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The Archaeology of African History
Author(s): Ann B. Stahl
Source: The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2009), pp.
241-255
Published by: Boston University African Studies Center
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International Journal of African Historical Studies Vol. 42, No. 2 (2009) 241
The Archaeology of African History9"
By Ann B. Stahl
In the beginning, historians of Africa put great store by archeology.1
Historians and archaeologists interested in Africa's pasts once envisioned themselves as
working toward broadly similar goals using complementary sources and methods in a
collaborative interdisciplinary project. Archaeology's value was perceived to lay in its
potential to inform on the longue durée of African societies, to provide evidence of daily
life (e.g., subsistence, settlement), and to validate insights drawn from other sources. The
regularity with which the Journal of African History published overviews of radiocarbon
dates underscored archaeology's role in providing a chronological framework for African
history.2 Thus, in an early contribution on methods, Jan Vansina, Raymond Mauny, and
L.V. Thomas forecast that "the contribution of the archaeologist to African history is not
marginal."3
"Not marginal" perhaps, but certainly bracketed in relation to select contexts and
periods. Several decades after the first flush of enthusiasm for interdisciplinary approaches,
the multivolume Cambridge and UNESCO histories of Africa captured the temporal
division of labor that had emerged between historians and archaeologists. In the nine
* Acknowledgments. A brief version of this paper was presented in 2007 at the 50th annual meeting of
the African Studies Association, New York, as preliminary remarks to two sessions on the "Archaeology of
African History," that I jointly organized with Adria LaViolette. Thanks are extended to Michael DiBlasi
who encouraged me to turn my remarks into a longer paper; to Adria for her support in developing the
sessions and comments on an earlier draft; and to Pete Robertshaw and two anonymous reviewers for their
constructive commentary.
1 Jan Vansina, "Historians, Are Archeologists Your Siblings?" History in Africa 22 (1995), 369.
2 For three decades periodic reviews of radiocarbon dates were routinely published in the Journal of
African History. These were first published as lists of dates, e.g., B.M. Fagan, "Radiocarbon Dates for Sub-
Saharan Africa: (From c. 1000 BC)-I," Journal of African History 2, 1 (1961), 137-39, and later expanded
into regional overviews of archaeological research intended to brief historians on recent research. Only two
such overviews have been published since 1991: Duncan E. Miller and Nikolaas J. Van Der Merwe, "Early
Metal Working in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Review of Recent Research," Journal of African History 35, 1
(1994), 1-36, and Peter Mitchell and Gavin Whitelaw, "The Archaeology of Southernmost Africa from 2000
BP to the Early 1800s: A Review of Recent Research," Journal of African History 46, 2 (2005), 209^41.
3 Jan Vansina, Raymond Mauny, and L.V. Thomas, "The Techniques of the Historian in Africa," in Jan
Vansina, Raymond Mauny, and L.V. Thomas, eds., The Historian in Tropical Africa (London: Oxford
University Press, 1964), 65. See also Creighton Gabel and Norman R. Bennett, eds., Reconstructing African
Culture History (Boston: Boston University Press, 1967).
Copyright ©2009 by the Board of Trustees of Boston University.
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242 Ann B. Stahl
volume Cambridge History of Africa published from 1975-1986, archaeologica
dominated Volume 1 and were prevalent in Volume 2; however, by Volume 3,
the period AD 1050-1600, Neville Chittick alone bore archaeology's standa
chapter on coastal East Africa. Volumes 4-9 included no archaeological cha
similar pattern held in the eight- volume UNESCO General History of Africa-
between 1981 and 1993.5 This temporal division of labor reflected the con
archaeologists at the time, preoccupied as Anglo-American-inspired archaeology
studying questions of origins and migration, building chronological framework
attention firmly focused on "pre-colonial" contexts.6 Although one can i
exceptional scholars on both sides of the disciplinary divide who have drawn
historical and archaeological sources, the rarity with which papers have been co
by archaeologists and historians similarly indicates how an early vision of colla
research failed to materialize and allowed disciplinary boundaries in African h
studies to remain intact.7
4 The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 1, From the Earliest Times to c. 500 BC, ed. J. Desm
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); vol. 2, From c. 500 BC to AD 1050, ed. J.D.
vol. 3, From c. 1050 to c. 1600, ed. Roland Oliver (1977); vol. 4, From c. 1600 to c. 1790, ed. Ri
(1975); vol. 5, From c. 1790 to c. 1870, ed. John E. Flint (1977); vol. 6, From 1870 to 1905, ed
Oliver and G. N. Sanderson (1985); vol. 7, From 1905 to 1940, A. D., ed. Roberts (1986); vol. 8
1940 to c. 1975, ed. Michael Crowder (1984). .
5 Roughly one-third of the chapters in volumes 1-3 of the U
(Portsmouth NH: Heinemann) were written by archaeologists, whil
twelfth to sixtenth centuries, included one chapter by an archaeo
Limpopo Basins, 1100-1500"). Vol. 1, Methodology and African Pre
Ancient Civilizations, ed. G. Mokhtar (1981); vol. 3, Africa from the
S.E.M.M. El Fasi, and I. Hrbek (1988); vol. 4, Africa from the Twel
Niane (1984); vol. 5, Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth
Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s, ed. J.F.A. Ajay
Domination, ed. A.A. Boahen (1985); vol. 8, Africa since 1935, ed. A
6 For a discussion, see Augustin Holl, "West African Archaeolo
Peter Robertshaw, ed., A History of African Archaeology (Portsmou
J. Sinclair, T. Shaw, and B. Andah, "Introduction," in Thurstan Shaw
Okpoko, eds., The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Tow
Graham Connah, "Static Image: Dynamic Reality," in Graham Con
Essays on Africa's Later Past (London: Leicester University Press, 199
research that has moved away from a preoccupation with origins
particularly when it comes to questions of metallurgy. See Stanley
Invent It? Iron in Sub-Saharan Africa," History in Africa 32 (200
Know about African Iron Working?" Journal of African Archaeo
Pringle, "Seeking Africa's First Iron Men," Science 323 (9 January 20
7 David Schoenbrun stands out as a historian who has systemati
See David Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Chan
Great Lakes Region to the Fifteenth Century (Portsmouth NH:
Interdisciplinary Allergy: Methodological Approaches to Pollen Studi
History in Africa 18 (1991), 323-48. Examples of papers co-author
notable for their rarity. See for example Andrew Reid and David L.
