these at the airport upon arrival (and you can get surprisingly good rates with no fees all over the place).

Upon arrival:

Visit the Department of Antiquities to drop off your application for an Excavation License. Again you can speed up the process if you have a colleague drop this off before you even arrive. Your application includes a short project proposal and budget. 5% of this budget is what you will pay for the excavation permit. Once your proposal has been approved you will be asked to pay your fee which you can do in USD or by traveler’s cheques. You will then receive a copy of the License which will notify you as to who is your Antiquities Officer. This Officer will accompany you during your entire field season. You are required to pay them a salary and cover their room and expenses. They will write up letters of introduction for you which are necessary for visiting government offices in your particular study area.

Arrange for transportation. You can hire a 4 wheel drive vehicle and driver from one of many reputable safari or car rental companies. You will generally pay a flat fee, plus kilometers, plus gas, plus room, food, and salary for the driver. It is worth the expense as your driver is also a mechanic and will ensure that your vehicle remains in working condition.

Visit the Tanzanian Department of Immigration (Uhamiaji). You will be required to have your immigration status changed to a Class C which will allow you to undertake research during your visit (your visa just gets you in the country). It will cost $120 USD and can take weeks to process. It is a grueling process and it is highly recommended you visit this office with a Tanzanian colleague who can help facilitate the process. You will have to fill out a form (in duplicate), provide 5 passport photos, and copies of your Curriculum Vitae (CV), COSTECH permit, passport photo and passport visa pages. You submit your application and will be given an receipt which provides the date for your appointment. At this appointment you should be able to pay for your Class C residence permit. Hopefully you will be able to receive your permit at this time (or sometime that day); often you are told to return in a few days. Plan on needing at least 10 – 14 days for this step alone.

Acquire any supplies you need that you did not bring with you or cannot acquire in your study area.

Coordinate your team as to when you are departing.

Once all the steps above are completed you can finally head out to the field. We usually are in Dar for 10 days before being able to leave for fieldwork. Be prepared to spend many hours waiting around in offices. Getting frustrated will not help but you must be persistent. Do not leave until you have spoken to someone and do not hesitate to return to offices day after day to make sure something is being done. Again if you can have a local colleague help you out do so; this process can be moved along much quicker with help than if you attempt to do it all on your own. Good luck!

From Macro to Micro: Characterizing Lithic Raw Materials

This is where I take archaeology and geology, smashing them together in a glorious mess.

In order to source the lithic (stone) raw materials that we recovered in our assemblages (see previous entry "My Research 101" for explanation as to why I am doing this), I am attempting to describe the stone types in a way that is based in geology but is accessible to archaeologists with little or no background in geology. I do have a limited background in geology myself, mostly a few introductory courses along with some upper level ones in sedimentation and stratigraphy, GIS mapping, and mineralogy, but I am not a geologist.

I am describing our lithic artifacts using both macroscopic and microscopic attributes. Macroscopic attributes are those visual characteristics (colour, patination, lustre, mottling, speckling, banding, texture, inclusions, etc.) that you can see via the naked eye. Microscopic characteristics are those that require the use of, obviously, a microscope (preferably a polarizing microscope). These include mineral content and relative proportions, fabric, and texture among many others. The lists of attributes I am recording are derived from those used by geologists to describe and characterize rocks within the three major rock types: igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary.

Macroscopic analysis is frequently not adequate for distinguishing between different rock types thus necessitating the use of microscopic analysis. Further, microscopic analysis often can tell us a lot about the specific formation environment of that particular rock (i.e. it's source). Chert is a great example to further clarify this.

Chert, overall, is highly variable. Within a single formation of chert there can be a considerable amount of variation in it's visual (macroscopic) characteristics. Even if the source is visually homogeneous there may be microscopic variations between the various members of that formation. Thus, when we talk about variation in cherts we can talk about inter-source variation (that between different sources) and intra-source variation (that within a single source). However, inter-source variation can be quite low too. You can have several sources of chert that all look visually the same, so we need to look at the microscopic features of each source individually to distinguish which one is which. We also have to look at a number of samples from each source must be look at in order to account for intra-source variability. Now if we don't have descriptions of the sources, like in this case (we did a field season of survey and were not able to find any potential sources, and this is the first study of its kind to occur in this region so there is no baseline data), we can still look at the microscopic attributes of the cherts to at least determine how many (potential) sources were being used and what formation environments should we expect to find these sources.

