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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 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40282387 Accessed: 13-02-2017 04:47 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40282387?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Boston University African Studies Center is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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." This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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." This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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). This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 210.212.93.46 on Mon, 13 Feb 2017 04:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms