African Archaeology Research Articles

Current Themes in the Archaeology of East Africa

East Africa boasts one of the longest histories of humankind. From hominid origins to the present, people have roamed, interacted with one another, and influenced the environment in innumerable ways. To teach about the archaeology of East Africa is to engage with the deepest history of humankind, from Hominin evolution to historical archaeology and the archaeology of listening. Each topic has developed its own peculiar and complex analytical methodologies that require varied resources and degrees of intensity and investment in training and mentoring. This review discusses advances made over the past two decades in the research and dissemination of archaeological knowledge about East Africa. Beyond the major issues that stimulate scientific research and debates, what debates have been settled? Which emerging threats must East African archaeologists overcome to ensure a sustained practice of archaeology in the future?

Unveiling Site Visibility: A Study of Farming Communities in the Magaliesberg Region, South Africa

This paper explores the historical and contemporary significance of visibility in human interactions with their environments, particularly in the context of archaeology and the application of geographic information systems (GIS) for visibility analysis. The study highlights the role of visibility analysis in investigating not only the physical visibility of features in landscapes but also the cultural significance associated with seeing or not seeing them. It draws from the ‘visibility relates’ principle, which argues that individuals tend to establish connections with visible entities. The focus is on comparing nineteenth-century urban settlements (Kaditshwene, Molokwane, and Marothodi) in the Magaliesberg region of South Africa, particularly examining the strategic positioning of kraals within these Sotho-Tswana farming communities. These settlements are some of the more popular Late Farming Communities (AD 1300–1840) in South Africa; hence, they have archaeological background and are among the few, if not the only ones, that have LiDAR data coverage. The findings reveal distinctions in visibility at both settlement and household scalar levels, with Kaditshwene standing out as different from Marothodi and Molokwane. This suggests that kraals were strategically located to be more or less visible based on specific settlement circumstances, such as attracting people from other communities and concerns about cattle theft. This study contributes to GIS approaches to archaeological sites and landscapes in Africa and calls for more extensive use of geospatial statistics in African archaeology.

African Archaeology at the Crossroads

African Archaeology at the Crossroads

Decolonising archaeology in South Africa: two decades after the National Heritage Resources Act of 1999

Twenty-four years ago, the National Heritage Resources Act, No. 25 of 1999 (NHRA) was enacted in South Africa. This was a moment of change, when the heritage of those marginalised during the colonial and Apartheid eras would finally be given its rightful place on the national heritage list. There was a sense of optimism amongst politicians that the African past was finally to be recognised in an inclusive and representative future. This was echoed in archaeology, given its central role in uncovering and telling the story of precolonial South Africa. The discipline slowly opened its doors to academics of all ethnic groups and new perspectives were identified. But an examination of the practical consequences and impact of this progressive legislation for transforming officially declared heritage in the past 24 years shows surprisingly little change in the overall body of recognized, listed heritage. Recent studies of transformation in South African archaeology have focussed on institutional transformation; possible transformation of the types and frequency of sites declared as national and provincial heritage sites has not yet been examined. It is this issue which our paper addresses. The paper presents analysis that relies on the South African Heritage Resources Information System (SAHRIS) database covering the period 1936 to mid-2022. Whilst sites associated with European colonialism still predominate, there has been a change in the frequency of types of heritage declared since 1999, with an increase in sites associated with the Black liberation struggle. Yet the list remains very unbalanced, with only a single heritage site connected to the precolonial past of Black South Africans having been declared as a national heritage site since 1999. We discuss and classify the types of heritage declared since 1999 and suggest reasons for the distortion.

Bringing Archaeology to the Classroom and Beyond: The African Archaeology Review

Bringing Archaeology to the Classroom and Beyond: The African Archaeology Review

African Epistemologies and Ontologies: Building a Pathway that Elevates African Ways of Constructing the World as Part of a Future African Archaeology

African Epistemologies and Ontologies: Building a Pathway that Elevates African Ways of Constructing the World as Part of a Future African Archaeology

Training and Collaboration in African Archaeology

Training and Collaboration in African Archaeology

African Archaeology in Support of School Learning: an Introduction

African Archaeology in Support of School Learning: an Introduction

Beyond Colonial Boundaries: Reimagining the Rozvi through Landscapes, Identities and Indigenous Epistemologies

The land, ‘things’/objects, and memory in the form of narratives and metaphors are intricately bound together. They all constitute the iconography of a shared set of ideas, beliefs, feelings, values, practices, and performances that objectify collective identities. Respectively, these complex entangled tangible and spiritual/invisible indices of identities situated in places deserve special archaeological devotion. However, since African archaeology and history remains trapped in Eurocentric colonial metanarratives, indigenous epistemologies and ontologies have somehow remained on the margins of knowledge production processes. This deliberate erasure and silencing continues to impede archaeology’s capacity to explore hidden meanings and values that people imbue to places and landscapes through time. Owing to this setback, multiple precolonial group identities in parts of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, and Mozambique such as Torwa, Twamamba, Rozvi, Singo, and Venda, among others, remain vague and subjectively tied to the archaeology of Butua/Torwa (AD 1400–1644) and Rozvi (AD 1685–1830) state systems. The failure to read the landscape as both a repository of memory and an agent for collective identities continues to compound our archaeological challenges. Against this background, Rozvi oral narratives and the Insiza cluster Khami-phase sites in southwestern Zimbabwe are subjected to renewed scrutiny. Following a critical review of colonial archives and Rozvi traditions, it turned out that instead of contradicting ‘science’, oral traditions actually amplify our reading of the archaeological record, only if handled properly.

