An ethnoarchaeological study of highland Ethiopian griddle technology is compared to bread-baking technologies in Africa and the Near East. There is a functional relationship between the use of ovens and griddles and the presence or absence of gluten in bread ingredients. Ovens are most appropriate for cereals containing gluten and may be implicated in the selection of higher quality gluten in domesticated wheats. We conclude, based on evidence for griddle use and the performance characteristics of African cereals, that indigenous species were exploited in highland Ethiopia before Near Eastern cereals were introduced. Griddle-cooking practices that bias the preservation of Near Eastern cereals over African ones may explain the absence of African cereals in the early archaeobotanical record. [
African witchcraft is a personal act of one individual using supernatural powers to harm another. This action is not random but is a strategy used within particular sets of social relations and contexts of interaction. Presented here is an ethnoarchaeological study of witchcraft in husband-wife relationships amongst the Mura of Déla in northern Cameroon. In Mura society a set of social practices, including witchcraft, presents women as mobile and antisocial, justifying their exclusion from controlling major resources especially land and houses. Wives use men's fear that they will act as witches to curb husbands from abusing their authority. Men use differential site formation processes in men's and women's areas of domestic compounds to represent women as disruptive and impermanent members of households and unworthy of holding major resources. At the same time men must protect themselves from wives who might use witchcraft against them and do so by burying powerful amulets in the floors and through other material practices. It is argued that such practices are widespread and may have broader implications in the emergence of social differentiation.
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