From at least 3.4 million years ago to historic periods, humans and their ancestors used stone as the raw material for tool production. Archeologists find stone tools on all the planet’s habitable landmasses, even in its cold and ecologically sparse Arctic regions. Their ubiquity and durability inform archeologists about important dimensions of human behavioral variability. Stone tools’ durability also gives them the ability to contribute to the study of long-term historical processes and the deeper regularities and continuities underlying processes of change. Over the last two millennia as ceramics, livestock, European goods, and eventually Europeans themselves arrived in southern Africa, stone tools remained. As social, environmental, economic, and organizational upheavals buffeted African hunter-gatherers, they used stone tools to persist in often marginal landscapes. Indigenous Africans’ persistence in the environment of their evolutionary origins is due in large part to these “small things forgotten.” Stone tools and their broader contexts of use provide one important piece of information to address some of archaeology and history’s “big issues,” such as resilience in small-scale societies, questions of human mobility and migrations, and the interactions of humans with their environments. Yet, stone tools differ in important ways from the technologies historians are likely to be familiar with, such as ceramics and metallurgy, in being reductive. While ceramics are made by adding and manipulating clay-like substances, stone tools are made by removing material through the actions of grinding, pecking, or fracture. Metals sit somewhere in between ceramics and stone: they can be made through the reduction of ores, but they can also be made through additive processes when one includes recycling of old metals. Stone-tool technologies can also be more easily and independently reinvented than these other technologies. These distinctions, along with the details of stone tool production and use, hold significance for historians wishing to investigate the role of technology in social organization, economy, consumption, contact, and cultural change.
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Stone Tools: Their Relevance for Historians and the Study of Historical Processes
Justin Pargeter
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Textiles in West Africa up to the 20th Century
Jody Benjamin
Across the large, dynamic diverse space of West Africa—from the dense urban enclaves in Oyo, Kano, Kumasi, Jenne, and Timbuktu to the smaller towns and village settings of the Sahel or rainy tropics of the southern coast—textiles were important to the social, economic, religious, and cultural lives of local communities. In many parts of the region south from Lake Chad to the Bight of Biafra and west along the Atlantic coast to Mauritania, artisans have processed and woven textiles from raffia, bark, bast, wool, silk, and cotton that was used for clothing such as infant swaddling, wrappers, head ties, turbans, tunics, gowns, trousers, and burial cloths. Textiles have served a variety of utilitarian and ceremonial purposes such as a flexible form of exchange currency to pay a customs tax or to give as a dowry in marriage. Whether as artifacts of everyday use or exceptional splendor, West African textiles have reflected the region’s enormous historical, geographical, ethnic, and religious diversity, as well as the specificity of distinct areas and time periods. Archeologists, art historians, anthropologists, and historians have produced much scholarly literature on cloth both manufactured in and imported to West Africa. These works have debated the still imprecisely understood origins of cloth weaving in West Africa, the use of natural dyes, and the impact of the capitalist global economy that began to emerge in the 18th and 19th centuries on local textile manufacturing and consumers. The study of textiles, especially their circulation and use before the 20th century, challenges the notion of West African societies as either static or isolated from the evolving global scene.
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The Archaeology of Nok Culture in Nigeria (2nd/1st Millennium BCE)
Gabriele Franke
The elaborate terracotta figurines of central Nigerian Nok culture date back to the early 1st millennium bce and represent the earliest large-size sculptural tradition in sub-Saharan Africa. Archaeological finds from the mid-20th century suggested that they appeared together with iron production and pointed to an early complex society preceding later Nigerian societies, such as Ile-Ife and Benin, which feature evidence for social differentiation and political organization. Fieldwork in the last fifteen years has yielded signs of specialization in terracotta and iron production, but no evidence for social or political complexity. Nok people were small-scale farmers living in dispersed homesteads from the mid-2nd millennium bce, when they arrived in the region from the north, and sharing the same lifeways, the same ceramic style, and, from 900 bce onward, the widely distributed use of highly standardized terracotta figurines. The earliest evidence for iron production is found at least one hundred years after the appearance of the first terracotta figurines, so that no link between the figurines and the presence of iron can be established. Excavations in 2016 have proven the spatial and temporal connection between terracotta figurine depositions and stone-pot arrangements interpreted as graves, indicating an ancestral belief system further revealed by evidence of feasting and mortuary rituals recurring over time. Thus, while no social or political complexity can be postulated for Nok culture based on the current evidence, the terracotta figurines and their use in mortuary rituals point to a complex ritual system spread over a large area in central Nigeria. Nok culture with its characteristic figurines and pottery disappears in the last centuries bce and is succeeded by people with new crops and different pottery in the early 1st millennium ce.