Glass in African Archaeology: A New Methodology Offers New Opportunities

Glass in African Archaeology: A New Methodology Offers New Opportunities

David Phillipson: An Illustrious Synthesizer of African Archaeology

David Phillipson: An Illustrious Synthesizer of African Archaeology

African Archaeological Journals and Social Issues 2014–2021

The two waves of reflexivity in archaeology are the identity politics of archaeologists and stakeholder politics. These social issues are considered in this article through the perspective of three African archaeological journals produced from 2014 to 2021. Identity politics is examined through a quantitative analysis of authorship, book reviewing, and the countries covered. I conclude that parity of gender authorship—assuming 61% male and 39% female archaeologists—has been achieved by the African Archaeological Review, Journal of African Archaeology, and Azania. In book reviewing, this is less so. The geographical coverage across the three journals shows lacunae. Stakeholder politics is most visible in book reviews and special issues. Journal ethics and goals and the final topics of open access and other ways of broadening the pool of authors, reviewers, and accessibility are offered.

Iron Age sites in northern Botswana’s Okavango Delta 1: the southern Delta sites Mat82 and Matlapaneng plus Qogana on the region’s eastern margin

ABSTRACT This paper, one of three focused on Early Iron Age (EIA) sites of the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana, provides descriptions and analyses of two sites, Mat82 and Matlapaneng, on the southern margin of the Delta and of a small contemporary hunting-fishing camp at Qogana in its eastern middle reaches. The relationship of these sites to others, particularly in the areas of the confluence of the Chobe and Zambezi Rivers and Victoria Falls, is examined in detail. Pottery recovered from the Delta sites is shown to be a western expression of the eastern Kalundu Tradition. Optical petrographic analyses of 26 sherds from Mat82, Matlapaneng and Qogana compared with 60 sherds from Chobe-Victoria Falls sites, plus clays from most lithological exposures in these regions, confirms that most of the Mat82 and Matlapaneng sherds can be associated with local southern Delta clays, while five have fabrics comparable with Chobe-Victoria Falls clays and sherds, documenting that these Matlapaneng sherds are from vessels made in, and imported from, that region. While the distribution of finds at Matlapaneng displayed a higher concentration of lithic artefacts on the site’s outer margins with a corresponding higher pottery concentration in the centre, all areas have the same representation of lithic tools, débitage, pottery fabrics and décor motifs and proportions of wild game to domestic animals, thus providing no evidence for a herder/hunter or inner/outer space dichotomy in residence or subsistence activities. This trio of sites, then, provides a further lesson regarding the archaeological erasure of mistaken isolationist tenets in southern African archaeology in which peoples have been automatically segregated according to the material inventory of the sites at which they lived.

Emergent complexity and political economy of the Houlouf polity in North Central Africa (1900 BCE-1800 CE)

Long-term socio-cultural change is a non-linear process involving demography, economy, culture, social organizations, symbols and ideas. It is generally marked by succession of social formations with different organizational requirements and “worldviews”. The concept of emergent complexity used in this paper thus refers to the punctuated shift that led to the formation of social ranking and socio-political centralization. Five successive social formations of varying duration have been reconstructed in the ca. 4000 years long development of the Houlouf polity located the Cameroonian portion of the Chadian plain:
 1) – small scattered pastoral-nomadic groups;
 2) – autonomous mixed-farming communities;
 3) – competing and rival peer-polities;
 4) – ranked and centralized polity – Chiefdom in local political terms -; and finally,
 5) – paramount chiefdom – Sultanate in local political lexicon-.
 This paper, anchored on high resolution paleoclimatological data and changes in regional settlement location and distribution, outlines the main steps of that evolutionary process. The dimensions investigated include settlement dynamics, political economy, the production and use of material culture, as well as their connected patterns of exchange from 1900 BCE to 1800 CE. A short review of research on trade in West African archaeology shows that the study of long-distance exchange tends to focus on characterization and provenience analyses of in-coming raw materials and goods. Important as it is such an approach does not provide access to the internal dynamics of the receiving societies. This paper examines the concomitant changes in site-location, flows, distribution, and consumption of long-distance traded items, patterns of craft specialization and production intensification, showing that they were part of interlocked feed-back loops. Evidence of intensification of local production geared to export is systematically documented in their chrono-cultural contexts for the first time. These deviating/amplifying feed-back loops triggered a dynamic that resulted in the emergence of five successive social formations in the Houlouf region ca. 4000 years evolutionary sequence.

On Food, Pots, Gender, Iron, and Archaeological Theory: Interview with Professor Randi Haaland.

