African archaeology is blossoming. Its perspectives and practices are varied, grounded, and savvy. Recent and on-going projects exhibit impressive breadth and depth. In certain African countries, African institutions and scholars now play key roles in the discipline and in (re)making African history. Contemporary archaeologists are more aware of the need for public engagement in archaeological studies and the social and political contexts of knowledge production. Despite the continent’s size, its remarkable diversity, and its lengthy material record, the relatively small contingent of Africanist archaeologists is better addressing the future of the continent’s past. Their work inspires scholars and generalists alike in their quest to understand the contributions made by Africans to the human condition and story.
This growth in African archaeology spans the discipline’s practices, its ideas, and the substance of its work. Interdisciplinary in nature, African archaeology has the ability to address the continent’s diverse communities and pasts in fundamental ways. This is as true for periods that have left behind other historical evidence (e.g., documents or oral traditions) as it is for eras that have not. Archaeology continues to grow in its relevance to Africans as public interest in cultural heritage peaks. Oddly, in this stimulating climate, the work of Africanist practitioners faces continued peripheralization by fellow archaeologists who work in both the Old World and New World. Updates about archaeology in Africa, including recent approaches and evidentiary findings, are essential given archaeology’s evolving practices and copious new findings. The material “turn” in the social sciences and humanities makes a synthetic review and reappraisal of African archaeology all the more crucial for generalists, specialists, and the next generation of students of Africa.
In The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology the editors, Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane, have compiled seventy chapters by seventy-four expert authors to present an up-to-date survey of archaeology in Africa. This massive volume includes an introduction (part 1), a robust discussion of current theory, method, and practice (part 2), and five sections that engage key topics and evidence (parts 3–7). The latter sections cover the beginnings of humankind and early material culture (part 3), early foragers (part 4), food producers through time (part 5), urban societies (part 6), and global connections in Africa during the last five hundred years (part 7). The Handbook is a new and important guide for present knowledge about the rich and extensive past of Africa and its comparative significance. In the more than one thousand pages of this volume, the interdisciplinary nature of African archaeology is made apparent, time and again. Unlike past compendia of its type, roughly one-third of the volume’s authors work at institutions in Africa or are of African descent. Women scholars and leading junior researchers also are well represented. And in several chapters, contributors consider the role of African worldviews (beyond science) in their interpretations. Black-and-white maps, photographs, line-drawings, and/or graphics accompany most chapters. At thirty pages in length, the index is sizable, although the choice of its entries leaves something to be desired.
Since World War II, only a handful of synthetic volumes or series (in English) have addressed the full scope of African archaeology. Even fewer texts target a general academic audience and an informed readership. Perhaps this is unsurprising. Even single-authored texts that provide an overview of African history—say, Joseph Harris’s Africans and Their History (Plume, 1972) or John Iliffe’s Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge University Press,1995)—minimize the long-term past and archaeological research and misapply or misinterpret certain archaeology terms and findings. Multi-authored texts that stress or include archaeology to a significant degree include the multi-volume (and multi-year) Cambridge History of Africa and the UNESCO General History of Africa as well as Joseph O. Vogel’s single-volume Encyclopedia of Precolonial Africa (Altamira Press, 1997). Other single-volume works, like A History of African Archaeology (Heinemann, 1990), The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns (Routledge, 1993), and Anne Brower Stahl’s African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2004), tend to highlight the historiography and personalities of the discipline, or focus on select topics and/or certain periods, or are more tailored to specialists.
Although comparable works vary in their purpose, organization, emphasis, length, and target audience, these volumes, like The Handbook, share a general interest: discussing the character and role of archaeology and its research outcomes for (re)making Africa’s past from antiquity forward. With the benefit of hindsight, these texts, including the Cambridge History of Africa, are fundamentally flawed, sometimes irretrievably so. They are products of times when archaeology was less well developed, myopic in its almost exclusive focus on deepest antiquity (and evidence of human physical evolution and early technologies), a handmaiden to history (and thus subservient rather than transformative to history), and largely disengaged from the African public and its realities. In addition, the noted compendia or stand-alone volumes tend to be written by non-Africans who, knowingly or in ignorance, inadequately recognized the potential of material culture and evidence from the distant past. As opposed to earlier treatments, the Handbook reflects a fuller range of the archaeological studies done in Africa and their significance for both academic and general readers.