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The Archaeology of African History 243
In practice, twentieth-century historians valued archaeology primarily as a source
of chronological insight for periods when other sources were unavailable; however,
archaeology's value in this regard was diminished by two developments. First, the interest
in precolonial history that characterized mid-century African history gave way to a more
substantive focus on colonial and post-colonial history for which archaeological
chronologies were deemed irrelevant. Second, scholars began to recognize the imprecision
of radiocarbon chronologies for recent centuries due to atmospheric fluctuations in
radiocarbon concentrations through time. Transforming radiocarbon age estimates to a
calendric scale requires calibration with a dendrochronological curve that, because of
extreme fluctuations in atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations over the last 500 years,
renders dates so imprecise that contexts younger than 500 years effectively cannot be dated
by radiocarbon methods.8 Both developments contributed to a sense that historical
reconstruction could proceed without the "mute"9 material evidence of archaeology.
Thus, by millennium's end, the mid-century optimism regarding archaeology's
contribution to African history had faded. In 1995, when Vansina asked historians if
archaeologists were their siblings, he wrote of disillusion, disinterest, an incompatibility in
sources, temporalities, and analytical goals born of disparate theoretical perspectives. He
bemoaned the inattention in Anglo-American-inspired archaeology to historical
contingency and the "daily circumstances of life."10 The dissonances were clear in
instances when scholars attempted to "blend an archeological reconstruction of an earlier
period with a subsequent historical one,"11 a quote that underscores the extent to which
archaeology's role was confined to. 'pre' -history (admittedly an outcome that flowed in
large measure from the preoccupations of archaeologists with origins questions). Whereas
Vansina offered trenchant critiques that went some way in explaining historians'
disinterest in archaeological literature, Peter Robertshaw responded by noting their
Formations and Inequality in the Great Lakes Region," Archaeological Review from Cambridge 13, 1 (1994),
51-60; also Peter Robertshaw, David Taylor, Sean Doyle, and R. Marchant, "Famine, Climate and Crisis in
Western Uganda," in R.W. Battarbee, Françoise Gasse, and Catherine E. Stickley, eds., Past Climate
Variability through Europe and Africa (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2004), 535-49; also P. Delius
and M.H. Schoeman, "Revisiting Bokoni: Populating the Stone Ruins of the Mpumalanga Escarpment," in
Natalie Swanepoel, Amanda Esterhuysen, and Philip Bonner, eds., Five Hundred Years Rediscovered:
Southern African Precedents and Prospects (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 2008), 13567.
8 In their 1986 review of West African dates, Susan and Rod Mclntosh drew historians' attention to the
imprecision of dates from recent centuries due to extreme fluctuations in carbon 14 concentrations over the
last 500 years. Their' s was the last review of West African dates published in the Journal of African History.
See Susan K. Mclntosh and Roderick J. Mclntosh, "Recent Archaeological Research and Dates from West
Africa," Journal of African History 27, 2 (1986), 413-42. Significantly the only review of recent
archaeological research published in the 2000s also stresses this point: Mitchell and Whitelaw, "Archaeology
of Southernmost Africa."
9 Vansina, "Siblings," 370.
10 Ibid., 376.
11 Ibid., 370.
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244 Ann B. Stahl
partiality.12 Robertshaw observed that late twentieth-century African archaeo
more varied than the neo-evolutionary or processimi approaches highlighted by
essay. He underscored the diversity of theoretical perspectives in 1990s archaeo
reflected on the possibilities for a new interdisciplinary relationship that "pr
archeology to a full partnership."13
Without wishing to impose an artificial unity on the archaeology of African h
this essay builds on Robertshaw' s response by highlighting several recent di
developments that enhance archaeology's contribution to our understanding of
pasts. These developments include temporal and topical shifts, specifically a grow
on the archaeology of the last millennium and more particularly on the archaeology
last five centuries that will be highlighted in a forthcoming special issue of thi
Other developments are conceptual and theoretical, informed by changing persp
cultural process and material culture that provide a basis for rethinking the
interdisciplinary approaches to the study of African history. In the brief over
follows, I direct readers' attention to literatures that explore 1) the archa
intercontinental entanglements; 2) culture-making practices that envision culture as
rather than an object; and 3) the saliency of material culture and technology
processes. My broader argument is that these literatures create scope for pro
interdisciplinary conversations among historians and archaeologists of Africa th
to enrich our understandings of Africa's pasts.14
The Archaeology of Intercontinental Entanglements
Like historians, mid-twentieth-century archaeologists worked to dispel colonial
foregrounding African achievement. Endeavoring to counter the colonial
technological development occurred through outside influence, archaeologists s
document the early and independent development of a suite of features, part
agriculture, metallurgy, and social complexity.15 In the process, consideration o
long-standing connections with the broader world slipped from view.16 Howeve
12 Peter Robertshaw, "Sibling Rivalry? The Intersection of Archeology and History," History
27 (2000), 261-86.
