African Archaeology

• Dominated by Western Researchers

– Non-Africans

• First article published on African Archaeology

» 1869 - Sir Langham Dale On a Collection of Stone Implements from the Cape of Good Hope

• 1998 hold academic positions in USA & Europe- 63 men and 22 women

– Africans

• First article written by an African (male) Ekpo Eyo in the West African Journal of Archaeology in 1974.

• 2 or 3 hold academic positions- Selassie Semaw at Indiana, also researchers at Chicago and Berkeley

• First article written by an African (female) Alinah Segoby from Botswana (1998).

Publications

• Journals

– the South African Archaeological Bulletin 1945- A.J. Goodwin

– Azania (focus on Eastern Africa) 1966- British Institute of East Africa BIEA

– West African Journal of Archaeology 1971- Thurstan Shaw

– The African Archaeological Review 1983- D. Phillipson

• Books

– Sonia Cole- Prehistory of East Africa (1954)

– Henrietta Alimen- The Prehistory of Africa (1957)

– David Phillipson- African Archaeology (1977)

– Graham Connah – African Civilizations (1987)

– Martin Hall-Archaeology Africa (1996)

Exploration, Exploitation and Pioneering Studies: 1860 to 1919

• Exploration and Exploitation

– European military personnel, adventurers, doctors, geologists, and bureaucrats,

– Destruction of sites- housing of materials in European Museums

– Africa is a cultural backwater- borrowed everything from Europe and not as developed

• Stone Age

• Early States

Looting:The Rape of the Nile

• Giovanni Battista Belzoni 1778 Padua, Italy

• Circus actor

• Designed water pump

• Looted- financed by the British Consul

– Rameseseum head

– Abu Simbel

– Karnak temples

– Philae

– Pyramids

Stone Age

• Terminology borrowed from Europe

• Gooch 1881 and Rickard 1881 use terms such as Paleolithic and Neolithic for Southern African Stone tools

States

• Early state sites

– Aksum (Bent, 1893),

– Great Zimbabwe (Hall, 1905; Stow, 1905)

– Benin-Ife (Frobenius, 1913)

– Nile Valley (Seligman 1930)

• Great Zimbabwe

– More than 50 walled settlements on the Zimbabwe Plateau

Dates – Continuous occupation AD 1100-1450

• Carl Mauch and the Bible- King Solomons’ wealth came from the land of Ophir via the Queen of Sheba

• Theodore Bent (1891), Richard Hall (1902-4) Phoenicains and Egyptians

• British Colonial Rule in South Africa- easier to attribute foreign origins

Pioneering Flinders Petrie

• Surveying and Geometry-Father-Stonehenge, pyramids

• Concerned about the destruction of antiquities

• Egyptian Exploration Fund

• Seriation- Prehistoric burials and indigenous origin for the state!

• Realized that trade and interaction occurred with other state societies, such as the Minoans

My First Hundred Years
Margaret Murray (1863-1963)

• University College London

– 1893 Amelia Edwards Library & Chair

– 1894 Student

– 1899 Junior Lecturer

– 1924 Assistant Professor

• 13 books- Egypt, Malta, Petra, & Witchcraft

• Archaeology- the excavator, interpreter, the linguist

• “In the desire to be scientific, archaeology seems to me to be losing touch with humanity”

Exploration & Pioneering Period
1860s-1920

• “Anthropology is not a subject for women. Because there are things a woman ought not to know.”

- S. Hartland

• Incorporated Wives and Miscegenation

• “The Shrieking Sisterhood”-Suffrage Movement

• “The woman was both the Giver of Life and the Giver of Food. This seems to be the reason why the earliest conception of the Deity is as a female; in otherwords the goddess precedes the god”- Murray 1963

• “Yet in the whole field of religion one gets the impression that the author has little understanding of the material she is dealing with. The “Positivist” party line is a rather barren dogma for interpreting the great religious documents of Egypt or of any other culture” - Brady 1950

• “In the investigation of any ancient religion the modern commentary seems to me to be guilty of every archaeological crime under the sun, especially century-mixing” - Murray 1963

The Systematic Studies and the Cultural Descriptive Period: 1920 to 1949

• Africa – cultural backwater

• Descriptive studies

• Relative dating techniques

• Amateurs contributed to most of the research

Van Riet Lowe and A.J.H. Goodwin
Southern Africa

• Goodwin – committed to using Southern African terminology – but still believed in migrations from North Africa

– U. of Cape Town, skills in methods

– Southern African Seriation of Stone Tools

• Lowe – appointed Director of Institute of Prehistory

• Both saw Sahara as an obstacle from south to north, but not vice versa

Louise Leakey’s Luck

– Discovered Miocene haplorhini, H.erectus

– Discovered first stone tools of Eastern Africa- Olduwan and used European terminology-- Paleolithic (lower)

