Publications

Southern Africa

Hunting and the social lives of southern Africa’s first farmers (Jones et al. 2024)
Summary: Shows how hunting remained an important social and economic practice among early farming communities, complicating simple narratives of a clean shift from foraging to herding and farming.

Eastern Uganda

Dynamic human-animal-environment relationships at two Later Stone Age sites in Holocene southeastern Uganda (Jones and Tibesasa 2025)
Summary: Shows how new fishing technologies enabled Kansyore tradition foragers to interact with Lake Victoria in new ways, driving ecological changes that led to further economic adjustments.

Kansyore fisher-hunter-gatherers abandoned the northeastern Lake Victoria shoreline during an arid period in the middle Holocene (Jones and Tibesasa 2022)
Summary: Uses zooarchaeological and chronometric data to show how Kansyore groups reoriented their fishing strategies and settlement patterns in response to aridity and the arrival of herders and farmers.

Shells, sand, and Holocene archaeology in Lake Victoria Nyanza, Eastern Uganda (Tibesasa and Jones 2021)
Summary: Documents Holocene archaeological evidence of long-term human legacies in a previously unexplored area in Uganda.

Southern Somalia

The dik-diks of Guli Waabayo: Late Pleistocene net-hunting and forager sociality in eastern Africa (Jones 2023)
Summary: Argues that cooperative net-hunting practices that targeted dwarf antelope structured social relations and resilience among Later Stone Age foragers in a semi-arid environment for thousands of years.

20,000 years of small game hunting in southern Somalia (Jones & Brandt 2022)
Summary: Tracks remarkable continuity in small game hunting strategies over ~20,000 years, challenging assumptions that hunter-gatherer economies are inherently fragile in the face of climate change.

Improved ostrich eggshell and ungulate tooth enamel radiocarbon dating reveals Later Stone Age occupation in arid Late Pleistocene Somalia (Jones et al. 2021)
Summary: Uses refined radiocarbon dating of eggshell and tooth enamel to push back evidence for human occupation in semi-arid Late Pleistocene Somalia.

Oxygen isotope analyses of ungulate tooth enamel confirm low seasonality of rainfall contributed to the African Humid Period in Somalia (Reid et al. 2019)
Summary: Uses serially-sampled isotopic data from warthog enamel to show that relatively low rainfall seasonality characterized Holocene humid period environments in the southern Horn of Africa, providing a climatic backdrop for human occupation patterns.

Hunter-gatherer reliance on inselbergs, big game, and dwarf antelope at the Rifle Range Site, southern Somalia ~20,000–5,000 BP (Jones et al. 2018)
Summary: Explores how inselbergs and prey availability informed long-term subsistence patterns in semi-arid Somalia, emphasizing the importance of local topographies and microhabitats on human resilience.

Central Sudan

The Shaqadud Archaeological Project (Sudan): Exploring prehistoric cultural adaptations in the Sahelian hinterlands (Varadzin et al. 2022)
Summary: Synthesizes archaeological work at Shaqadud to show how communities in Sahelian terrestrial environments adapted to Holocene climatic and environmental shifts.

Other research

Ritual dispositions, enclosures, and the passing of time: A biographical perspective on the Winchester Farm earthwork in Central Kentucky, USA (Henry et al. 2021)
Summary: Applies a “biographical” approach to a Kentucky earthwork to trace how continued ritual practices and landscape modifications accumulated meaning over time.