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The past does not exist. This may seem a strange way to start a book on archaeology and history, but this is a view now widely accepted. What does exist are interpretations of the past constructed in the present. Academics, in their wisdom, create theories and methodologies which allow them to evaluate, select and exclude different pasts. Nevertheless, this inherent relativism gives rise to differing...
The archaeology of Nubia and the Middle Nile occupies a special place in sub-Saharan Africa in being concerned with exceptionally early large-scale polities for which we also have historical records, notably: Kerma during the second millennium BC, the Kushite state centred on Napata and then Meroe, and the medieval Nubian kingdoms. The historical sources include not only a range of external sources...
In the end there will be two histories, theirs and ours. Ours will obviously be within a literate mode of historical thought, taking account of all the additional data we can muster to reconstruct sequential evolutionary patterns of change. It will satisfy us, while theirs continues to satisfy them. (Spear 1981a: 178)
In 1331, the renowned Arab traveller Ibn Battuta visited Kilwa Kisiwani, a large prosperous trading town on the southern coast of present-day Tanzania (see Figure 1). He declared that “the city…is one of the finest and most substantially built towns” he had seen on the East African coast, and praised the generosity and power of the Sultan (Gibb 1962:380). However, only decades later the town witnessed...
In this chapter I explore the use of historical documents by archaeologists working on the Swahili coast of eastern Africa. I focus on one central region, Pemba-northernmost of Tanzania’s three major offshore islands-where both written and oral historical information has been put to use over the past half century of archaeological research. The use of historical documents has constituted a double-edged...
Until recently, much of the focus of archaeological research on historical periods in the Sahel and Savannah (Sudan) zones of West Africa could be described as being dictated by attempts to correlate places and events with a limited corpus of Arabic historical sources (see McIntosh and McIntosh 1984, for a critique of what they term these “city-centric” approaches). It is also probably fair to say...
This chapter discusses some aspects of the archaeology of the Cross River area of Nigeria, close to the Cameroon border. This is an area that has long been known to contain monoliths, often decorated and arranged in groups, in locations sometimes close to the Cross River itself. The only detailed account of the stones is that published at around the time of Independence by a colonial service forester,...
Charleston, South Carolina; Kingston, Jamaica; Port au Prince, Haiti; Salvador, Brazil: all of these are cities in the Americas that share one overwhelmingly apparent factor. Any visitor to these communities will immediately be struck by the strength of the African contribution to their cultures. Indeed, the visibility of an African legacy in these settings has stimulated broader research into the...
It is possible to argue that historical archaeology in Zimbabwe is essentially the archaeology of the spread of European culture into the region and the impact this had on the indigenous Karanga, Rozvi, Manyika and other groups (for examples, see Garlake 1967; 1969; Whitty 1959), since European texts have been available from the beginning of the sixteenth century. This, however, offers only a limited...
The types of questions asked by the British archaeologist Thurstan Shaw as he endeavoured to interpret the remains his team had uncovered at the site of Igbo Isaiah in eastern Nigeria during the 1959-60 field season, are not unusual. Archaeologists the world over ask themselves similar questions as they ponder over assemblages of artefacts and faunal remains, stare long and hard at sections through...
This chapter considers the archaeology of historical African societies and their use in generating models for the understanding of earlier communities. There is nothing new in suggesting such approaches and indeed there are significant theoretical problems in using later episodes to explain earlier archaeological events. However, as with the use of it’s rich ethnographies, Africa’s plentiful historical...
The creation of a modern, democratic, South Africa was a long drawn out process of struggle for possession of the more obvious resources and symbols - land, political power, wealth and, not least of all, the ‘right’ to author the past. Over centuries, a general image of Africa, its peoples, and their pasts, had been created by outsiders and this image, in time, played an important role in determining...
A Sunday morning in March, 1886 ... “The tangled threads of destiny were being detached from the spinning wheel ...” (Crisp 1974 in Ricci 1986: 24) as two gold prospectors, walking the land of the widow Oosthuizen’s farm, Langlaagte, stumbled upon an outcrop of the Main Reef Conglomerate, a banket of gold bearing ore, arcing , virtually uninterrupted, from present-day Randfontein in the west to Springs...
Assembled in this volume, African Historical Archaeologies , are an exciting set of papers that encompas s a remarkably wide range of topics , methods, periods and regions of the African past. From the symbolism of decorated monoliths in Nigeria (Ray, Chapter 7) to indigenous recollections of war with a colonial government in South Africa (van Schalkwyk and Smith , Chapter 12), from the origins of...
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