African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction (review)

African Archaeology, part of the Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology series, aims to give undergraduate archaeology students an introduction to sub-Saharan African archaeology and to encourage critical assessment of current archaeological knowledge across a wide range of themes. These span 2.6 million years and most of Africa, excluding the Horn, the Mediterranean, and the Nile Valley. The sub-Saharan focus, acknowledged as regrettable but determined by space constraints, fortunately is not absolute. One cannot discuss the debates around the advent of animal domestication, agriculture, or metallurgy in sub-Saharan African without considering North Africa as a whole. Nevertheless, I think the traditional segregation of sub-Saharan archaeology remains problematic in an introductory text because it reinforces popular notions of isolation as well as the assumption that the histories of the Nile and Sudan somehow are not really African.

Within the stated constraints, this book achieves its main goals admirably. The twenty-three contributing authors (African, European, and North American) are all specialists in their respective fields, with a welcome spread of established senior academics and more recently qualified younger practitioners. The individual chapters are remarkably consistent in tone, which I suspect shows a strong editorial hand, and really do summarize not only vast amounts of information but also the current debates around significance and interpretation of the archaeological record. The themes covered in such detail include the archaeological role of ethnography, Oldowan hominin behaviour, the origins of modern humans, Middle and Later Stone Age societies in southern Africa, the advent of farming, linguistics and the Bantu problem, metallurgy, intensification and urbanism, East African interactions, Central African occupation, the archaeology of the Kalahari, and an overview of two thousand years of West African history. It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive introduction without resorting to an encyclopaedia format.

The references are copious and up-to-date, which will make this a valuable resource for both lecturers and students. The index is comprehensive. Maps of site locations accompany most of the chapters, although they are drawn in diverse styles, and some of them are unforgivably fuzzy. Apart from the maps, the illustrations are sparse for an introductory book, but space constraints must have limited their number. Each chapter has its own list of references, some of them repeated in successive chapters, presumably to enable students to photocopy individual chapters intact. The referencing format is mildly inconsistent, with forenames usually given in full, but sometimes only as initials. A vanity check of references to my own work on metallurgy showed two out of the nine to be erroneous, one with completely the wrong title for the paper! Sloppy referencing sets a bad example to students, and somewhat compromises this otherwise excellent book.

I can recommend this book for its intended readership of (senior?) undergraduate archaeology students, as well as to postgraduates and professional Africanists who seek an authoritative update in their field. It is too dense and sparsely illustrated to engage a lay readership, and it probably requires the prior completion of at least a foundation course in archaeology for its full appreciation.