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Introduction: Current Trends in the Archaeology of African HistoryAuthor(s): Ann B. Stahl and Adria LaVioletteSource: The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 42, No. 3, CurrentTrends in the Archaeology of African History (2009), pp. 347-350Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40646773 .

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International Journal of African Historical Studies Vol. 42, No. 3 (2009) 347

Introduction: Current Trends in the Archaeology of African History

By Ann B. Stahl andAdria LaViolettë*

The 2007 African Studies Association (ASA) meeting in New York marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Association's founding. It was an apt moment to revisit archaeology's contribution to African historical studies, particularly in light of the paucity of archaeological contributions to the Association's annual meetings in the years leading up to its "golden" anniversary. Despite early optimism around the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration in African historical studies, enthusiasm for multidisciplinary perspectives on African history had waned by the closing decade of the twentieth century to the point that historians and archaeologists seemed to look at one another across a gulf created by incompatibilities of sources, temporalities, analytical goals, and theoretical perspectives.1 At the same time, a growing interest in recent decades among archaeologists in the study of colonial processes and the effects of global connections that include the Atlantic slave trade, would seem to reduce the gulf. But as archaeologists who have for decades been involved in projects centered on how the "daily circumstances of life"2 in African villages were transformed through villagers' broader connections, we were puzzled by the apparent inattention of historians to the burgeoning literature on the archaeology of African history. It seemed to us that many scholars of Africa, whether historians, anthropologists, or other social scientists, remained unaware of the topical and theoretical shifts that have taken place in African archaeology in the last decade or two.

It was this that motivated us to organize dual sessions on the Archaeology of African History for the 2007 ASA meetings in New York- one focused on "West African Cultural Dynamics in the Era of Atlantic Connections," chaired by Ann Stahl, and another

* Acknowledgments. Thanks are extended to Jane Guyer, who, as a member of the African

Studies Association Executive Committee, offered early encouragement as we conceptualized the ASA session that led to this collection of essays. Joseph Miller and Thomas Spear offered cogent and thoughtful commentaries on the papers delivered in the ASA session in their capacity as discussants. We also appreciate Michael DiBlasi's enthusiasm around this project, combined with his and our authors' patience as we sought to bring this collection to fruition in the context of busy lives.

*Jan Vansina, "Historians, Are Archeologists Your Siblings?" History in Africa 22 (1995), 369-408; Peter Robertshaw, "Sibling Rivalry? The Intersection of Archaeology and History," History in Africa 27 (2000), 261-86.

2 Vansina, "Siblings," 376.

Copyright ©2009 by the Board of Trustees of Boston University.

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348 Ann B. Stahl and Adria LaViolette

focused on "Eastern and Southern African Political, Cultural and Economic Transformations, AD 800-1900," chaired by Adria LaViolette. We invited our colleagues to reflect on the dynamics of production, consumption, and exchange and to consider the implications of long-standing intercontinental connections for our understanding of African history. We invited papers that highlighted the growing concern with questions of cultural process and the specificity of practice in seeking to understand the ways in which African societies of the last thousand years were enmeshed in, though not wholly determined by, ramifying connections within and outside the continent. We sought contributions that illustrated what archaeologists are learning from a renewed engagement with questions of intercontinental entanglements through conceptual and theoretical perspectives that highlight the role of daily action in the production of culture, and therefore a shift from the study of "culture" to the study of "culture-making practices." We also sought contributions that illustrated how our understanding of historical processes is enriched by a study of things- by attention to continuities and change in material culture systems and techniques of production.3 The resulting sessions brought together a series of mid-career and newly minted professionals to showcase recent archaeological research informed by these perspectives. The papers in this special issue- three centered on West Africa and two on East Africa- are extended and revised versions of those papers.4

A thread that runs through the contributions focused on West African societies is the value of archaeological sources for investigating how societies in interior regions responded to the shifting landscape of exchange that accompanied the rise of the Atlantic trade. Archaeologists working in what Akinwumi Ogundiran terms "areas of near-perfect documentary silences" are well positioned to balance our understanding of inter-regional trade networks with insights into domestic economic systems and intra-regional exchange. Too often, historical claims about domestic economies are extrapolated from nineteenth- or early twentieth-century patterns and projected back in time. In "Material Life and Domestic Economy in a Frontier of Oyo Empire During the Mid- Atlantic Age," Ogundiran uses the micro-history of household and community to explore how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inhabitants of Ede-Ile, a colony of the Oyo Empire, responded to the commercial revolutions of the Atlantic world. Ogundiran attends to the social valuation of Atlantic imports and to the distinctive features of African domestic economies that were linked to, though not fully determined by, Atlantic trade. Key to understanding these ramifying links are cowries, which affected people in the Yoruba hinterlands more than any other Atlantic import. But as Ogundiran demonstrates, people in this hinterland center

3 For a conceptual framing of these issues, see Ann B. Stahl, 'The Archaeology of African History," International Journal of African Historical Studies 42, 2 (2009), 241-55.

4 The sessions included contributions by several archaeologists who were unable to submit revised

papers to this volume because of other commitments. They included Scott MacEachern ("Gagadama and Afterward: The History of Ethnicity in Mandara Ethnoarchaeological Research), Peter Robertshaw ("Glass Beads of Southern Africa and Indian Ocean Trading Networks: New Results from Archaeology"), and Sibel Kusimba ("Vernacular Architecture of Bukusu and Teso of Western Kenya").

