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Panga ya Saidi, Kenya

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Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa

Abstract

Panga ya Saidi is a large, open-roofed, solutional cave located in the Dzitsoni limestone hills that run parallel to the Kenyan coast, approximately halfway between Mombasa and Malindi (3.67° S, 39.74° E) (Fig. 1). The location of the site is of significance since Panga ya Saidi is a rare near-coastal Stone Age site, with most archaeological investigations centering on the Rift zone of eastern Africa. The steep drop-off of the continental shelf in this region ensures that the cave would never have been more than 20 km from the coast during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene occupation of the site.

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Acknowledgments

Funding for the excavations at Panga ya Saidi was provided by the Sealinks project under a European Research Council grant (no. 206148; awarded to N.B.), and the Max Planck Society. Permission to conduct the research was granted from the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation, Kenya. We are grateful to the staff of the National Museums of Kenya for their ongoing collaboration and to the local custodians of Panga ya Saidi for facilitating our work there.

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Correspondence to Ceri Shipton .

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Shipton, C., Boivin, N., Petraglia, M. (2023). Panga ya Saidi, Kenya. In: Beyin, A., Wright, D.K., Wilkins, J., Olszewski, D.I. (eds) Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20290-2_42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20290-2_42

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