13 Ibid., 280.
^ For an accessible introduction to the range of conceptual and methodological app
contemporary archaeology, see Martin Hall, Archaeology Africa (London: James Currey, 1996
K. Mclntosh, "Archaeology and the Reconstruction of the African Past," in John Edward Philips,
African History (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 51-84. On methodology, see al
Stahl, Making History in Africa: Anthropological Visions of Africa's Past (Cambridge: Un
Cambridge Press, 2001), 19-40.
15 For a discussion, see P.J.J. Sinclair et al, "Introduction"; Susan K. Mclntosh, "Pa
Complexity: An African Perspective," in Susan K. Mclntosh, ed., Beyond Chiefdoms: Pa
Complexity in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1-30. Also see contri
Robertshaw, History of African Archaeology.
16 In a 1991 article raising questions of Igbo Ukwu's external connections, John Sutton n
general reticence to invoke external connections blinded archaeologists to their importance in s
See J.E.G. Sutton, "The International Factor at Igbo Ukwu," The African Archaeological Revi
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The Archaeology of African History 245
two decades have seen growing interest in the archaeology of intercontinental connections
focused on the Indian Ocean, trans-Saharan and Atlantic trades, as well as on more recent
colonial entanglements. In West Africa archaeologists working in coastal regions have
investigated the relationship between Europeans and Africans around trade forts, while
archaeologists working in interior regions have explored the effects of Atlantic trade on
societies of varying scales.17 Archaeologists working in eastern Africa are similarly
addressing the effects of Indian Ocean connections on coastal and interior societies.18 In
southern Africa the debates centered on the "encapsulation" of Kalahari hunter-gatherers
has diverted attention from broader archaeological literatures focused on the implications
of long-term global connections for daily life in southern Africa.19 Here the recent Five
Hundred Year Initiative (FYI) is endeavoring to foster cross-disciplinary research. This
initiative, which in 2006 received five-year funding from the South African National
Research Foundation, is intended to address a perceived disengagement of mainstream
historians from the study of indigenous South African history and to encourage
interdisciplinary research on the influences that have shaped southern African identities
over the last 500 years. Project participants are paying particular attention to interactions
among communities within and beyond southern Africa's internal and regional frontiers.20
145-60. Fifteen years later, there was greater willingness to adopt a more balanced view, e.g., Gilbert Pwiti,
"Southern Africa and the East African Coast," in Ann Brower Stahl, ed., African Archaeology: A Critical
Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 378-91.
17 For coastal contexts, see Christopher R. DeCorse, An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and
European on the Gold Coast, 1400-1900 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); Kenneth
Kelly, "The Archaeology of African-European Interaction: Investigating the Social Roles of Trade, Traders
and the Use of Space in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Huéda Kingdom, Republic of Bénin,"
World Archaeology 28, 3 (1997), 351-69. For interior contexts, see Ann Stahl, Making History; Akinwumi
Ogundiran, "Of Small Things Remembered: Beads, Cowries, and Cultural Translations of the Atlantic
Experience in Yorubaland," International Journal of African Historical Studies 35 (2002), 421-51. Relevant
edited collections include Christopher R. DeCorse, ed., West Africa during the Atlantic Slave Trade:
Archaeological Perspectives (London: Leicester University Press, 2001); Akinwumi Ogundiran and Toyin
Falola, eds., Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2007), and Peter Mitchell's African Connections: An Archaeological Perspective on Africa and the Wider
World (Lanham MD: Altamira, 2005) provides a relevant overview.
18 See for example Chapurukha M. Kusimba, The Rise and Fall of Swahili States (Walnut Creek CA:
AltaMira Press, 1999); Adria LaViolette, "Swahili Cosmopolitanism in Africa and the Indian Ocean World,
A.D. 600-1500," Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 4, 1 (2008), 24-49.
19 On the Kalahari debate, see Andrew Reid, "Interaction, Marginalization, and the Archaeology of the
Kalahari," in Stahl, ed., African Archaeology, 353-77. On southern Africa, Carmel Schrire, Digging through
Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995); Martin Hall,
Archaeology and the Modern World: Colonial Transcripts in South Africa and the Chesapeake (London:
Routledge, 2000), and more generally, work by the University of Cape Town Historical Archaeology
Research Group, http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/age/harg.htm.
ZK) See http://web.wits.ac.za/Academic/Science/Geography/Research/500YearInitiative/; See also P.L.
Bonner, A.B. Esterhuysen, M.H. Schoeman, N.J. Swanepoel, and J.B. Wright, "Introduction," in Five
Hundred Years, and papers forthcoming in the Journal of Southern African History.