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Current Trends in the Archaeology of African History 349

pursued Atlantic trade to further their own projects. Evidence suggests that local elites remained largely indifferent to European imported goods, instead using profits from the slave trade to acquire politically salient goods (specifically horses) from northern neighbors. Local production of ceramics, iron, and cloth thrived in this period, with implications for our understanding of both regional and inter-regional interaction.

A second theme that threads through the papers is the need to balance an understanding of urban contexts with evidence from associated rural ones as a balance to the relatively rich historiography of African towns. To this end, Neil Norman, in "Hueda (Whydah) Country and Town: Archaeological Perspectives on the Rise and Collapse of an African Atlantic Kingdom," uses archaeological data to enlarge our understanding of processes that shaped Hueda' s meteoric rise and fall beyond the restricted vantage point of European traders confined to Savi' s trading lodges. Widespread burning associated with the Dahomean conquest of Hueda resulted in the destruction of interacting villages and towns that provide rich insight into daily life and afford comparative view into rural and urban settlement. Systematic archaeological survey augmented by mapping and test excavation of select locales provides insights into architectural practices, ritual, and practices of craft production that suggest economic integration of settlements of varying scale with one another and into broader Atlantic exchange. As in the Ede-Ile case explored by Ogundiran, Norman argues that the proceeds from participation in Atlantic exchange were steered to local interests, in this case playing an important role in ritual veneration and household protection.

In a similar vein, Natalie Swanepoel's "Every Periphery is its Own Center: Sociopolitical and Economic Interactions in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Ghana," argues the need for more nuanced understandings of the dynamics of decentralized societies on the peripheries of states. Swanepoel argues that site biographies reveal diverse responses to nineteenth-century conditions of uncertainty and go some way in helping to bring into view the complex relations among diverse groups in the so-called "peripheral" areas from which many of the enslaved were derived. Using data from archaeological survey and excavation in Gurunsiland, Swanepoel comparatively explores the occupational histories of three sites occupied at a time when the area was subject to Zaberma slave raiding. The histories of these sites underscore the diverse responses of communities to the pressures of slave raiding and the need to consider these responses in relation to internal as well as external factors.

Like their colleagues working in West Africa, Adria LaViolette and Jeffrey Fleisher demonstrate how anachronistic understandings of settlement and economy derived from later-period sources fall short when compared to archaeological evidence. In "The Urban History of a Rural Place: Swahili Archaeology on Pemba Island, Tanzania, 700- 1500 AD," LaViolette and Fleisher use archaeological data from their research on Pemba Island, Tanzania from the first and early second millennium AD to challenge later historical accounts of Pemba' s role in the Swahili world. The post-fifteenth-century historical sources that cast the island as a marginalized breadbasket to nearby regions such as Mombasa and Zanzibar led to assumptions that this had always been the case, eclipsing

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350 Ann B. Stahl and Adria LaViolette

earlier documentary evidence of cosmopolitan centers on the island. There is now an increasingly rich archaeology-based understanding of the seventh to fifteenth centuries there. The authors marshal three lines of evidence to argue for Pemba's early prominence on the East African coast: the presence of Tumbe, a large, wealthy settlement that never became a major town; the formation nearby of the later town known as Chwaka, which drew in rural populations from its surrounding countryside and became the center of a settlement hierarchy; and evidence for an urbane farming populace at Chwaka that participated in long-distance trading networks, and practiced a long-standing commitment to building elaborate Islamic architecture rather than stone houses.

Paul Lane reminds us that these historical and archaeological scenarios have implications for current practice. In "Environmental Narratives and the History of Soil Erosion in Kondoa District, Tanzania: An Archaeological Perspective," Lane explores how interdisciplinary approaches to ancient landscape use were carried out in this region, to evaluate the severe soil erosion there and what might be done to combat it. He shows how colonial attitudes toward African indigenous practices- in short, that they were ill- informed and destructive to the environment- gave way more recently to a more engaged, bottom-up historical and political ecology, yet with traces of the old narratives still lingering. These entrenched scenarios have provided the backdrop to national policies and foreign development aid, and have great potential to influence rural ways of life. Through an archaeological examination of this region combined with palaeoenvironmental data, Lane shows that soil erosion began some 12,500 years ago. Policies targeting the last century or so of rural practices are therefore missing the mark, and indeed, this interdisciplinary study shows that local populations have long devised successful ways of managing the eroded landscape. Archaeological inquiry can therefore move beyond helping to construct precolonial histories for nation building, to having influence on landscape use and reform.

The projects highlighted here are works in progress and represent a mere sample of ongoing archaeological research relevant to the study of African history.5 Yet as the papers gathered here attest, archaeological research lends depth and complexity to our understanding of Africa's pasts. In a decade's time, we can envision that these projects and those of graduate students now in the process of formulating research programs will have yielded contextually rich, comparative insights into the relationships between coastal and interior, urban and rural settlements, as well as how African societies of recent centuries negotiated the shifting terrain of global connections through material practice. These projects will play a central role in the paradigm shift that Heike Schmidt envisioned in her recent reflection on "The Future of Africa's Past,"6 and as such renew the promise of archaeology's contribution to a multidisciplinary African history.

5 See references in Stahl, "Archaeology of African History," notes 17-20, 31, 37. 6 Heike Schmidt, "The Future of Africa's Past: Observations on the Discipline," History in Africa 34

(2007), 453-60.

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