After independence, archaeologists who conducted research in Africa began to shift their gaze. New issues and strategies arose. For instance, in the 1960s the erection of the Aswan High Dam and its anticipated impact on Abu Simbel in Egypt motivated future heritage projects (a trend set to grow exponentially if, as is shortly expected, the World Bank updates its heritage compliance policies). Shortly thereafter landscape surveys in places like Mali integrated and assessed the hinterlands of ancient states, namely Jenne-Jeno, a trend that resonates in current landscape approaches in Senegal, Benin, Eritrea, and Tanzania. Ethnoarchaeology, the interface between the oral and material records, and the study of intercontinental linkages matured as subjects, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. Topics that now receive heightened attention from archaeologists include, but are not limited to, genetic and material links within the continent (and beyond it), the correspondence of shifts in ancient climate and technologies, early symbolic expression, African epistemologies that are evident in patterned residues, the origins and influences of domesticated plants, maritime technologies, slave trades, and the impact of colonialism and capitalism. The application of new environmental, material characterization, dating, and digital technologies bodes well for updated understandings of the human story across places and times in Africa.
This being said, weaknesses and challenges persist in archaeology on the continent. Increasingly archaeologists lack expertise in multiple subregions. The many languages in which scholarly findings are published tend to impede comparative work (e.g., between East and West Africa). In addition, there is an abyss of knowledge concerning the archaeology of less studied countries, like Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, and Swaziland. Of note, the archaeology of African influences on other world regions, including the wider Indian Ocean, deserves focus, as remarked in Peter Mitchell’s previous publication, African Connections: Archaeological Perspectives on Africa and the Wider World (Altamira Press, 2005). These relative voids in our knowledge present significant opportunities, however. As a discipline, archaeology (whether aligned with anthropology, history, or classical studies) has made tremendous strides since the 1950s and 1960s. But there is ample room for it to take new directions and to include African institutions, African scholars, and African intellectual contributions in developing narratives. This potential resonates in the content of the Handbook.
For the most part, the Handbook avoids the shortcomings of similar works. For example, it avoids the artificial (and dangerous) dichotomy between “history” and “prehistory” that plagues former treatments. The editors and most authors also moderate the usual strict insistence on temporal categories which, in more conventional texts, create stark distinctions among people based on their lifeways. Mostly, the legacy of the Three Age System is supplanted by a stress on the dynamic relations among diverse African communities (say, urbanites and hunter-gatherers) that inhabited landscapes at the same time. Mitchell and Lane also acknowledge that Africa’s past is not an unproblematic narrative which science—as divorced from heritage perspectives on the ground—can resolve fully. The essays in part 2 speak to this realization. Finally, multiple chapters engage with concerns that are relevant to African publics: colonial encounters, heritage, and the role of scientific practice in Africans’ daily struggles to prosper.
Several chapters in the Handbook present valuable summaries and stimulating assessments for nonspecialists. Some of the most useful and best developed chapters include those by Arazi and Thiaw (chapter 16), Breen (chapter 15), Breunig (chapter 38), Chirikure (chapter 10), El-Zein (chapter 66), Fleisher (chapter 14), Fuller and Hildebrand (chapter 35), Giblin (chapter 19), Insoll (chapter 12), Lane (chapter 40), Lyons (chapter 7), MacEachern (chapter 5), Mapunda (chapter 42), Monroe (chapter 48), Thiaw and Richard (chapter 68), and Wadley (chapter 25). Lyons’s review of ethnoarchaeology is carefully crafted. In Africa there is a great potential for critical studies of living communities to advance Africanists’ comprehension of past behaviors. For similar reasons, Schmidt (chapter 3) highlights contemporary oral traditions. Elsewhere the chapters by Davies (chapter 49) and Giblin discuss, respectively, African social structures and indigenous perspectives in archaeological narratives. Of note, Giblin’s chapter touches on an array of grand topics, such as colonialist archaeology, indigenous perspectives, and postcolonial practice, and therefore might have been divided into expanded entries on each topic. Curiously, the essays in Peter R. Schmidt’s Postcolonial Archaeologies in Africa (School for Advanced Research Press, 2009)—an edited volume devoted to such topics—receive scant mention in this and other relevant chapters in the Handbook.