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246 Ann B. Stahl
As these examples suggest, the burgeoning interest in the archaeology of
connections coincides with a growing focus on the archaeology of recent centur
of this research has been conducted under the rubric of "historical archaeolo
appellation that may bring this work to historians' attention. "Historical archae
term that emerged in North America to refer to the archaeology of literate post-Co
colonial society and for some is thus defined by being "text-aided."21 Others des
the archaeology of capitalism or as an archaeology centered on the emergence of
world system.22 Though there were early isolated examples of so-called
archaeology focused on European sites in Africa, the influence of North
historical archaeology first became prominent in South Africa through the wo
Cape Town Historical Archaeology Working Group and Carmel Schrire's work
Dutch outpost of Oudepost.23 Here, in similar fashion to North American his
archaeology's growing focus on groups under represented in documentary sour
the enslaved), historical archaeology in South Africa focused particularly on so
economically disadvantaged groups. Students of Merrick Posnansky working
Africa framed their studies of European-African interaction on the coast as
archaeological and were similarly influenced by North American perspectives.24
years, the term has been increasingly applied in Africa, though it is no
controversy and is only unevenly being taken up by practicing archaeologists.25
In a separate vein, Peter Schmidt has long identified his projects as hist
archaeology, beginning with his 1978 Historical Archaeology: A Structural App
an African Culture and continuing through his recently published monograph a
which tout his pioneering role in establishing an "Africa-based historical archaeolog
claims to look at African history from an African viewpoint.26 Schmidt and h
21 Barbara J. Little, ed., Text-Aided Archaeology (Boca Raton FL: CRC Press, 1992).
22 Charles E. Orser, Jr., A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World (New York: Plenum
Mark P. Leone, "A Historical Archaeology of Capitalism," American Anthropologist 97 (1995),
a recent overview of its world-wide applications, see Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, "In
Archaeology of the Modern World," in Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, eds., Historical
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 1-19.
23 James Kirkman, Fort Jesus: A Portuguese Fortress on the East African Coast, Memoir
Institute in Eastern Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). Cape Town group, see http://web.uct.ac.z
harg.htm); also Martin Hall, "The Archaeology of Colonial Settlement in Southern Africa," Annua
Anthropology 22 (1993), 177-200, and An Archaeology of the Modern World. Also Schrire, Digg
Darkness.
24 See Merrick Posnansky and Christopher R. DeCorse, "Historical Archaeology in Sub-Saharan
Africa- A Review," Historical Archaeology 20, 1 (1986), 1-14. Christopher R. DeCorse, An Archaeology o
Elmina, and Kenneth Kelly, "The Archaeology of African-European Interaction." Also Kit W. Wesler, ed
Historical Archaeology in Nigeria (Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1998).
10 See Andrew M. Reid and Paul J. Lane, eds., African Historical Archaeologies (New York: Kluwer
Academic/Plenum, 2004). Also Graham Connah "Historical Archaeology in Africa: An Appropriat
Concept?" African Archaeological Review 24, 1-2 (2007), 35^0.
2^ Historical Archaeology: A Structural Approach in an African Culture (Westport CT: Greenwood
Press, 1978); Peter R. Schmidt, Historical Archaeology in Africa: Representation, Social Memory, and Oral
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The Archaeology of African History 247
Jonathan Walz have recently argued that archaeological studies that attend to the
implications of global entanglements, including colonialism, equate with "a position that
denies the validity and the integrity of local African histories outside the orbit of colonial
influence."27 They suggest that a historical archaeology that focuses on global connections
is akin to denying "that local histories can be explored outside the domain of Western
contact." Their premise seems to be that local histories must stand apart to be authentic, a
notion that carries forward the kernel of earlier anthropological thinking that has been
largely supplanted by the recognition that "all human cultures are shaped and transformed
in long histories of regional-to-global networks of power, trade and meaning."28 Theirs is
an argument that instead at its root reproduces assumptions associated with an earlier
"ethnographic genre" that envisioned connections with a broader world as contaminating
forces rather than part of the social, political, and economic fields within which societies
are constituted.29 Attending to connections does not equate with assuming encapsulation in
either the recent or more distant past. Rather more productively, recent anthropological
literature explores the variety of African modernities that are simultaneously connected
and local.30 The specific nature and effects of broader connections are thus questions to be
posed and, as recent archaeological research on slavery and the slave trade is
demonstrating, we should expect variability in relation to specific contexts.31 But to argue
that by posing questions about connections we compromise the validity and integrity of
local histories conjures a world of hermetically sealed cultures in which an uncontaminated
chrysalis of local history is carried forward. Such an argument reinscribes the temporally
Traditions (Lanham MD: AltaMira, 2006); Peter R. Schmidt and Jonathan R. Walz, "Silences and Mentions
in History Making," Historical Archaeology 41, 4 (2007), and "Re-Representing Africa's Pasts through
Historical Archaeology," American Antiquity 72, 1 (2007), 53-70.
27 Peter R. Schmidt and Jonathan R. Walz, "Historical Archaeology in Africa: Noble Claims,
Revisionist Perspectives and African Voices?" Journal of African History 46 (2005), 319.
28 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Frictions: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 3.
29 On the "ethnographic genre," see Jan Vansina, "The Ethnographic Account as a Genre in Central
Africa," Paideuma 33 (1987), 433^4.
30 For example, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds., Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and
Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the
Slave Trade: Ritual and Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002); Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999). For an archaeological exploration, see Alfredo Gonzâlez-Ruibal, "The Dream of Reason: An
Archaeology of the Failures of Modernity in Ethiopia," Journal of Social Archaeology 6, 2 (2006), 175-201 .
31 See for example contributions in Ogundiran and Falola, Archaeology of Atlantic Africa; Chapurukha
M. Kusimba, "Archaeology of Slavery in East Africa," African Archaeological Review 21,2 (2004), 59-88;
Natalie Swanepoel, "Socio-Political Change on a Slave-Raiding Frontier: War, Trade and 'Big Men' in
Nineteenth Century Sisalaland, Northern Ghana," in Tony Pollard and Iain Banks, eds., Past Tense: Studies
in the Archaeology of Conflict (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 265-93; Ann B. Stahl, "The Slave Trade as Practice and
Memory: What Are the Issues for Archaeologists?" in Catherine M. Cameron, ed., Invisible Citizens:
Captives and Their Consequences (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 25-56; Peter Robertshaw
and William Duncan, "African Slavery: Archaeology and Decentralized Societies," in Cameron Captives,
57-79.
