Current Directions in West African Prehistory

Abstract

The tempo of prehistoric research in Africa has quickened remarkably during the past decade, necessitating important revisions in our understanding of the archaeological record. Africa's past in general is emerging as more complex, and more instructive from a comparative point of view, than earlier believed. With the more routine application of radiometric dating, old assumptions about chronology have fallen. Earlier it had seemed that Middle and Late Stone Age technologies appeared very late in sub-Saharan Africa compared with analo­ gous Middle and Upper Paleolithic industries in Europe. This apparent lag led Graham C. Clark to declare in 1971 (51, p. 181) that much of Africa during the Late Pleistocene remained a kind of museum in which archaic tradi­ tions continued ... without contributing to the main course of human prog­ ress. Recent dates demonstrate that technological innovations like flake tools produced on prepared cores, punch-struck blades, and burins appear in Africa at about the same time they did in Europe (20,28, 269). Far from remaining a cultural backwater, as Clark further suggested (51, p. 67), it now appears possible that micro lithic technology, pottery, and cattle domestication were indigenous African developments. Improved chronological resolution has also revealed that the pattern of technological change in Africa was frequently mosaic in character. Just as stone-tool using hunter-gatherers continued to inhabit regions subject to settle­ ment by Iron Age farming groups up until this millennium in parts of Africa, so prepared core flake technology may have coexisted alongside backed micro­ lithic technology in the prehistoric past (191). This complex situation is quite different from the more homogeneous pattern of technological change familiar from Europe.