Professor Randi Haaland is a Norwegian archaeologist with a distinctive anthropological approach and global research interests. In this conversation, Randi Haaland reflects on her extraordinary and multifaceted engagement with archaeology and Africa for over 50 years, from her formative experience as a young woman among the Fur in Sudan in the mid-1960s, through her research between the processual and post-processual paradigms, to the capacity-building programs she initiated with the support of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). Randi Haaland created her unique path in the archaeology of Africa. This interview shows that it has been the right path towards a novel and in-depth understanding of the human past, especially on food culture, beginnings of food production, gender, and technology.

The emergence of Late Acheulean pattern of bifact production and resharpening (on materials of Hugub locality, 600–500 ka, in Ethiopia)

The Hugub open-air site in Ethiopia well-dated to between 600 and 500 ka yields the earliest securely dated and found in situ Late Acheulean archaeology in Africa. The studied lithic assemblage includes numerous, often diminutive broad-tipped ovate and pointed bifaces, many of which are made on large flakes. These show the earliest evidence of intensive on-site resharpening thru modification and edge rejuvenation as well as the earliest use of the plano-convex method of biface manufacture. This emergent pattern of biface production, maintenance, and discard is typical for the Late Acheulean related to post-erectus Homo, referred to as Homo heidelbergensis (for European forms) or Homo rhodesiensis (for African forms), as well as post-Acheulean industries, and has no analogs among earlier Acheulean populations of Homo erectus.

Savino di Lernia and Marina Gallinaro (Eds.): Archaeology of Africa. Potential and Perspectives on Laboratory & Fieldwork Research

Savino di Lernia and Marina Gallinaro (Eds.): Archaeology of Africa. Potential and Perspectives on Laboratory & Fieldwork Research

Comparing structured light and structure-from-motion modelling techniques at Malapa to determine their utility within the African archaeological context

The development of three-dimensional surface modelling has allowed archaeologist to document sites to a degree not yet possible. Numerous approaches and techniques are currently available, with the two most used techniques being structured light and structure-from-motion. Little research has been done as to which of these two mainstream techniques will have the highest utility within the African archaeological landscape. This study examines these two techniques, by use of the Artec EVA scanner and the Agisoft Metashape photogrammetric software, to determine which of these two systems will be best suited for use within Africa. It was found that, despite the Artec system's generally higher accuracy and quality, the physical limitations of the system as well as associated cost made the use of the Agisoft Metashape system more viable for use within African archaeology.

Distinguishing African bovids using Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS): New peptide markers and insights into Iron Age economies in Zambia.

Assessing past foodways, subsistence strategies, and environments depends on the accurate identification of animals in the archaeological record. The high rates of fragmentation and often poor preservation of animal bones at many archaeological sites across sub-Saharan Africa have rendered archaeofaunal specimens unidentifiable beyond broad categories, such as “large mammal” or “medium bovid”. Identification of archaeofaunal specimens through Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS), or peptide mass fingerprinting of bone collagen, offers an avenue for identification of morphologically ambiguous or unidentifiable bone fragments from such assemblages. However, application of ZooMS analysis has been hindered by a lack of complete reference peptide markers for African taxa, particularly bovids. Here we present the complete set of confirmed ZooMS peptide markers for members of all African bovid tribes. We also identify two novel peptide markers that can be used to further distinguish between bovid groups. We demonstrate that nearly all African bovid subfamilies are distinguishable using ZooMS methods, and some differences exist between tribes or sub-tribes, as is the case for Bovina (cattle) vs. Bubalina (African buffalo) within the subfamily Bovinae. We use ZooMS analysis to identify specimens from extremely fragmented faunal assemblages from six Late Holocene archaeological sites in Zambia. ZooMS-based identifications reveal greater taxonomic richness than analyses based solely on morphology, and these new identifications illuminate Iron Age subsistence economies c. 2200–500 cal BP. While the Iron Age in Zambia is associated with the transition from hunting and foraging to the development of farming and herding, our results demonstrate the continued reliance on wild bovids among Iron Age communities in central and southwestern Zambia Iron Age and herding focused primarily on cattle. We also outline further potential applications of ZooMS in African archaeology.

Nyanga pottery and the Manyika ethnohistory: towards a decolonised archaeology of the Nyanga agricultural complex

Ancient pottery from the Nyanga agricultural complex (CE 1300–1900) in north-eastern Zimbabwe enjoys more than a century of archaeological research. Though several studies dedicated to the pottery have expanded the frontiers of knowledge about the peopling of Bantu-speaking agropastoral societies in this part of southern Africa, we know little about the social context in which the pottery was made, distributed, used, and discarded in everyday life. This mostly comes from the fact that the majority of the ceramic studies undertaken were rooted in Eurocentric typological approaches to material culture hence these processes were elided by most researchers. As part of the decolonial turn in African archaeology geared at rethinking our current understanding of the everyday life of precolonial agropastoral societies, we explored the lifecycle of traditional pottery among the Manyika, one of the local communities historically connected to the Nyanga archaeological landscape. The study proffered new dimensions to the previous typological analyses. It revealed a range of everyday roles and cultural contexts that probably shaped the lifecycle of local pottery in ancient Nyanga.