In the early 21st century, understanding West Africa’s Stone Age past has increasingly transcended its colonial legacy to become central to research on human origins. Part of this process has included shedding the methodologies and nomenclatures of narrative approaches to focus on more quantified, scientific descriptions of artifact variability and context. Together with a growing number of chronometric age estimates and environmental information, understanding the West African Stone Age is contributing evolutionary and demographic insights relevant to the entire continent.
Undated Acheulean artifacts are abundant across the region, attesting to the presence of archaic Homo. The emerging chronometric record of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) indicates that core and flake technologies have been present in West Africa since at least the Middle Pleistocene (~780–126 thousand years ago or ka) and that they persisted until the Terminal Pleistocene/Holocene boundary (~12ka)—the youngest examples of such technology anywhere in Africa. Although the presence of MSA populations in forests remains an open question, technological differences may correlate with various ecological zones. Later Stone Age (LSA) populations evidence significant technological diversification, including both microlithic and macrolithic traditions. The limited biological evidence also demonstrates that at least some of these populations manifested a unique mixture of modern and archaic morphological features, drawing West Africa into debates about possible admixture events between late-surviving archaic populations and Homo sapiens. As in other regions of Africa, it is possible that population movements throughout the Stone Age were influenced by ecological bridges and barriers. West Africa evidences a number of refugia and ecological bottlenecks that may have played such a role in human prehistory in the region. By the end of the Stone Age, West African groups became increasingly sedentary, engaging in the construction of durable monuments and intensifying wild food exploitation.
12
Article
The Stone Age Archaeology of West Africa
Eleanor Scerri
Article
History of Archaeology in Ghana
Wazi Apoh and Samuel Amartey
The conduct of archaeological research and scholarship in Ghana (formerly Gold Coast) dates back to the 1920s. However, before the 20th century, some antiquarian practices were pursued by European scientists, missionaries, merchants, and enslavers. Expatriate archaeologists dominated archaeological research in Ghana until the 1980s when the number of local scholars started increasing. The University of Ghana remains the only institution of higher learning in Ghana where academic and scientific archaeology is practiced through the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies (DAHS), which was established in 1951. Until the 1980s, prehistoric Stone Age archaeology dominated the thematic research landscape. However, from the 1980s onward, indigenous and expatriate archaeologists steered attention to sites dating to periods after 1000 ce. This was in response to the need to build new histories for the postcolonial nation-state of Ghana. By the close of the 20th century, local researchers had taken over the scholarly landscape of archaeology in the country. The Department of Archaeology was rebranded as the DAHS to make the discipline more meaningful and economically viable for national development. Since 2010, the department has dramatically diversified its thematic and temporal foci. Aside from Iron Age studies, prehistory, historical archaeology, state formation, and Atlantic–global encounters, themes such as public archaeology, developmental archaeology, restitution, bioarchaeology, archaeobotany, museology, slavery studies, and environmental humanities are emerging as practical ways of diversifying the field of archaeology in Ghana. These emerging and innovative themes are attractive and underscore the growing number of students pursuing archaeology at the University of Ghana.
Article
Rock Art Research Methods
Jeremy Hollmann
Rock art is an archaeological resource with the potential to reconstruct aspects of the ideologies of prehistoric societies. Research methods are distinguished here from theoretical, interpretive frameworks. The methods discussed here concern the documentation of rock art, methods of working with the temporal dimensions of rock art (such as developing relative chronologies and dating), and the characterization of pigments. Nonetheless, the choice of research methods depends on an explicitly formulated, theoretically informed research question. Research aims will also determine the scope and scale of the documentation and chronological methods employed.
Fieldwork is a major and initial component of documentation and may involve surveying for rock-art sites. Researchers should experience rock art first hand. Digital mapping and imaging techniques are used routinely, but field tracings continue to be an important means of recording and interpreting the art. Computational photography includes enhancement software such as DStretch and other techniques that enable researchers to see details that would otherwise be invisible.