– Pluvial theory

– Supported idea of hunting by early hominids

FIRST LADY OF FOSSILS

• No University degree, Honorary degree from U. of Witwatersrand and Oxford

• Illustrator – introduced to Caton-Thompson and L. Leakey

• A. boisei, A. afarensis, Laetoli footprints, H. habilis, homebases?, Tanzanian rock paintings and caves

Culture Historic Period 1950s-1970s

• African nations independence

• Looking for indigenous development

• Radio-carbon dating – able to excavate single component sites

• Ecological approach emphasized

Thurston Shaw

• Began his career in England – contemporary of Mary Leakey

– Anthropology Museum at Achimota College, Ghana (Gold Coast) and U. of Ibadan, Nigeria

• Concerned with building up a culture history of the region

– No radio-carbon dating

– No previous research

Mixed Memoirs
Gertrude Caton Thompson
(1888-1986)

• 1921 University College London

• 1923 Newnham’s College Cambridge

• Rivers Medal (1934), Huxley Medal (1946), and Burton Medal (1954)

• 1940-1946 Prehistoric Society

• 1961-founder British Institute of Archaeology in East Africa

• 7 books- Egypt and Zimbabwe

• Women’s Suffrage movement

Systematic Studies and Cultural Descriptive Period 1920-1949

• Interdisciplinary regional surveys

• Air surveys

• Screening for seeds and small artifacts

• Paleolithic to Predynastic Period

Rumblings at Great Zimbabwe

• “The Work of Miss Caton Thompson may begin from now on to affect, insensibly but yet surely, all white relations with the Bantu race”- Church Times

• “Dr. MacIver came to this conclusion in 1905. Miss Caton Thompson’s exhaustive study just shows that he was right” - The Spectator

• “Letters of the local experts have been stored in a file marked insane” - Caton Thompson

• “It is, in fact, but another example of the force of character and genius for administration and organization which an African people has shown on more than one occasion, but of which the significance is usually overlooked” - Caton Thompson

Cultural Ecology 1960s-1970

• Emphasis on what people ate, the environment, and how the environment changes culture

– More collection of faunal and flora

J. (John) Desmond Clark

• Studied at Cambridge, first arrived in Africa in 1938 (Rhodesia, now Zambia)

• 1964- classic article how the environment induces culture change

Avocational Archaeology

• Debate over who should be able to publish

• South African Archaeological Bulletin

– Changed regulations that made it difficult for avocational researchers to publish

– New laws requiring permits

Processualism

– Generalized Laws and Natural Science Analogy

• Processualism (1960 – 1980, present)

• Cross-cultural perspectives

• Environmental Subsistence studies

• Emphasis on statistical methods to understand patterns of human behavior

• Cognitive world was outside the realm of understanding

KALAHARI HUNTERS & GATHERERS

• 1968- Harvard University Bushman Studies Project-Irven DeVore & Richard Lee

• John Yellen

• !Kung San, Botswana

• Research goal was to study settlement patterns, duration of occupation, activities, and demography.

• General models and law-like generalizations for the archaeologists

YELLEN’S METHODOLOGY

• Linguistic competence

• 3 years research

• 16 camps

– Described and plotted to nearest cm every object and structure

– Duration of occupation

– Daily activities, social relationships, and foods consumption

MOBILITY

• Movement based on Water

– Nore - water hole and surrounding land/resources

– primary means for associating individuals with geographic space

• Dry season

– Aggregate with higher density of material.

• Wet season

– move to seasonal water holes and nut groves with few materials visible.

– not visible in ethnographic context

• Archaeological Application: Cae Cae and Mahopa

– Later Stone Age sites, 3500-630 BP

– “lifestyle remains unchanged”

– Dry season occupation

Post- Processual Studies

• 1980 to present

• Emphasizes the symbolic nature

• Relationship between ideology and material culture

– Just as easy to explain as subsistence

• Attempts to understand the human mind

• Historical perspective and Particularistic

• Seeks multiple perspectives

Ian Hodder

• Differences in material culture between ethnic groups

– Lake Baringo, Northern Kenya

– Pots, basketwork, stools, gourds, jewelry, etc.

– Ilchamus/Tugen boundary clearly differentiated

– Traits move east (Ilchamus) to west (Tugen) more easily

• Why? Expression of conformity to assert tribal identity

• Emphasis on competition over resources

Afrocentrism

• I. Van Sertima A. Wiercinksi, and C. Winters

– Africans first Old World inhabitants to come to the Americas

– Olmec heads represent Africans not Native American resemble Nubian heads in style

• Nubians control of Egypt dates to 2750 2650 BP

• Olmec Heads 3500 to 2500 BP

– Skeletal evidence “Negroid” Olmec population

– Olmec language origins in Mande language of west Africa. Mande live in southern Sahara and West Africa. The Proto-Mande came to Mexico in boats sailing down an extinct river to the Atlantic and then to MesoAmerica.

