Tozzer Library Room 203
21 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA


Dr. Stanley H. Ambrose is a pioneer of archaeological science - his early work on bone chemistry provided important insights into past human diet and past environments, while his more recent geochemical and ethnographic studies are illuminating social networks through the movements of raw materials such as obsidian (a volcanic glass) and red ochre (a pigment).

Red and yellow ochre in archeological sites up to 300 thousand years old is widely considered to be the earliest evidence for symbolic behavior by cognitively modern humans. Ethnographic evidence for symbolic and functional uses of ochre in Africa is extremely limited. In 2015-16 Dr. Ambrose’s team systematically sampled ochre geological sources in the Kenya Rift Valley, guided by Maasai, Samburu and Dorobo informants. They interviewed users about their traditional uses of ochre, and collected pigment samples from rock art, Paleolithic and Neolithic sites.

Geochemical provenience analysis of ochre is the first step in the process of reconstructing artifact provenance (object biographies), and the geographic scale of social information and symbolic exchange networks. The diversity of pigment sources used at rock art sites provides evidence for reconstructing place biographies, including the scale of social and symbolic community catchment areas. The concepts of place biography and symbolic catchment area will be illustrated with painted sites used by the informants, and a Neolithic cremation site with red ochre burials.

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Dr. Stanley H. Ambrose is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A true interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Ambrose is affiliated with the Center for African Studies, the Division of Nutritional Studies, the Program in Ecology, Conservation and Evolutionary Biology, the Department of Geology, and most recently the Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. Dr. Ambrose is a foremost scholar of the Middle and Later Stone Ages in Africa, a key period for the emergence of novel behaviors among Homo sapiens; he is expert in the emergence and spread of food production in East Africa; and most recently he has engaged with the rapidly-developing field of ancient DNA research. Dr. Ambrose obtained his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley.