East African Archaeology: Foragers, Potters, Smiths, and Traders

Preface

Preface East Africa has special meaning for us Homo sapiens. It is, as far as we know, the place where early humans first experimented with the technologies , social relationships, and food-getting strategies that eventually became the survival repertoire of modern people. East Africa, including the present countries of Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, is remarkable for its diversity of environments, languages, economic lifeways, and ethnic groups. How did East Africans shape this diversity over time? This volume’s goal is to impart an appreciation of the many facets of East Africa’s cultural and archaeological diversity over the last two thousand years. It brings together chapters on East African archaeology, many by African archaeologists, who review what is known, present new research, and pinpoint issues of debate and anomaly in the relatively poorly known prehistory of East Africa. In the last chapter,discussant Peter Mitchell,a SouthAfricanist scholar,provides a broader perspective on East Africa by highlighting similarities and differences in problem and process faced by South African prehistorians and historians. Mitchell’s chapter helps to contextualize East African prehistory by focusing it against one of the better-known and researched areas of the continent. It would be difficult indeed to impose common research methods or goals on East Africa’s four-million-year record of human settlement.Thus it is especially difficult to write a book that adequately addresses the region’s research (Robertshaw 1995:55–56). Our volume attempts not to offer a synthesis of the region’s prehistory but to provide examples of current research in later East African prehistory,ethnoarchaeology,and cultural resource management that point to future research directions. Many of these chapters began as papers that were presented in a symposium organized by Chapurukha Kusimba at the 95th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association;several other chapters were solicited in order to provide a more rounded edited volume. The contributions to this volume address five themes: later hunting and gathering groups (Chapters 1 and 2), ethnohistorical and ethnoarchaeological perspectives (Chapters 3 and 4),ironworking and ironworkers (Chapters 5 to 8), cultural resource management (Chapter 9), and the origins of social inequality (Chapters 5, 8, and 10). East Africa is one of few places in the world where foraging lifeways persisted well into the 20th century (Kent 1996). Ethnoarchaeological studies like Mabulla’s work with the Hadzabe, presented here in Chapter 3, can provide testable hypotheses about Stone Age and historic hunter-gatherer adaptations, compared here in Chapter 1. Bower (1991) and Karega-Munene (1996; Chapter 2 here) have recently reexamined East Africa’s complex Neolithic archaeology in the light of ethnoarchaeological work with present-day potters (Herbich 1987; Wandibba, Chapter 4 here). Research into African ironworking has benefited from the intensive study of archaeomaterials as well as ethnoarchaeological study of technology ’s social role (Kusimba and Killick, Chapter 7 here). In light of the urgent need to conserve East Africa’s cultural and wildlife resources, Musiba and Mabulla (Chapter 9 here) advocate better planning and management of cultural and wildlife resources at the community level, combined with the use of sustainable eco- and archaeo-tourism. Investigation into urbanism on the East African coast and the rise of the precolonial kingdoms of the Great Lakes region has weathered a period of anti-colonialist writings and is now contributing to theoretical debates on state formation (Robertshaw 1990). Like the study of agricultural origins, that of state formation may be freed from the “red herring” (Robertshaw, Chapter 10 this volume) of questions of identity and begin focusing on questions of process, especially the role of social power. No longer can state formation in Africa be synonymous with external trade. Early Africanists saw technological change as either an aid to chronology and seriation or the driving force behind culture change. Childs’s (1994) volume on African technology announced that a new approach to technology would emphasize not its determining effects on other levels of culture but its embeddedness within both economic and ideological social domains. This more ethnographic understanding of technology’s role in social life has inspired lithic studies emphasizing environmental adaptation and technological organization, archaeometallurgical approaches to artisanal and technological styles,and approaches to pottery analysis that examine the multitude of influences on pottery style, including social communication and trade relationships as well as ethnicity (Herbich 1987; Karega-Munene 1996).The contributors to this volume are participants in these ongoing revisions of method and theory. East African archaeology bears the stamp of several generations of...