African Archaeology

• Dominated by Western Researchers

– Non-Africans

• First article published on African Archaeology

» 1869 - Sir Langham Dale On a Collection of Stone Implements from the Cape of Good Hope

• 1998 hold academic positions in USA & Europe- 63 men and 22 women

– Africans

• First article written by an African (male) Ekpo Eyo in the West African Journal of Archaeology in 1974.

• 2 or 3 hold academic positions- Selassie Semaw at Indiana, also researchers at Chicago and Berkeley

• First article written by an African (female) Alinah Segoby from Botswana (1998).

Publications

• Journals

– the South African Archaeological Bulletin 1945- A.J. Goodwin

– Azania (focus on Eastern Africa) 1966- British Institute of East Africa BIEA

– West African Journal of Archaeology 1971- Thurstan Shaw

• Books

– Sonia Cole- Prehistory of East Africa (1954)

– Henrietta Alimen- The Prehistory of Africa (1957)

– David Phillipson- African Archaeology (1977)

– Graham Connah – African Civilizations (1987)

– Martin Hall-Archaeology Africa (1996)

Exploration, Exploitation and Pioneering Studies: 1860 to 1919

• Exploration and Exploitation

– European military personnel, adventurers, doctors, geologists, and bureaucrats,

– Destruction of sites- housing of materials in European Museums

– Africa is a cultural backwater- borrowed everything from Europe and not as developed

• Stone Age

• Early States

Looting:The Rape of the Nile

• Giovanni Battista Belzoni 1778 Padua, Italy

• Circus actor

• Designed water pump

• Looted- financed by the British Consul

– Rameseseum head

– Abu Simbel

– Karnak temples

– Philae

– Pyramids

Stone Age

• Terminology borrowed from Europe

• Gooch 1881 and Rickard 1881 use terms such as Paleolithic and Neolithic for Southern African Stone tools

States

• Early state sites

– Aksum (Bent, 1893),

– Great Zimbabwe (Hall, 1905; Stow, 1905)

– Benin-Ife (Frobenius, 1913)

– Nile Valley (Seligman 1930)

• Great Zimbabwe

– More than 50 walled settlements on the Zimbabwe Plateau

• Carl Mauch and the Bible- King Solomons’ wealth came from the land of Ophir via the Queen of Sheba

• Theodore Bent (1891), Richard Hall (1902-4) Phoenicains and Egyptians

• British Colonial Rule in South Africa- easier to attribute foreign origins

Pioneering Flinders Petrie

• Surveying and Geometry-Father-Stonehenge, pyramids

• Concerned about the destruction of antiquities

• Egyptian Exploration Fund

• Seriation- Prehistoric burials and indigenous origin for the state!

• Realized that trade and interaction occurred with other state societies, such as the Minoans

My First Hundred Years Margaret Murray (1863-1963)

• University College London

– 1893 Amelia Edwards Library & Chair

– 1894 Student

– 1899 Junior Lecturer

– 1924 Assistant Professor

• 13 books- Egypt, Malta, Petra, & Witchcraft

• Archaeology- the excavator, interpreter, the linguist

• “In the desire to be scientific, archaeology seems to me to be losing touch with humanity”

Exploration & Pioneering Period 1860s-1920

• “Anthropology is not a subject for women. Because there are things a woman ought not to know.”

- S. Hartland

• Incorporated Wives and Miscegenation

• “The Shrieking Sisterhood”-Suffrage Movement

• “The woman was both the Giver of Life and the Giver of Food. This seems to be the reason why the earliest conception of the Deity is as a female; in otherwords the goddess precedes the god”- Murray 1963

• “Yet in the whole field of religion one gets the impression that the author has little understanding of the material she is dealing with. The “Positivist” party line is a rather barren dogma for interpreting the great religious documents of Egypt or of any other culture” - Brady 1950

• “In the investigation of any ancient religion the modern commentary seems to me to be guilty of every archaeological crime under the sun, especially century-mixing” - Murray 1963

The Systematic Studies and the Cultural Descriptive Period: 1920 to 1949

• Africa – cultural backwater

• Descriptive studies

• Relative dating techniques

• Amateurs contributed to most of the research

My First Hundred Years
Margaret Murray (1863-1963)

Exploration & Pioneering Period
1860s-1920

Van Riet Lowe and A.J.H. Goodwin
Southern Africa

Mixed Memoirs
Gertrude Caton Thompson
(1888-1986)