Franca Cole

University College London, UCL Qatar, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Co-authors

Public Views

Conservator and Archaeologist, Academic and Educator. Currently based in Kuching, Sarawak, Franca is a consultant in Conservation, Archaology and Collections to the Sarawak Museum Department and teaches the MA course in Collections Care and Management at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. An archaeological conservator with more than 25 years professional experience, Franca has worked on excavations and in museums in Malaysia, Turkey, Libya, Egypt, Qatar, UAE, Lebanon, Peru, Chile, Syria, Norway, India and Greece. She taught Conservation Studies for the MSc Program at UCL Qatar for 4 years. Her research focuses on artefact use, practice and deliberate fragmentation.
Address: UCL Qatar
P.O. Box 25256
2nd Floor, Georgetown Building
Hamad bin Khalifa University
Doha, Qatar

less

Julian D Reynolds

Trinity College Dublin

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Enrico Cirelli

Università di Bologna

Marie Louise Stig Sørensen

University of Cambridge

Yannis Hamilakis

Brown University

Clive Stannard

University of Warwick

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research

Dene Wright

University of Glasgow

Christopher DeCorse

Syracuse University

Gérard L. F. Chouin

College of William and Mary

InterestsView All (7)

Uploads

Papers by Franca Cole

The jar-burial tradition in the west mouth of Niah Cave, Sarawak: burial histories, social identities and changing perceptions of pottery and death

The Niah Caves, the 'Human Revolution', and foraging/farming transitions

In the first chapter of this book we set out the three principal research questions about the pre... more In the first chapter of this book we set out the three principal research questions about the prehistory of Island Southeast Asia that provided the intellectual framework for the Niah Caves Project as it was formulated in the late 1990s: when did Homo sapiens first come to the region? how did our species adapt to living in the tropical environments that they encountered here? and how did farming begin in the region? As the intervening chapters have described, the new fieldwork by the Niah Caves Project, and our studies of the materials from these excavations and from the excavations by Tom and Barbara Harrisson in the 1950s and 1960s, have provided rich data with which to address these questions. At the same time, other questions also emerged as important as part of the process of organic growth that characterizes many complex archaeological projects: in part as new people joined the team bringing new interests and questions; in part as the fieldwork and archive studies threw up unexpected discoveries; in part as the wider research framework in which the project was situated developed. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize our principal findings relating both to our original questions and to those that developed during the course of the project, and to reflect on their wider ramifications for the long-term history of people and rainforest in Island Southeast Asia (Fig. 9.1)

The Niah Caves Project:Preliminary report on the third (2002) season

$Research paper thumbnail of The \u27Metal Age\u27 at the niah Caves, c. 2000-500 years ago$

The \u27Metal Age\u27 at the niah Caves, c. 2000-500 years ago

The term \u27Metal Age\u27, sometimes with locally-specific sub-divisions such as \u27early\u27, ... more The term \u27Metal Age\u27, sometimes with locally-specific sub-divisions such as \u27early\u27, \u27develop d\u27 and \u27protohistoric\u27, is used in Island Southeast Asia a harthand for the p · riod from about 200 years g until the arrival of Europ ans. Tt \· as originally pr posed because of th· Ia k f clear chron logical sep\u3c~ ration between the appearan e of iron and bronze in th region, compared with on the Asian Mainland (Bellwood 1999, 116; Fox 1970, 121-2; T. Harrisson 1970, 30; van Heekeren 1958, 1). Despite the fact that people at Niah may have been acquainted with metal from c. 2500 BP (Chapter 7, pp. 289-90), the term Metal Age remains a useful tag for a period beginning c. 2000 BP that is inherent! diverse, and often eclectic. Perhaps because of this diversit there have been remarkably few attempts at synthesi , scholars tending to focus on the technology and distribution of metal artefacts (e.g. Chia 2007; Soejeno 1980) or on dominant external cultural influences...

$Research paper thumbnail of \u27Neolithic’ societies c. 4000-2000 years ago: Austronesian farmers?$

\u27Neolithic’ societies c. 4000-2000 years ago: Austronesian farmers?

Despite the evidence of the Gan Kira pollen core for sustained human activity in the forest aroun... more Despite the evidence of the Gan Kira pollen core for sustained human activity in the forest around the Niah Caves from c. 6000 BP (Fig. 6.7), the caves themselves do not appear to have been used at that time. The earliest evidence for the resumption of activity is a radiocarbon date obtained from loose charcoal collected during the excavation of an extended burial (B50) in the West Mouth of the Great Cave, of 3285±168 bp or 3078-3963 cal. BP (AA-27957) (Krigbaum 2001). Targeted radiocarbon dating of charcoal in the Harrisson Excavation Archive from excavated contexts in the West Mouth, interpreted as possible candidates for the beginning, middle and end of the long gap between the Early Holocene occupation and the start of the Neolithic cemetery, failed to produce dates in this period, or even dates between 6000 BP and 4000 BP contemporary with the palynological evidence. After c. 3500 BP there is a consistent number of radiocarbon dates with narrow calibrated date ranges produced o...