Temporality is a fundamental attribute of rock art, and the biggest challenge in this regard is to relate the chronological sequences on the rock face to other archaeological and environmental data and thus contextualize the rock art. Relative chronologies provide information about the order of image-making episodes at a site or in a particular region. Age determinations may be arrived at using correlative methods in which the art is dated by means of independently available age ranges. Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating is commonly used to date organic paint samples. Engravings are difficult to date; age ranges obtained from cation-ratio (CR) and varnish microlamination (VML) are regarded as approximations. Pigment analysis is used to characterize the inorganic components of paint and to detect the presence of organic components. Research methods are multidisciplinary and thus require a coordinated, unified approach in order to achieve the research aims.
Article
Archaeology and the Heritage of Slavery in Eastern Africa
Lydia Wilson Marshall
Despite its long history in the region, slavery in Eastern Africa has attracted little archaeological attention. This deficit is partly due to the reticence of many Eastern Africans to discuss slavery, a historically painful topic. In addition, some archaeologists have expressed skepticism about the material visibility of the practice. That is, they question whether slavery can be archaeologically identified. Given these concerns, those archaeologists who have pursued the study of slavery in Eastern Africa tend to focus on the 18th and 19th centuries, when historical documentation of the practice is well established. Archaeologists in the region have considered slavery in a variety of settings—including not only plantations but also contexts of slaving and emancipation. Research in Eastern Africa has helped to challenge and complicate definitions of slavery rooted in American historical experience. Yet, perspectives on slavery from outside of the region continue to shape public memory in Eastern Africa; increased outside interest and investment in the heritage of slavery has begun to influence both memorialization and the practice of memory itself. For example, heritage funding from UNESCO is tied to particular expectations for how slavery is defined and what counts as heritage. In this context, archaeologists studying slavery in Eastern Africa grapple with their responsibilities to many different stakeholders and audiences. In particular, they continue to work to make slavery research and memorialization more meaningful to Eastern Africans themselves. In addition, researchers have begun to develop methodological tools to push the study of slavery in Eastern Africa to deeper time periods less undergirded by historical documents.
Article
Food Production in the Forest Zone of West Africa: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives
Richard T. Chia and A. Catherine D'Andrea
Recent narratives on the origin of food production in the West African forest zone have replaced earlier diffusion-based models with viewpoints that emphasize the diversity of sources for plants and animals exploited and domesticated in the region. Management of indigenous tree species, including oil palm and incense tree, managed first by indigenous foragers, have the longest history in the area, dating back to over 8,400 before present (bp). After the 4th millennium bp, domesticates such as pearl millet, cowpea, and domestic caprines were introduced from adjacent Sahel and the savanna regions, and populations began to favor oil palm over incense tree. The mechanisms of these introductions are less clear but likely involved both diffusion and/or movements of peoples who became sedentary to varying degrees. Palaeoenvironment is an important factor to consider in tracking the development of food production in the forest zone; however, some combination of natural and human-mediated changes took place, the nature of which was not uniformly distributed.
Article
Genetics and the African Past
Mary E. Prendergast, Elizabeth A. Sawchuk, and Kendra A. Sirak
Africa harbors the greatest human genetic diversity on the planet, a fact that has inspired extensive investigation of the population structure found across the continent and the demographic processes that shaped observed patterns of genetic variation. Since the 1980s, studies of the DNA of living people have repeatedly demonstrated that Africa is the cradle of human origins, in agreement with fossil and archaeological evidence. Since the first ancient human genome was published in 2010, ancient DNA (aDNA) has contributed additional possibilities for exploring population history, providing a direct window into genetic lineages that no longer exist or are barely discernible. Genetic data from both living and ancient people—when integrated with available archaeological, bioarchaeological, historical linguistic, and written or oral historical data—are important tools for contextualizing African genetic diversity and understanding the biological and cultural processes that have shaped it over time. While most studies to date have focused on humans, aDNA can also be obtained from plant and animal remains, sediments, and some artifacts, all of which can enable a more comprehensive understanding of human lives.
Genetic research on the African past often focuses on human origins and Pleistocene population structure, as well as on the origins, directionality, and tempo of demographic changes that accompanied Holocene transitions to herding and farming. The rise of cosmopolitan cities and states in the past two millennia has been examined with genetic evidence to a very limited extent, but this is a potentially rich vein of research. Increasingly, forced migrations of enslaved Africans and the development of the diaspora are the subjects of genetic study as well. Yet to date, Africa remains vastly understudied relative to parts of the world such as Eurasia, in terms of both ancient and present-day DNA. This shapes not only the study of the past but also medical innovations and public health.
While the bulk of published African genomes come from present-day people, there are problems with relying solely on this data to reconstruct the past, given the continent’s long and complex demographic history. Increasingly, aDNA is providing novel perspectives on a past largely invisible in the genomes of people living in the 20th and 21st centuries due to recent demographic shifts. A surge in African aDNA studies since 2015 has also renewed longstanding debates about the ethics of genetic research on people, both living and deceased. Researchers working in Africa today must consider ethical issues including stakeholder engagement, informed consent, and control of biological samples and data; in aDNA studies, descendant communities, museum curators, bioarchaeologists, and geneticists, among others, play critical roles in these discussions.
Article
The Archaeology of Christian Missions in Southern Africa
Chris Wingfield
Archaeological engagements with historic Christian mission stations have increased significantly since the late 1990s, but in joining the established dialogue between historians and anthropologists about mission pasts in southern Africa, the distinctive contribution offered by archaeological approaches has not always been recognized. Interdisciplinary conversations have at times focused on excavation, archaeology’s most distinctive method, and the material evidence this uncovers, without recognizing the distinctive ways of thinking and working that archaeologists have developed to understand the past on the basis of its material traces.
Through an engagement with the material world as it exists in the present, archaeologists develop understandings of the past that form the basis of new narratives. This is a form of engagement shared with others, including local and family historians, and on which many people’s engagements with museums and heritage sites are based, including a number of museums and heritage sites based in and around historic mission sites in southern Africa.
Engaging the traces and remains of missionary pasts in this way, whether through places, artifacts, images, or texts, has the potential to reveal traces of ways of acting, thinking, and being that were not recognized or understood within the textual sources upon which many early 21st-century understandings of southern Africa’s missionary past have been built. This form of engagement, overlapping as it does with the projects of enthusiasts and nonprofessional scholars, has the potential to generate new stories that can become the basis of new interpretations at heritage sites and museums.
As places that were not the exclusive preserve of any single racial or ethnic group, Christian missions have the potential to allow stories to be told that include a range of forms of historical engagement, from displacement and refuge, to slavery and emancipation in the Cape, from collaboration and conflict in the face of expanding colonial frontiers, to tension, negotiation, and compromise between missionaries and African leaders both within, and beyond, formal colonial boundaries. Missionary pasts exemplify histories of racial mixing as well as segregation, and provide a glimpse into the multiple ways in which a range of future-oriented political and religious projects were imagined and manifested, but also frequently failed.
Christian missions are boundary objects, with the potential to constitute borderlands where a range of academic disciplines, but also nonacademic projects, can come together to develop new ways of making sense of the past in as yet undetermined and potentially transformative ways. In an expansive and globally comparative mode, the archaeology of Christian missions has the potential to illuminate some of the ways in which Christianity itself has been remade in southern Africa, but also remade as southern African, since the early 19th century.
Article
Ethnographic Analogy in Archaeology: Methodological Insights from Southern Africa
Mark McGranaghan
Analogical arguments are central to and pervasive within archaeological discourse. Within these arguments, ethnographic analogies are often seen as being particularly problematic exercises in essentialism, which unthinkingly cast reified ethnographic schema back in time and thus perpetuate ideas about primitive indigenes, awaiting colonial contact to emerge from ahistorical primordial obscurity. The shadow of 19th-century social evolutionism, in which forager communities (not participating in agriculture and leading nomadic lifestyles) were represented as particularly primitive, has cast a pall of suspicion over ethnographic analogical models—especially as forager communities continue to feature prominently in such models to this day.
Archaeologists use ethnographic analogies in a variety of ways; these analogies are heuristic constructs tailored to research questions and to the stubbornness of particular suites of archaeological data. Such uses include inducing imaginative and revelatory modes of thinking about past societies, outside of the archaeologist’s usual experiences, as well as a suite of formal and relational analogies that seek to combine ethnographic data with data drawn from the physical sciences to help constrain archaeological interpretation.
Direct historical approaches utilize a collection of ethnographic and historical sources to construct analogies based on a relation of similarity between the communities of people involved; these frameworks, perhaps, carry the greatest danger of unwittingly casting modern populations as “contemporary primitives.” By emphasizing that source-side ethnographic datasets are heuristic tools rather than reflections of some sociocultural reality, such fears may (at least in part) be ameliorated. Saliently, archaeological data must operate as epistemologically equivalent to ethnographic data in order to resist the tendency to cast back a rich, textured ethnographic case study wholesale into the murky waters of prehistory. Only when this status is afforded archaeological data can is it possible to reveal the ways in which past conditions diverged from ethnographic ones.
Article
Climate Change in Eastern Africa
Rob Marchant
The climatology of East Africa results from the complex interaction between major global convergence zones with more localized regional feedbacks to the climate system; these in turn are moderated by a diverse land surface characterized by coastal to land transitions, high mountains, and large lakes. The main climatic character of East Africa, and how this varies across the region, takes the form of seasonal variations in rainfall that can fall as one, two, or three rainy seasons, the times and duration of which will be determined by the interplay between major convergence zones with more localized regional feedbacks. One of the key characteristics of East Africa are climatic variations with altitude as climates change along an altitudinal gradient that can extend from hot, dry, “tropical” conditions to cool, wet, temperate conditions and on the highest mountains “polar” climates with permanent ice caps. With this complex and variable climate landscape of the present, as scientists move through time to explore past climatic variability, it is apparent there have been a series of relatively rapid and high-magnitude environmental shifts throughout East Africa, particularly characterized by changing hydrological budgets. How climate change has impacted on ecosystems, and how those ecosystems have responded and interacted with human populations, can be unearthed by drawing on evidence from the sedimentary and archaeological record of the past six thousand years. As East African economies, and the livelihoods of millions of people in the region, have been clearly heavily affected by climate variability in the past, so it is expected that future climate variability will impact on ecosystem functioning and the preparedness of communities for future climate change.
Article
Early Food Production in the Congo Basin
Dirk H. Seidensticker and Katharina V. M. Jungnickel
The introduction of food production into a specific region is among the most influential transitions in human history. It is frequently connected to other changes such as sedentism and population growth. Though most communities living in the Congo Basin today follow a relatively sedentary lifestyle with a slash-and-burn agri- or horticulture, hunting and fishing still contribute in large part to their subsistence. The lifestyle of historic forager communities and their sedentary neighbours changed significantly through colonialism. When and how food production started in the region is essentially not solved yet.
Studies suggest that the introduction of food production dates back to the 1st millennium bce. However, empirical data are sparsely available, and Central African research is still marked significantly by its lack of physical evidence. Postcolonial archaeological research started earlier in other parts of Central Africa, while the Congo Basin saw large-scale, systematic research on its prehistory from the late 1970s. Investigations focused predominantly on the chrono-typological sequences, as ceramics are an easily encountered find category in the region. Archaeobotanical samples often underwent no further scrutiny or are still awaiting processing. Political instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1990s and 2000s halted research in the Congo Basin. The western parts of Central Africa are among the better-researched areas. However, even there, only limited evidence of early food production has been uncovered. For a more concise picture, one should nonetheless discuss these two bodies of evidence in conjunction.
The available evidence suggests that during the 1st millennium bce, pearl millet, originating from West Africa, was used in southern Cameroon and the Congo Basin, but presumably not in quantities that constituted a staple crop. The evidence for the use of cooking bananas is incomplete. Archaeobotanical remains are dominated by charred oil palm or wild Canarium, both equally unsuited as a staple food. Thus, the composition of the subsistence base and the reliance on food production of the ceramic-producing communities living in the Congo Basin during the 1st millennium bce and the 1st millennium ce remain uncertain.
Article
The Empire of Mali
Sirio Canós-Donnay
The Mali Empire is one of the largest and most widely known precolonial African states. It has featured in films, video games, works of fiction, and its memory is still a profound force in the articulation of social and political identities across Mande West Africa. Founded in the 13th century in the south of modern Mali, it quickly grew from a small kingdom to a vast empire stretching from the Senegambia in the west to Ivory Coast in the south. Before its disintegration in the late 16th century, its connections to distant trade networks stretched from Europe to China and its rulers became famous across the Old World for their wealth. In the absence of indigenous written histories, knowledge of the Mali Empire has been based on a complex combination of oral traditions, medieval Arabic chronicles, European accounts, oral histories, and archaeology. Through a critical analysis of these sources, it has been possible to learn much about Mali’s history, including aspects its social organization, political structure, belief systems, and historical evolution. However, there is much we still do not know, including the location and nature of its capital(s).
Article
The History of Eastern African Foragers
Mary E. Prendergast
Humans have foraged across diverse eastern African landscapes for millions of years. In the 21st century, few eastern Africans rely exclusively on foraging, but there are groups for whom this strategy remains central to daily life. Drawing analogies between present and past lifeways is one approach to understanding ancient foragers, but multiple lines of evidence are needed to appreciate past variation. Ethnohistories, historical linguistics, and genetics are also potential sources of information on past foragers. However, most data come from the archaeological record, key to investigating the diversity of ancient foragers in terms of technology, subsistence, mobility, social organization, and cultural expression.
The spread of herding and farming in eastern Africa over the past five millennia had a definitive impact upon foraging lifeways. Ethnographic, archaeological, and ethnohistoric evidence enables development and testing of hypotheses for past forager–food producer interactions. Some evidence suggests that past social groups (or individuals in them) may have shifted among foraging and food-producing strategies on a situational basis. Other data indicate that foragers may have joined herding and farming communities, and vice versa.
Eastern African foragers have played an underappreciated role in large-scale social, economic, and political systems. Beginning in the late Pleistocene (some 130,000 years ago), prehistoric obsidian exchange networks extended over hundreds of kilometers. Early in the Common Era (nearly 2,000 years ago), foragers were involved in Indian Ocean economic spheres that extended to western and southern Asia. The precolonial and colonial ivory and slave trades in the 16th through 19th centuries exploited and impacted foraging communities. Settler colonialism in the 20th century had devastating impacts on foragers and their access to ancestral lands. More recent threats to forager livelihoods include economic “development” and environmental destruction. The future of the foraging lifeway is in peril, and the 21st-century state plays a key role in determining if it will continue.
Article
Archaeology of Christianity in Ethiopia and Eritrea
Tania C. Tribe
Christianity entered Ethiopia via the Kingdom of Aksum in the 4th century ad, within the context of the international trade linking the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean during the 1st to 7th centuries. Adopted by King ‘Ezana and the Aksumite elite, it gradually spread among the general population of the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands. This social process intensified after the 5th century with the arrival of numerous missionaries from the Roman and Byzantine Empires. Archaeologically, this process is manifested through changes in the form, decoration, and use of objects; for example, crosses began to appear on Aksumite coins and ceramics, were used as pendants, or were inscribed on pre-Christian sites of symbolic and ritual importance. The Christianization process also expressed itself through the adaptation of old temples to the new practices and the appearance of rock-hewn churches, often in a basilica form. Indigenous types of round architecture would also gradually become common practice. During the Middle Ages, Christianization accompanied the emergence of the state and the construction of rulership in large areas of the Ethiopian highlands. Two main Christian dynasties emerged at that time: the Zagwe, based in and around the monumental architectural complex of Lalibäla, comprising eleven rock-hewn structures that all now function as churches; and the Solomonic dynasty, whose first ruler, Yəkunno Amlak, had his family domains on the Wadla plateau, centered around the cave church of Wašša Mika’el. This was located twenty-three miles southeast of Lalibäla, carved into an outcrop of rock in the middle of a broad valley surrounded by low hills and containing friezes of hunting and herding scenes in low relief, suggesting the space had been occupied prior to its conversion to a Christian church, as well as a cycle of religious wall paintings dateable to the 13th century. More distant regions of Ethiopia, such as southern Šäwa and parts of the provinces of Bägemdər and Goǧǧam, were only Christianized as late as the 14th and 15th centuries.
