Africa and the Indian Ocean

Abstract

The papers presented in this special issue of the African Archaeological Review all explore interactions between particular African regions and the Indian Ocean from prehistory to the present. The scholarly interest in this theme is manifested in numerous conferences and seminars that have taken place over the last 20 years. These seven articles present different kinds of empirical material and analytical approaches. Exploration of our empirical theme had to confront a particular bias that seems inherent in our discipline: namely the way area-study specialization tends to narrow our search for wider culture-historical influences. Africanists become inclined to search for African connections while Indologists focus on Indian connections. This may even lead to different conceptual orientations that may serve to limit scholarly exchanges between archaeologists working in Africa and in Asia. This becomes particularly problematic with the development of scholarship focusing on various classical traditions characterizing the complex societies of Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. The first paper, by Nicole Boivin, Alison Crowther, Mary Prendergast and Dorian Q. Fuller, “Indian Ocean Food Globalisation and Africa,” covers a long timespan, from 4,000 years ago to the recent period. The authors explore the patterns of food globalization vis-a-vis Africa, focusing especially on the arrival of new food crops and domesticated animals in Africa and also touching on flows from Africa to the broader Indian Ocean world. They use archaeological, archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological materials, as well as historical and ethnographic sources. Drawing on data from the interdisciplinary Sealinks Project, they explore how seafaring activities in the Indian Ocean changed over time and how this had impact on dispersals of plants, animals, material objects, people and ideas. More than 4,000 years of seafaring between the Indus and Mesopotamian civilizations was well established. In the first centuries BCE, Indians had discovered that they could sail across the Indian Ocean by using the seasonal changes of the monsoon. According to the account of the Periplus from the first century CE, this stimulated increased open-sea seafaring between India and the Red Sea. Afr Archaeol Rev (2014) 31:543–545 DOI 10.1007/s10437-014-9177-0