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248 Ann B. Stahl
distancing notion that, to have integrity or be authentic, African histories m
apart.32
The rubric of historical archaeology has been critiqued by North American
archaeologists for the boundary it creates between the study of people perceived as being
"in history" (Europeans) and those whose past is studied as "prehistory" (Native
Americans). Interacting groups are thus parsed into categories that are the subject of
separate literatures.33 Historians of Africa should be aware that, in similar fashion, a
significant body of archaeological research focused on recent centuries in interior regions
of Africa fits uncomfortably within the rubric of historical archaeology despite its focus on
the very same intercontinental entanglements.34 This is amply illustrated by recent
overviews of historical archaeological research in Africa that replicate the division
between so-called "Iron Age" and historical archaeology by highlighting coastal studies
without connecting this work with studies of interior societies with which those coastal
societies interacted.35 Neither do these studies fit comfortably within "Iron Age"
archaeology, a point illustrated by the failure of conventional summaries of African
archaeology to incorporate their results.36
Regardless of the specific rubric under which studies are conducted, a rapid glance
at recent issues of the African Archaeological Review and the more recently launched
Journal of African Archaeology bears witness to the considerable archaeological activity
focused on sites occupied in the last half millennium. This marks both a dramatic temporal
shift in archaeological focus and a growing willingness to undertake evidentially robust
assessments of how Africans negotiated the long-standing interregional and global
connections that have linked the continent to the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and
32 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983), 1-35. This is one among several contradictions and inconsistencies in Schmidt and
Walz' s recently published polemics on the archaeology of African history, a discussion of which is beyond
the scope of the present piece. Schmidt and Walz, "Silences" and "Re-Representing."
33 Kent G. Lightfoot "Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and
Historical Archaeology," American Antiquity 60, 2 (1995), 199-217; see also Laura J. Mitchell, "Material
Culture and Cadastral Data: Documenting the Cedarberg Frontier, South Africa, 1725-1740," in Toyin
Falola and Christian Jennings, eds., Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed
(Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 17-19.
34 For example, work in interior regions referenced in note 17; see also Stahl, African Archaeology;
DeCorse, West Africa; Ogundiran and Falola, Atlantic Africa. For an overview see Ann B. Stahl, "Political
Economic Mosaics: Archaeology of the Last Two Millennia in Tropical Sub-Saharan Africa," Annual Review
of Anthropology 33 (2004), 145-72.
35 For example, Innocent Pikirayi, "Gold, Black Ivory, and Houses of Stone: Historical Archaeology in
Africa," in Hall and Silliman, Historical Archaeology, 230-50; see Scott MacEachern, "Two Thousand
Years of West African History," in Stahl, ed., African Archaeology, 441-66.
3^ For example the most recent edition of David Phillipson's African Archaeology 3rd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005). Compare this to Martin Hall, Farmers, Kings and Traders: The People
of South Africa, 200-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), which works to surmount the
Ages/Stages terminology that long structured discussions of African archaeology; also Hall Archaeology
Africa, and Stahl, ed., African Archaeology.
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The Archaeology of African History 249
Atlantic worlds. Whereas relevant studies are finding their way into journals focused
specifically on African archaeology, readers will find that studies are also appearing in
journals that highlight anthropologically-informed archaeological research as well as in
themed edited volumes.37 The temporal and topical shift that these studies embody
potentially realigns the interests of archaeologists and historians. Yet judging from the
dearth of archaeological citations in historical studies of Africa's global entanglements,
historians and anthropologists remain largely unaware of the relevance of this literature to
historical inquiry.
From the Study of "Culture" to the Study of Culture-Making Practices
Equally as important as these temporal and topical shifts are conceptual and theoretical
ones that underscore the role of daily actions in the production of culture. Mid-century
perspectives treated culture as an object that preceded individuals and was associated with
specific 'things.' The utility of archaeology was thought to lay in its potential to use
pottery styles to study "unsuspected past relations between different cultures that are
relatively far apart," and as a basis for comparative study that "should enable the
archaeologist to date sites and cultures."38 Yet for some decades archaeologists have
recognized that variation in pottery styles cannot be assumed to map onto either language
or culture- that pots do not equal peoples.39 Anthropological archaeologists today view
culture as emerging through contingent human action- in other words, through historically
specific practice- rather than as a complement of traits linked to a unified group of people
37 See for example the recent themed issue, "Theorizing Identity in African Archaeology," in Stephanie
Wynne- Jones and Sarah K. Croucher, eds., Journal of Social Archaeology 7, 3 (2007). Also in recent issues
of the Journal of Social Archaeology, see Timothy Insoll, "Negotiating the Archaeology of Destiny: An
Exploration of Interpretive Possibilities through Tallensi Shrines," 8, 3 (2008), 380-403; Shadreck Chirikure,
"Metals in Society: Iron Production and its Position in Iron Age Communities of Southern Africa," 7, 2
(2007), 101-12; Nick Shepherd, "Archaeology Dreaming. Post- Apartheid Urban Imaginaries and the Bones
of the Prestwich Street Dead," 7, 1 (2007) 3-28; Gonzâlez-Ruibal, "Dream of Reason," 6, 2 (2006), 175-
201; Godhi Bvocho, "Ornaments as Social and Chronological Icons: A Case Study of Southeastern
Zimbabwe," 5, 3 (2005), 409-24. The Journal of Anthropological Archaeology is another venue where
archaeologists are publishing works of interest to historians of Africa, e.g., A.B. Esterhuysen, "Divining the
Siege of Mugombane," 27, 4 (2008), 461-74; Edward John Pollard, "The Maritime Landscape of Kilwa
Kisiwani and Its Region, Tanzania, 11th to 15th Century AD," 27, 3 (2008), 265-80; Olivier Langlois,
"Intrasite Features Distribution as a Source of Social Information: The Case of Djaba-Hosséré (Northern
Cameroon)," 26 (2007), 172-97; Aribidesi A. Usman, "On the Frontier of Empire: Understanding the
Enclosed Walls in Northern Yoruba, Nigeria," 23, 1 (2004), 119-32. Archaeologists have also published
anthropologically oriented pieces in the American Anthropologist, e.g., Neil L. Norman and Kenneth G.