Article
Archaeology of Senegambia
Sirio Canós-Donnay
The Senegambia is the area located between the rivers Senegal and Gambia, as well as its surrounding regions, including the countries of Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. The earliest documented references to the archaeology of the Senegambia date from the mid-19th century, in the form of short mentions in colonial reports and generalist scholarly journals. In the 1930s through the 1940s, the creation of research institutions facilitated the gradual professionalization of the discipline; and since independence, the quantity of researchers has both increased and diversified, as they use a range of approaches and period foci. Since the onset of the 21st century, the Stone Age has been a fast-developing area of study, ranging from the first evidence of hominin or human occupation 250 kya, to the development of pottery and animal domestication. Increasing social complexity, as well as technical developments, are a hallmark of the subsequent Iron Age, whose archaeology initially focused on the emergence of kingdoms and towns and has subsequently broadened to encompass also a wider range of societies at the margins of centralized polities. From the 15th century onward, the opening to the Atlantic world, together with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, brought new dynamics across the region. As a result, much of the archaeology of this period has focused on trade (particularly the impact of the slave trade), new Afro-European settlements and sociopolitical change. Finally, although the archaeology of colonial and postcolonial remains is still incipient, it has received some coverage, particularly through ethno-archaeological studies, although the extent varies from country to country.
Article
Technological Origins: Primate Perspectives and Early Hominin Tool Use in Africa
Susana Carvalho and Megan Beardmore-Herd
The origin of technology is believed to have marked a major adaptive shift in human evolution. Understanding the evolutionary process(es) underlying the first human adaptation to tool use, and the subsequent process(es) that led Homo sapiens to become the only extant primate fully dependent on technology, is one of the most stimulating topics of research of present-day archaeology. New fields of research have been founded (e.g. primate archaeology, Pliocene archaeology) during the quest to find out how old technology is, where it originated, and who were the first tool users. Historically, the vast majority of the information on this topic comes from the study of lithic (stone) tools, tools whose manufacture was generally believed to be a uniquely human characteristic until well into the 1960s. The production of lithic technology was linked first to the origin of the earliest hominins (the taxonomic group comprising modern humans, extinct human species, and all immediate human ancestors), being thought to have co-evolved with traits such as bipedalism or hunting/scavenging, and later to the evolution of the genus Homo and accompanying increases in brain size. As a result of breakthroughs in the field of primatology, and greater interdisciplinary work between archaeologists and primatologists, a paradigm shift in beliefs surrounding the uniqueness of human technology is underway. Following discoveries from the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st century, habitual tool use, tool manufacture, and the production of flakes are now known to occur in extant non-human species, firmly decoupling brain size expansion, bipedalism, and the origins of technology. Knapped stone tools and cut-marked bones have been discovered dating to ca. half a million years before the earliest evidence of Homo, giving rise to the possibility that earlier, previously unconsidered hominins, or even other extinct non-human primates, could have been responsible for the inception of tool use and manufacture. Following these advances, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the origins of technology may lie much further back in time than the earliest discovered modified stone tools—perhaps as far back as the late Miocene with the last common ancestor of Homo and Pan. Moreover, discoveries of lithic technology in more distantly related species, where convergent evolution is the most parsimonious explanation, strongly suggest the existence of multiple evolutionary pathways for technological emergence. While there is still much to unearth, the extension of the antiquity of modified stone tools, combined with the increased focus on interdisciplinary studies between archaeologists, primatologists, and paleoanthropologists, has gone a long way in overturning outdated beliefs by demonstrating that the development of technology is unlikely to have been a simple, linear process resulting from a single event or factor in the evolutionary history of humans.
Article
Archaeology of Madagascar
Sean Hixon
Off the east coast of Africa lies the “Great Red Island” of Madagascar, with a history that has left the island rich in superlatives: It is Earth’s oldest island and among the hottest of the biodiversity hotspots. Definitive European accounts of the island extend over five hundred years into the past, but our knowledge of the island’s human history extends further via the archaeological record. Basic questions on the earliest human settlement of the island remain unresolved. However, archaeological traces of how people subsisted on endemic taxa in the island’s diverse environments are relatively clear, and traces of introduced plants and animals reflect connections across the Indian Ocean. How past people thrived on the island is closely tied with century-old environmental history narratives regarding extinction and deforestation, which remain relevant during ongoing attempts to conserve the island’s biological and cultural diversity. Durable elements of the archaeological record also reflect past resource extraction, connections with far-reaching trade networks, and the rise of an empire that ruled much of the island by the late 19th century. Though the Portuguese captain Diogo Dias visited Madagascar in 1500, the island’s recent history stands out due to its limited period of colonial control (French: 1895–1960). The fantastical stories of Madagascar’s man-eating trees and elephant-hunting birds no longer capture the Western imagination, yet the island’s diverse cultural heritage and human-environment interactions draw the attention of researchers and the curious public both within Madagascar and abroad.
