Esther Mahlangu at the retrospective of her work at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town.
Marco Longari/Getty Images
At 88 the artist Esther Mahlangu is world famous and is the subject of a major exhibition in Cape Town.
Beads from Jarigole site.
Carla Klehm.
Mineralogical analysis of 5,000-year-old stone beads from Turkana, Kenya suggest a novel mortuary tradition by early pastoralists.
Artist AbdulAlim U-K (Aikin Karr) combines the fractal structure of traditional African architecture with emerging technologies in computer graphics.
AbdulAlim U-K
By bridging culture and computation, heritage algorithms challenge the myth of ‘primitive cultures’ and forge a new understanding of science and art.
Rosaries are meant for praying anywhere and anytime.
Anderson Mouzinho/EyeEm via Getty Images
Rosaries are meant to be used wherever, whenever – and each one tells a story.
Glass related artifacts excavated from Igbo Olokun, Ile Ife. Left: glass beads, Right: fragments of glass making crucibles.
Courtesy Author
Africa has always contributed to global technological breakthroughs and economic systems.
For centuries, indigenous history has been largely told through a European lens.
John White, circa 1585-1593, © The Trustees of the British Museum
Modern dating techniques are providing new time frames for indigenous settlements in Northeast North America, free from the Eurocentric bias that previously led to incorrect assumptions.
Amber held high value in past human cultures, and it may have been lucrative to create fake beads for trade.
from www.shutterstock.com
Archaeologists have uncovered a 2,000-year-old amber bead scam. But humans have been making fake jewels and icons for much longer than that.
Necklaces and earrings in traditional Kenyan cultures denote messages about marriage and childbearing.
from www.shutterstock.com
Why is jewellery so important to the story of human evolution? Because it provides a public message – even to people we don’t know.