Foraging-farming transitions at the Niah Caves, Sarawak, Borneo

Antiquity, 2011

The Niah Caves in Sarawak, Borneo, have captured evidence for people and economies of 8000 and 40... more The Niah Caves in Sarawak, Borneo, have captured evidence for people and economies of 8000 and 4000 years ago. Although not continuous on this site, these open two windows on to life at the cultural turning point, broadly equivalent to the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic. They have much in common, inferring that the occupants, perhaps belonging to an older maritime dispersal, had a choosy appetite for the Neolithic package.

Download

The Niah Cave Project: the third (2002) season of fieldwork

Sarawak museum journal, 2002

RefDoc Refdoc est un service / is powered by. ...

The Cyrenaican Prehistory Project 2008:The second season of investigations of the Haua Fteah cave and its landscape, and further results from the initial (2007) fieldwork

Early Saharan Trade

Trade in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond

The NCP Excavations in Lobang Hangus, Lobang Tulang, Gan Kira and Kain Hitam

One of the more persistent gaps in our knowledge of prehistoric human adaptation to tropical envi... more One of the more persistent gaps in our knowledge of prehistoric human adaptation to tropical environments is the lack of developed models of early forager mobility and site function in Southeast Asia. This situation has been perpetuated, partly by the practical constraints that working in the humid tropics places of identifying and excavating new and well preserved sites; but partly also on methodological grounds. In particular, there has often been a ‘cellular’ approach to tropical subsistence reconstruction – where ‐ by each site locale is assumed to express a complete and representative record of a whole foraging economy. The archaeological work being undertaken in Trang An, Vietnam, is beginning to address this issue through its focus on reconstructing a foraging landscape. In this paper we present multi ‐ proxy data combining traditional and state ‐ of ‐ the ‐ art approaches to archaeological and palaeo ‐ environmental research to further elucidate the issue of tropical forager...

Early Saharan trade : the inorganic evidence

The Niah Caves Project: Preliminary report on the forth (2003) season

Archaeological investigations in the Niah Caves 1954-2003

Neolithic’ societies c. 4000-2000 years ago: Austronesian farmers?

practised through this period and, through that lens, to make inferences about the nature and str... more practised through this period and, through that lens, to make inferences about the nature and structure of the ‘Neolithic’ societies who buried their dead in the caves. As in many other regions of the world, the term ‘Neolithic’ in Island Southeast Asia has traditionally been used to define the first agricultural communities, people who used a new material culture that included polished stone tools and pottery, and who based their subsistence primarily on the use of domestic crops and livestock. There are valid concerns about whether it is appropriate to apply to other parts of the world a term originally coined in the second half of the nineteenth century within the classification systems being established then for European prehistory. However, despite alternative local terminologies being proposed (e.g. Bacus 2004; Soejono 1997), the term ‘Neolithic’ remains a convenient label for the first pottery-using societies in Island Southeast Asia. As in Europe, though, one of the difficul...

Download

The NCP Excavations in Lobang Hangus, and Reconnaissance in Lobang Tulang, Gan Kira, and Kain Hitam

The 'Metal Age' at the niah Caves, c. 2000-500 years ago

Visible and Invisible Commodities of Trade:: The Significance of Organic Materials in Saharan Trade

Trade in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond

Desert Migrations: people, environment and culture in the Libyan Sahara

Libyan Studies, 2007

The Desert Migrations Project is a new interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional collaborative proj... more The Desert Migrations Project is a new interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional collaborative project between the Society for Libyan Studies and the Department of Antiquities. The geographical focus of the study is the Fazzan region of southwest Libya and in thematic terms we aim to address the theme of migration in the broadest sense, encompassing the movement of people, ideas/knowledge and material culture into and out of Fazzan, along with evidence of shifting climatic and ecological boundaries over time. The report describes the principal sub-strands of the project's first season in January 2007, with some account of research questions, methods employed and some preliminary results. Three main sub-projects are reported on. The first concerns the improved understanding of long-term climatic and environmental changes derived from a detailed palaeoenvironmental study of palaeolake sediments. This geo-science work runs alongside and feeds directly into both archaeological sub-pro...

DMP IX: Summary Report on the Fourth Season of Excavations of the Burials and Identity team

Libyan Studies, 2010

The fourth season of the Burials and Identity component of the Desert Migrations Project in 2010 ... more The fourth season of the Burials and Identity component of the Desert Migrations Project in 2010 focused on completion of excavation work at two main cemeteries (TAG001 and TAG012) and smaller-scale sampling work at a number of nearby cemeteries. The investigation of a number of burials in a semi-nucleated escarpment cemetery TAG063 produced interesting new information on Proto-Urban Garamantian funerary rites, dating to the latter centuries BC. The excavations at TAG001 were extended to two areas of the cemetery characterised by different burial types to the stepped tombs that were excavated in 2009. A second type of fairly monumental burial was identified, but these had been heavily robbed and it was not possible to demonstrate conclusively that these pre-dated the stepped tombs. Most of the other burials excavated were simple shaft burials and were relatively sparsely furnished with imported goods, in comparison with the larger tombs, though quite a lot of organic material was id...

The jar-burial tradition in the west mouth of Niah Cave, Sarawak: burial histories, social identities and changing perceptions of pottery and death

The Niah Caves, the 'Human Revolution', and foraging/farming transitions