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The investigations carried out within the project in NE-Nigeria since 1989 have been focussing on the late Pleistocene and Holocene landscape development of the south eastern Chad basin. Areas of interest include palaeodune fields, clay plains and former beach ridge systems of Lake Chad. Transgressions and regressions of Lake Chad played an important role in the younger landscape history of NE-Nigeria and have also caused great environmental changes. The term „Megachad“ is well known and describes an enormous lake with an extension comparable with the Caspian Sea of today. The term „Microchad“ stands for the other recent extreme in terms of the lake dimensions varying during the times. Environmental changes in the surroundings of Lake Chad are closely connected with transgressions and regressions of the lake. These lake level changes can be climatically induced as well as non-climatically, due to human impact. Nearly all land units have more or less been influenced by the lake, spatially as well as temporally. It is important, though, to notice the scales of the changes. Some changes took place in a millennial scale, some in the scales of centuries or decades, and at least – as can be observed every year – in a seasonal scale.
Studies on land use in Africa have usually been carried out by ethnologists or human geographers and were rarely concerned with data on the physical conditions of soil. There is hardly any issue, however, where interdependencies between natural and cultural factors are as evident as in the topic of land use. For this project the approach of three ethnologists, Braukämper, Kirscht and Platte, was therefore combined with the analysis of Thiemeyer as physical geographer. The area of research is the Local Government Area of Marte in the Nigerian State of Borno. As part of the Chad Basin this region is mainly characterised by clay sediments which are commonly labelled firgi by its inhabitants. Beside this general term, however, the local peasants clearly distinguish five types of soil (Kanuri: katti), to which different physical conditions and qualities with respect to their cultivation are attributed. The question arose how far can this popular knowledge, accumulated by agricultural experiences over generations, be correlated with scientific data. That is why samples of the mentioned types of soil were collected by the members of our team and analysed in the laboratory of the Frankfurt Institute of Physical Geography. The detailed presentation of this analysis has to be preceded by the classification of the respective soil types in the terminology of the indigenous farmers.
Bei den hier vorgestellten ethnologischen und geomorphologischen Aspekten von Brunnen und Getreidespeichern in der firgí-Region Musenes wird besonders die "angepaßte Technologie" der hier lebenden Menschen deutlich. Die kulturelle Entwicklung der Region hängt eng mit den besonderen naturräumlichen Bedingungen zusammen. Die Eigenbezeichnung als firgiwú (die Leute des Tons) verweist auf eine Beziehung der Bewohner zum Naturraum, in dem Ton eine besondere Rolle spielt und für den es spezielle Berufszweige gibt. Die Ressource Ton wird, gleichwohl im Bewußtsein, daß es sich hierbei um regionalspezifische Aspekte handelt, als integrierendes Moment über die ethnischen Grenzen hinweg als Teil ihrer firgiwú -Kultur verstanden. Offensichtlich hat diese eine lange Tradition. Interessant wäre, ob in anderen ähnlich ausgestatteten Naturräumen in Westafrika eine vergleichbare Anpassung bzw. Nutzung des Naturraumes zu finden ist, bzw. wie dort die Nutzungsstrategien aussehen.
[Nachruf] Arno Semmel
(2010)
Case numbers of endemic Ca-deficiency rickets (CDR) have been reported to be alarmingly rising among children of subsistence farms in developing countries within the last 30 years. Fluoride toxicities in the environment are known to not be related to the disease. To investigate if, instead, CDR is caused by a nutrient deficiency in the environment, subsistence farms in an endemic CDR area near Kaduna, northern Nigeria, were investigated for bedrock, slope forms, soil types, and soil characteristics. The natural environment was investigated according to the World Reference Base, soil texture was analysed by pipette and sieving, and plant-available macronutrients were determined using barium-chloride or Ca-acetate-lactate extraction. The analyses showed that granite and slope deposits were the dominant parent materials. The typical slope forms and soil types were Lixisols and Acrisols on pediments, Fluvisols in river valleys, and Plinthosols and Acrisols on plains. Compared with West African background values, all of the soils had normal soil textures but were low in macronutrients. Comparisons to critical limits, however, showed that only the P concentrations were critically low, which are typical for savanna soils. A link between nutrient deficiency in soils and CDR in the Kaduna area was therefore considered unlikely.
In the nineteenth century, two Neolithic axe-heads were reported from the Michelsberg enclosure system at Kapellenberg. The recent identification of an unusually large tumulus, from which the axe-heads were almost certainly once recovered, reveals that socio-political hierarchisation, linked to the emergence of high-ranking elites in Brittany and the Paris Basin during the fifth millennium cal BC, may have extended into Central Europe.
Los campañas de 2006, 2007 y 2008 en Alcorrín han puesto de manifiesto la importancia del lugar para los primeros contactos entre fenicios e indígenas en el extremo occidental de la provincia de Málaga, que las dataciones radiométricas han situado en la segunda mitad del siglo IX a.C. Este proyecto ha permitido documentar una imponente fortificación del Bronce Final, conocida con anterioridad sólo a nivel superficial. La realización de prospecciones geofísicas nos revela un incipiente urbanismo que irá siendo conocido en detalle en futuras actuaciones. Estos trabajos se han completado con la excavación de un edificio singular, de planta cuadrangular y compartimentada, con un pavimento de conchas en su acceso. Entre los materiales, escasos y mayoritariamente consistentes en cerámica a mano, cabe señalar la presencia de dos grafitos fenicios sobre cerámica.