Article
Ceramics and Archaeology in Southern Africa
Per Ditlef Fredriksen
Pottery has been part of daily life in southern Africa for the last two millennia. The frequent occurrence at settlement sites and its resistance to decay makes pottery the most common proxy for past food-producing communities (farmers and livestock herders), who made containers for cooking, serving, and storing foods and liquids. Provided that pots and sherds have enough diagnostic features to indicate décor patterns and vessel shape, trained eyes can get an instant and literally cost-free peek into past movement and interaction. Various material sciences offer high-precision dating and insights into less visible characteristics, and ethnographic insights are helpful for understanding more intangible aspects, such as the organization of production, pots’ roles in social practices and belief systems, and the transmission of knowledge and skills through apprenticeship. Potting has been a highly gendered activity, and attention to social identity is instrumental in widening the range of lenses through which archaeologists view past material culture. In this manner, by focusing on skilled craft networks dominated by women, ceramic research can provide a critical corrective alternative to more traditional top-down narratives that trace the evolution and interaction of (male) elites.
However, the European and North American legacy of archaeological classification in southern Africa cannot be overlooked. Ceramic classification may still unwillingly project a Western-centered understanding of the human condition, mobility, and social change. While unacceptable labels that refer to outmoded notions of tribalism have long been replaced by more neutral terms, this does not mean that ceramics provide archaeology with a neutral “tracking device.” A continual key challenge for practitioners in southern Africa is to situate ceramic analysis within a wider thematic and disciplinary nexus in order to construct convincing deep time narratives while also exploring new pathways to insights that can give voices to otherwise silent or subaltern members of past societies.
Article
Archaeobotany: Methods
Louis Champion and Dorian Q. Fuller
Archaeobotany’s goals are to investigate the interactions between human societies and the plant world in the past from the botanical remains preserved in archaeological sites, including the environment people exploited and the foods they extracted from it. Archaeobotanical research in Africa has tended to be less widely practiced than in many other parts of the world, and systematic archaeobotanical sampling is still only incorporated into a minority of archaeological field projects in Africa. Nevertheless, there is potential for archaeobotany to contribute to a holistic understanding of Africa’s past. The general scope of archaeobotany is outlined before focusing on how typical archaeobotanical remains relate to agriculture and food production. A short overview on the practical side of collecting archaeobotanical samples is provided. Archaeobotany’s two general themes are discussed: hunter-gatherer subsistence and the origins of agriculture.
Article
Primary Historical Sources in Archaeology: Methods
Rachel King
While there are a handful of defined methods for working with primary historical sources in archaeology, few archaeologists take these as their main points of departure or rely upon them too rigidly. This is to do both with the highly variable nature of the historical and archaeological material available for certain African contexts, and also with how archaeologists conceive of the relationship between these two bodies of evidence: as antagonistic, supplementary, entangled and subjective, mutually creative, and so on. Some methodologies focus on the potentials for consonance and dissonance between written and material sources. Others utilize oral traditions to provide insights into chronology, memory, historical and political dynamics, and the material aspects of these. Still other approaches focus on how historical and archaeological sources offer complementary perspectives on the local and the global, events and processes, and other shifts in scale. While these methods are diverse and contingent, they are united insofar as archaeologists take their cues from objects and from preoccupations with time and space. Archaeologists see their work concerning primary historical sources not as filling in gaps in written records but as addressing the partialities of the records themselves by engaging with an array of complex questions about meaning, authority, and materiality
Article
Material Culture as a Historical Source
Robert Ross
Over the last couple of centuries, there has been a profound shift in the things which Africans have around them, or in other words their material culture. At differing speeds and to different extents, depending on the part of the continent and the political and religious positioning of the people concerned, the goods of the globalized world have penetrated to the farthest reaches of Africa. Belongings, and thus identities, have taken on new forms. This, however, is not a completely new phenomenon, as Africans have been absorbing things from outsiders to the continent for as long as there have been humans outside Africa. Understanding these shifts, and analyzing the causes and consequences thereof, requires the study of a wide variety of types of sources, many of which are dealt with by historians of Africa with a rare degree of sophistication, so that the fascinating stories of material change can be fully examined.
12