9320534 Lewis Under the direction of Dr. R. Barry Lewis, Ms. Sibel Barut will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will study archaeological materials from the site of Lukenya Hill, Kenya and also conduct limited excavation at the locality. Lukenya Hill is extremely important for Africanist prehistorians because the area contains a number of individual sites which span the period from recent times to over 50,000 years ago. Excavations have yielded not only abundant lithic materials but also large series of faunal remains. Ms. Barut will focus on the lithics and study the processes employed to convert raw materials into finished tools. In collaboration with other scientists, neutron activation analyses will be conducted to determine the sources for the stone. Obsidian hydration dating will allow age assessments of the different sites and levels. On this basis it will be possible to gain insight into changing land use and mobility strategies over time. Within the last 100,000 years major changes in social and technological organization occurred in Africa and the result was people with essentially modern cultural capacities. Information to date indicates that this transformation occurred first in sub Saharan Africa and therefore considerable archaeological attention has been focussed on this region and time period. Unfortunately, the number of sites which span this transition are very few. Lukenya Hill is one of them and because of this MS. Barut's study is of major significance. This research is important for several reasons. It will shed new light on the emergence of modern cultural capacities. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and assist in the training of a promising young scientist. ***