Kelly, "Landscape Politics: The Serpent Ditch and the Rainbow in West Africa," 106, 1 (2004), 98-110; Ann
B. Stahl, "Colonial Entanglements and the Practices of Taste: An Alternative to Logocentric Approaches,"
104, 3 (2002), 827-45.
38 Vansina, Mauny, and Thomas, "Techniques," 66, 69.
3^ For an early discussion see Martin Hall, "The Burden of Tribalism: The Social Context of Southern
African Iron Age Studies," American Antiquity 49 (1984), 455-67. Also Scott MacEachern, "Scale, Style,
and Cultural Variation: Technological Traditions in the Northern Mandara Mountains," in Miriam Stark, ed.,
The Archaeology of Social Boundaries (Washington D. C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 107-31.
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250 Ann B. Stahl
or a structure that precedes social action. These practices are learned and shared
may be reproduced or alternately transformed by communities of practice thro
Informed by this perspective, an emerging literature explores how communities of
are created through embodied practices of learning. These communities share a
bodily dispositions and dimensions of style that we can reconstruct from th
objects.40 Unlike earlier images of bounded cultures, recent literature stresses
social relations that connect communities of practitioners cannot be assumed
align to create tidy boundaries, between for example ethnic groups. Instead,
anticipate a rather more kaleidoscopic landscape in which people participate in
communities of practice. For example, potters may make vessels that appear
design (vessel form and decoration) but that differ in aspects of underlying tec
style (techniques of paste preparation or vessel construction) as a result of havi
potting in different communities. People who consume their pottery may par
different communities of ritual practice (linked to shrines, ancestor veneratio
religions, etc) and may in turn belong to different communities of subsistenc
(people whose focus is on fishing compared to farming, etc.). Social identific
produced through these practices, at the same time that the practices salient t
formation at specific times and in specific places is a question to be posed rathe
assumption to be made.41
This shift in conceptual framing has implications for our analytical un
practices. Rather than the bounded "tribes" of early to mid-twentieth
ethnography,42 we should anticipate more complex Venn diagram-like l
comprised of overlapping communities of practice that do not neatly stac
example, a community that shares in the production and use of particular technolog
not share in the same set of ritual practices, and these may be cross-cut
communities of subsistence practice. Additional complexity is introduced
consider temporal variation in practices. Here archaeologists are beginning to
genealogies of practice, studying the reproduction and transformation of pr
examining continuity and change in specific technologies and objects through ti
materiality of these culture-making practices (of which more below) ena
investigate their dynamics using archaeological sources. A focus on practice br
life- the site of culture-making activities- into analytical focus, and archaeol
40 For an introduction, see Jill C. Minar and Patricia Crown, "Learning and Craft Produ
Introduction," Journal of Anthropological Research 57, 4 (2002), 369-80.
41 For a discussion of this as it relates to the study of slavery and the slave trade
"Archaeology of Slavery."
42 For example, the image offered by the large fold-out map of African tribal groups
George Peter Murdock's Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History (New York: McGraw Hill,
43 For a discussion, see Rosemary A. Joyce and J. Lopiparo "PostScript: Doing Ag
Archaeology," Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12, 4 (2005), 365-74; Timothy
and Susan M. Alt, "Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making,"
Archaeological Method and Theory 12, 3 (2005), 213-36; Chris Gosden, "What Do Objects Wan
of Archaeological Method and Theory 12, 3 (2005), 193-211. See also Nicholas David and Caro
Ethnoarchaeology in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 303-59.
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The Archaeology of African History 251
developing new methodologies for discerning culture-making practices from the houses,
work places, landscapes, and rubbish pits that are the focus of our field investigations.
Material Culture and Techniques
A focus on practice aligns with a related conceptual cum theoretical shift in
anthropological archaeology centered on how material culture and associated techniques of
production and processes of consumption shape social life.44 Techniques drawn from
repertoires of possibility may be arbitrarily selected, but become naturalized as they are
accepted and transmitted through material apprenticeship and learning.45 These ideas have
been particularly influential in the study of contemporary material culture systems and
techniques of their production in Africa.46 Under the influence of these perspectives, the
mid-century view of material culture as mute, and reflective of social or ideational
processes has given way in recent decades to a growing interest in what Appadurai termed
the "social life of things." In this view, material culture- inclusive of dwellings, ceramics,
iron implements and imports- is integral to culture-making practices and therefore deeply
implicated in the production of social life.47 Technology is viewed as a process involving
choices that actively produce social configurations.48 Consumption of material culture
actively creates in- and out-groups that underwrite social differentiation. These
perspectives represent a shift away from cognitivist views that underwrote earlier
44 Marcel Mauss' notion of bodily techniques inspires some of this literature; see Mauss, Sociology and
Psychology: Essays, translated by Ben Brewster (London: Routledge; and Kegan Paul, 1979 [1950]).