So I start by grouping the cherts into "types" based on their macroscopic features. I then sample each "type" for thin sectioning. These thin sections are then analysed for their microscopic attributes and again grouped into "types" based on similarity or difference to each other. Hopefully the macroscopic types will correlate with their microscopic types. If not, that's ok too - what that means is that it is likely there is intra-source variation. Either way I need to then look further at the microscopic attributes of the types to try to connect them to a formation environment. Again, certain microscopic features can allow me to say that this chert was formed in this particular environment over another. The idea is to then go back to the geological maps for the region and identify possible formations that match the microscopic evidence for where the chert could have come from so we can go back into the field and check them out.

Whether I am able to find the sources or not, it is my hope that the method I am using, and the charactertization scheme I am developing, will allow archaeologists working in Tanzania to describe their assemblages in a standardized way. This will then allow us to start to look at similarities and differences in raw material selection and use within and between various regions of the country.

In the future I'll post some pictures to clarify what I've tried to explain above. Eventually, once my research is done, I am going to develop a website where anybody can see descriptions, photos, and microphotographs of all of our raw material types (not just the chert).

My Research 101

Good evening class. Today's topic is my research. I will try to keep this relatively short and straightforward but please do not hesitate to interrupt should you have a question. Let's begin.

I study the raw materials used to make stone tools. Specifically I am interested in the characterization (description) and sourcing of these lithic raw materials in order to infer mobility patterns, trade and exchange, and resource exploitation. Basically, I look at and describe the different types of raw materials (including, but not limited to, chert) found in stone artifact assemblages and try to determine how they were being used and where they come from.The goal of this is to go from looking at stone artifacts to actually saying something about the behaviour, culture, and worldview of the people who made them.

In particular I am intrigued by the use of chert. Chert is, well, awesome. In the real world, it is just a type of sedimentary rock and, in honour of my pledge to keep this simple, a "variant" of chert - jasper - is often considered semi-precious and is used in jewelry. In my world, chert is a highly variable, high quality raw material for making tools. Different outcrops (sources) of chert can vary significantly from other sources in the same region. This means, in theory, that I can look at the different types of chert recovered in an assemblage at a single site, and between sites, to answer a number of questions relating to technology. To get a bit more science-y, chert is fascinating because geologists still cannot quite agree over how it forms. Generally it is agreed that there is some sort of precipitation and lithification process that involves siliceous microorganisms. Often we can find microfossils which are incorporated into the chert during formation. These microfossils can be specific to particular formations which can assist in determine what source a chert is coming from. Neat huh!?

Back to my current research...I am looking at the raw materials from two stone age sites in Tanzania. I am conducting work on sites there as Tanzania is important in terms of human evolution. Both genetic and fossil evidence place the origin of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens (anatomically modern humans), to East Africa. Now there is a whole bunch of discussion in the Africanist world about the relationship between anatomical modernity and behavioural modernity. As we know when we became anatomically modern (around 300,000 years ago give or take a couple thousand years) the question is when did we start behaving like modern humans. Now there is a whole grocery list of features that are argued make up behavioural modernity (i.e. art, personal adornment, etc.). Most of these indicators were derived from European Upper Palaeolithic assemblages - sites dating to after the expansion of modern humans into Eurasia from Africa (note: there is a counter argument to the idea that modern humans evolved in Africa but it is currently not the dominant paradigm. I will have to leave that debate to another post). What this suggests is that behavioural modernity developed after anatomical modernity. For those of us working in East Africa one of the things we are trying to do is identify these indicators or traits in our assemblages and see if we can pin down when the transition to modernity occurs. Luckily our research area Iringa (see earlier post) has sites that date to the period when we see the rise of anatomical modernity, and, hopefully, also contain the period of transition to behavioural modernity.

If you are following me so far you are probably wondering how this directly relates to what I do (i.e. all the stuff with the rocks and chert). Well, it is argued that a key modern behaviour is the establishment and maintenance of long distance trade and exchange networks. By looking at where and how stone raw materials were acquired and used, it may be possible for me to infer if there were long distance trade/exchange networks. My analyses demonstrate the presence of a number of the behaviours attributed to modern humans.

Obviously my research is just one small part of the larger research project headed by my PhD supervisor, and there are other archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists from around the world who are also working on this time period and these questions. In general, those of us looking at these questions have found that in fact behavioural modernity did develop before our anatomically modern ancestors left Africa to populate the rest of the world.

Any questions?

Class dismissed.