The Handbook provides useful summaries of a number of other topics. Breen reviews underwater archaeology, which has tremendous possibilities in South Africa, the western Indian Ocean, and the Red Sea, in particular. The subject of “diasporas”—subjective framings of human itineraries—is balanced against that of “migrations.” This is a welcome development compared to treatments in earlier grand overviews of African archaeology, which tend to represent Africans (or their artifacts or languages) as chess pieces on arrow-filled maps. Breunig’s poignant discussion of food production reminds readers that the “Neolithic package” (the nearly simultaneous appearance of food domesticates, ceramics, and permanent settlement) is not common in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Rather, aspects of the “package” frequently arose and developed independently, often thousands of years apart. Parts 4 and 7 bring North Africa, especially the Nile Valley, as well as the Ottoman Empire (chapter 66), into the general discourse about the continent.
Composing and then integrating topical findings that may span centuries into an eight- to twenty-three-page chapter, as each author does, is not a simple task. Predictably, the quality of the seventy chapters varies. A few essays will overwhelm nonspecialists, and a handful of other contributions are too short, poorly developed, or monotonously descriptive. The separate bibliographies linked to each chapter are respectable and more or less up-to-date, but skewed to scholarship in the English language. Works in French, German, Italian, and Japanese, for instance, are less well-referenced. On the whole, however, two-thirds or more of the chapters are lucid and accessible to a range of readers, including undergraduates.
Additional weaknesses—none fatal—include the volume’s skewed temporal emphasis, topical lacunae, inadequate visual aids, and hefty price. Two sections (parts 5 and 7) contain almost half of the chapters. These chapters, on food and ancient cities and states, respectively, are the strengths of the volume, but they cover a small proportion of the time range of Africa’s archaeology. Earlier periods, stretching back three million years or so, might have received a more extensive treatment for better balance. Gender and “contemporary archaeology” are strangely absent from the Handbook despite being popular subjects in world archaeology today. Even hunter-gatherer communities, like the Sandawe, might have been examined up to recent times and therefore have been included in the chapters that cover the archaeology of the most recent era. In addition, there is scant mention of human–environment interfaces (e.g., including links between iron smelting and climate change), dating techniques, and the substantive ties between Africa and the Indian Ocean. On another front, the inclusion of a chapter exclusively on Africans outside of Africa would have extended nonspecialists’ perspectives on African archaeology beyond the continent’s coastline, emphasizing Africa’s global influence. Although most of the photos and tables among the more than 240 figures enhance the essays, a few maps and line-drawings have errors, lack a scale, are printed too small (e.g., phylogenetic trees), or have uneven contrast and are therefore difficult to read. Finally, the price of the volume (U.S.$195.00) is prohibitive, especially for African institutions, colleagues, and students. To mitigate expense, the editors might have arranged for digital access or, alternatively, offered web features.
Archaeology continues to face serious challenges in Africa. Funding for archaeology is on the decline and most African institutions have minimal access to field and laboratory equipment. Heritage destruction, due to pillaging and development, is another stark reality. Antiquities laws lack policing. Despite these impediments, the Handbook demonstrates the achievements and service of archaeologists to the expansion, transformation, and refinement of knowledge about the continent’s unique and diverse past. It offers a set of authoritative accounts to newcomers, Africanists in other disciplines, and archaeologists unfamiliar with Africa’s record, and it is also an intellectual compendium of value to specialists. It is an accessible overview of African archaeology today.
Much recent research has been done in African archaeology. But there is much more to contribute through collaboration with Africans and fellow Africanists. Within the field, African epistemologies and intangible sources, such as oral traditions, deserve greater attention. Research must be made more available to the African public and to new students. Without a doubt, African archaeology has advanced due to the commitment of its practitioners. The material “turn” in the social sciences and humanities offers promise to African history. The editors and authors of The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology deserve gratitude for their efforts to compile a synthesis of archaeology in Africa to inform and inspire a new generation.