45 See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans, by Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977). Also Pierre Lemonnier, "The Study of Material Culture Today: Toward
an Anthropology of Technical Systems," Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 5 (1986), 147-86.
46 On potting, see Michael Dietler and Ingrid Herbich, "Tien Matek: The Technology of Luo Pottery
Production and the Definition of Ceramic Style," World Archaeology 21 (1989), 148-64, and Olivier P.
Gosselain "Technology and Style: Potters and Pottery among Bifia of Cameroon," Man, n.s., 27, 3 (1992),
559-86, and "Materializing Identities: An African Perspective," Journal of Archaeological Method and
Theory 7, 3 (2000), 187-217. On metallurgy see S. Terry Childs, "Style, Technology and Iron Smelting
Furnaces in Bantu-Speaking Africa," Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 10 (1991), 332-59, and
Eugenia W. Herbert, Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 1993). David Killick's "Social Constructionist Approaches to the Study of
Technology," World Archaeology 36, 4 (2004), 571-78, provides a brief but accessible overview of the
perspectives that inform this literature.
47 Theoretical groundwork for this view can be found in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Lives of
Thing: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See also
Daniel Miller, ed., Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), and Materiality (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005). For an early discussion of the role of
objects in colonial entanglements, see Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture,
and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), and Bernard Cohn,
Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). For more recent
perspectives, see Tim Ingold, "Making Culture and Weaving the World," in P.M. Graves-Brown, ed. Matter,
Materiality, and Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), and Chris Gosden, "What Do Objects Want?"
48 Lemmonier, "Study of Material Culture"; Gosselain "Technology and Style."
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252 Ann B. Stahl
structuralist perspectives that perceived culture as mind impressed upon the
world: "culture made material" in Henry Glassie's words.49
Recent perspectives encourage us instead to explore how material culture
up in and shapes social action, a concern sometimes captured though not nece
illuminated by the term "materiality."50 When viewed in relation to practice, this l
stresses the formative role of material culture in socialization. Things create con
bear varying degrees of resemblance to past contexts, thereby actively p
continuities or discontinuities with what went before. As such, dispositions, t
apprehension of the world are all conditioned by the object worlds through w
emerge. Importantly, artifacts in this perspective are not 'mute' reflections of
process, but are enmeshed in and shape those processes. Viewed in this way, pr
and consumption are sites of creative engagement between people and materials that
social configurations and are bound up in the repetitive practices through w
memory is produced.51
These perspectives on material culture prompt new questions and possibil
archaeological interpretation.52 With respect to production, detailed stud
operational sequences through which technologies are produced provide insig
technological style. Whereas standard approaches to the study of style focus
finished object, studies of technological style endeavor to explore the processe
which objects are produced.53 The study of technological style is based on the n
49 Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 4
Huffman's work on the Southern Bantu cattle pattern is exemplary of a cognitive structural
Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe (Johannesburg: Witw
University Press, 1996). Notably the FYI in southern Africa is motivated in part by a concern t
ahistoricism that characterizes cognitivist approaches; see Bonner et al., Five Hundred Years, 10
50 See Victor Buchli, "Material Culture: Current Problems," in Lynn Meskell and Robert W.
eds., A Companion to Social Archaeology (Oxford: Black well, 2004), 179-94; Chris Gosden
Objects Want?"; Miller, ed., Materiality; Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler-F
Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, eds., Handbook of Material Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Mary Beaudry and Dan Hicks, eds., Oxford Handbook of Material Culture (London: Oxford
Press, forthcoming). For an exchange over the term "materiality," see Tim Ingold, "Materi
Materiality," Archaeological Dialogues 14, 1 (2007), 1-16, and responses therein.
5* On the role of objects creating continuities and discontinuities, see Marilyn Strathern, "A
History: Events and the Interpretation of Images," in J. Siikala, ed., Culture and History in
(Helsinki: Finnish Anthropological Society, 1990), 25-44; Nicholas Thomas, "The Case of the
Ponchos: Speculations Concerning the History of Cloth in Polynesia," Journal of Material Cultu
5-20. For archaeological discussions of the implications for social memory, see Martin H
Archaeology and the Theatres of Memory," Journal of Social Archaeology 1, 1 (2001), 50-61; con
in Barbara J. Mills and William H. Walker, eds., Memory Work: The Materiality of Depositio
(Sante Fé, NM: School of Advanced Research, 2008); Schmidt, Historical Archaeology in Afric
52 Elizabeth Brumfield, "It's a Material World: History, Artifacts, and Anthropology," Ann
of Anthropology 32 (2003), 205-23.
53 For a discussion, see Gosselain, "Technology and Style," 559-61; also Dietler and Herb
Matek." On metallurgy, see Childs, "Style, Technology and Iron."
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The Archaeology of African History 253
there exist multiple ways to achieve a particular end, and that choice is therefore involved
in technological processes. In the case of pottery, for example, pots can be fashioned
through coiling, drawing, molding, or some combination of techniques. Choices become
habituated through processes of apprenticeship and learning, and variations in choice can
produce regional micro-styles. These studies in turn have enabled archaeologists to
document cases in which discontinuities in form or decoration mask underlying
continuities in other aspects of style, particularly those linked to habitual motor habits
(e.g., the coiling of a pot compared to fashioning a vessel by drawing or molding). These
complex mosaics of continuity and discontinuity provide an evidentially robust basis for
exploring practices of social identification. For example, in an ethnographic study of
technological style, Barbara Frank has adduced evidence that variability in motor habits
among potters in southern Mali is masked by similarities in vessel form and decoration and
relates to the enslaved origins of Kadiolo potters. Though forcibly incorporated into
another society, Kadiolo potters retained the motor habits of their youth, which they in turn
passed on through apprentice learning.54 Such patterns can be archaeologically
investigated by combining compositional analyses of ceramic pastes with technological
studies of vessel forming techniques that enable us to discern heterogeneities in practice
that may be masked by commonalities in outward appearance.55
In relation to consumption, archaeological perspectives on the circulations of
imports have drawn on Kopytoff' s notion of object biographies to study the varied
associations and effects of imports as they were taken up and recontextualized in new
contexts.56 By exploring temporally seriated contexts, archaeologists have been able toi
document how extant tastes and preferences shaped the reception of imports, how they
were put to local uses, and with what sociopolitical effects. Archaeological analyses along
these lines hold considerable promise for extending our understanding of how African
consumer preferences conditioned metropolitan production and international trade.57 A
54 Barbara E. Frank, "Reconstructing the History of an African Ceramic Tradition: Technology,
Slavery and Agency in the Region of Kadiolo Mali," Cahiers d'Études Africaines 33, 131 (1993), 381-401.
For links between technological style and identity, see Gosselain, "Materializing Identities." For the broader
implications for understanding African slavery, see Stahl, "Slave Trade."
55 For an example, see Ann B. Stahl, Maria das Dores Cruz, Hector Neff, Michael D. Glascock, Robert
J. Speakman, Bretton Giles, and Leith Smith, "Ceramic Production, Consumption and Exchange in the Banda
Area, Ghana: Insights from Compositional Analyses," Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27 (2008),
363-81.
56 Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process," in
Appadurai ed., The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64-
recontextualization, see Thomas, Entangled Objects. Marshall Sahlins famously forwarded the argumen
people consume introduced goods according to their own logics in order to become "more like themse
see "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of The World System,'" in Nicholas B. D
Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture/ Power /History: A Reader in Contemporary Social T
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 412-55.
57 See Christopher B. Steiner, "Another Image of Africa: Toward an Ethnohistory of European C
Marketed in West Africa, 1873-1960," Ethnohistory 32 (1985), 91-110; Jeremy Prestholdt, Domest
the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of Califo
Press, 2008).
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254 Ann B. Stahl
growing literature in African history explores the role of African consumer prefe
shaping the balance of imports and manufacturing processes in Europe and
Notably, archaeological sources can provide useful insight into extant
preferences and provide a lens through which to investigate consumer choice.5
sources are thus intimately involved in culture-making processes and as suc
sources of insight into the historical dynamics of African societies that we ar
beginning to appreciate.
Concluding Comments
In 2007 David William Cohen and his students organized a symposium at the Un
Michigan centered on the future of African studies.59 Cohen encouraged th
imagine what the discipline might look like in 2020 at a time when current
students were envisioning their second book project. Notably, no archaeolog
included among the presenters, yet symposium themes resonated substantively wit
directions in African archaeology. For example, Heike Schmidt argued that
challenges facing Africanists was Dipesh Chakrabarty's project of provincializi
a project that she argued requires publishing outside the area studies
communicating insights on African history to broader scholarly audiences.
observations resonate with Gareth Austin's call for "reciprocal comparisons" th
how findings from "non-western" histories can illuminate "western" ones.6
archaeologists are doing this, as witnessed by the increasing number of arti
archaeology of African history being published in the major journals d
anthropological archaeology. As outlined above, a concern with colonial proc
global connections are central themes in this literature, yet Africanist histo
anthropologists addressing these same themes seem largely unaware of this lit
its relevance. Schmidt also drew attention to the rudimentary state of knowledge r
Africa's history before 1850, citing as have others before her, the need for s
acquire additional methodologies such as archeology and historical linguistics
58 Michael Dietler, "Consumption, Agency, and Cultural Entanglement: Theoretical Impl
Mediterranean Colonial Encounter," in J. Cusick, ed., Studies in Culture Contact. Interactio
Change, and Archaeology (Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, South
University, 1998), 288-315. For archaeological examples from Africa, see Ogundiran, "Of S
Remembered," 421-51, and Stahl, "Colonial Entanglements."
59 Heike Schmidt, "The Future of Africa's Past: Observations on the Discipline," History in
(2007), 453-60. See also http.7/sitemaker.umich.edu/africa2020/download_thinkpieces; Dipesh C
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ
University Press, 2000); Gareth Austin, "Reciprocal Comparison and African History: Tacklin
Eurocentrism in the Study of Africa's Economic Past," African Studies Review 50 (2007), 1-28.
60 Heike Schmidt, "The Future of Africa's Past: Observations on the Discipline," History in
(2007), 453-460. See also http://sitemaker.umich.edu/africa2020/dovvnload_thinkpieces; Dipesh C
Provincilaizing Europe: Poscolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton NJ: Princeton
Press, 2000); Gareth Austin, "Reciprocal Comparison and African History: Tackling
Eurocentrism in the Study of Africa's Economic Past," African Studies Review 50 (2007), 1-28.
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The Archaeology of African History 255
forward, she envisioned 2020 as a time when "The newest research by graduate students
on Africa's past before 1850 will ... have brought about a major paradigm shift in how we
think about identity, ethnicity and power."61 Arguably, that paradigm shift will involve a
growing comprehension of identification as a process shaped by material practice and a
recognition of the robust insights that can be generated using archaeology's material
evidence to apprehend the dynamics of African lifeworlds. If so, 2020 will be a time when
graduate students and their mentors can claim that "The contribution of the archaeologist
to African history is central."
61 Ibid., 459, 460.
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