Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

Peter Mitchell, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford; School of Geography, Archaeology
and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.367
Published online: 20 November 2018

Summary
Archaeology’s focus on material culture provides it with unparalleled opportunities to investigate the entire span of
the human past. For periods for which historical records (verbal as well as textual) exist, this includes its ability to
deliver insights into the lives of individuals and communities only partially represented, if at all, in those records. Its
remit ranges from individual sites requiring excavation to surface scatters of artifacts, from upstanding monuments
to entire landscapes. Interpreting archaeological observations depends upon establishing that they are in valid
association with each other and can be accurately dated. In both cases the principles of stratigraphic
superimposition, association, and context are key concerns. While analogies derived from ethnographic data
sustain many archaeological interpretations, individual finds and assemblages of finds are also investigated using a
wide range of scientific and other techniques.

Keywords: archaeology, survey, excavation, landscapes, dating, context, diet, artifact manufacture and use, trade, DNA

Subjects: Archaeology, Historiography and Methods

Archaeology and History

African archaeology and African history have had a long and at times heated relationship. Until
the 1950s, archaeologists were almost exclusively interested in the remoter past of hunter-
gatherers and early hominins, coming to emphasize more recent periods only as the
1
independence movement gathered strength. Debate has focused on several topics. Has
archaeological research on periods informed by historical sources been unduly dominated by the
latter’s expectations and agendas, as in the well-known emphasis in the West African Sahel on
2
excavating historically known sites like Gao or Kumbi Saleh? If “historical archaeology” is to be
recognized as a distinct sub-discipline, should it be restricted to the era of globalization and
3
international capitalism set in motion by Europe’s voyages of discovery? Or should it be
broadened out to encompass all periods and contexts, before and after the 15th century, for which
historical records exist, regardless of how they have been transmitted—via writing, by word of
4
mouth, or in material form? Has African archaeology been handicapped by what some historians
may have considered as an undue dependence on neo-evolutionary thinking (as discussed in
“Primary Historical Sources in Archaeology: Methods” and “Ethnographic Analogy in
5
Archaeology: Methodological Insights from Southern Africa”)?

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

However these debates are resolved, there is widespread recognition that what ultimately
distinguishes the practice of archaeology from other disciplines interested in Africa’s past is its
emphasis on the material—as opposed to the verbal, textual, or biological—residues of human
actions. Most obviously, those residues comprise the artifacts that people made and used in their
daily lives, the remnants of the structures in which they lived, and their own physical remains. In
addition there is everything else that people employed, altered, and ultimately discarded, from
the bones of the animals they ate to the microscopic traces of plants consumed as food or fuel to
chemical changes in the very soils on which they placed their houses, fields, and livestock
enclosures.

Sometimes deliberately, but more often through the gradual accumulation of layers of sediment
via natural processes and human actions, these residues become buried. Failing natural erosion,
they can then only be uncovered via excavation. But archaeology is not just about digging holes in
the ground. The material remains that people create also frequently survive on the surface, from
the coral porites mosques of the Swahili coast to the drystone-walled livestock enclosures and
houses of southern Africa’s highveld to the earthen tumuli of the Sahel. As well as such readily
recognizable architecture for the living and the dead, there may also be evidence of mining,
quarrying, or the production of metals (notably in the form of smelting furnaces and slag). Rock
art, whether in the form of painted shelters and caves, engravings on more open rock surfaces or
boulders, or inscriptions constitutes another major component of the above-ground record in
many parts of the continent. So, too, do other forms of human modification of the landscape,
from constructing field systems, terraces, and trackways through safeguarding sacred forests and
groves to evidence of how people’s activities have altered whole ecologies by cutting down trees,
cultivating fields, grazing their livestock, or hunting apex predators and key ecosystem
6
engineers.

Even this quick overview makes clear how broad archaeology’s purview is and the scale of the
challenge that it sets itself. Often met by drawing analogies between societies of the present and
those of the past (see “Ethnographic Analogy in Archaeology: Methodological Insights from
Southern Africa”), that challenge is all the greater when recognizing that ultimately what
archaeologists seek to do is, in the words of David Clarke, to recover “unobservable . . . behaviour
patterns from indirect traces in bad samples”: unobservable because for lack of a time machine
they cannot directly see what people did; indirect because those traces were rarely intended to
convey the information that they seek; and bad because of the many processes that intervene
between what once existed in the past and what survives to be located and recovered in the
7
present. Identifying those processes and accounting for their effects in determining what
survives and what does not and how archaeological deposits form (something archaeologists
generally term “taphonomy”) is a critical part of any analysis (see discussion in
“Archaeozoology: Methods”).

This article examines how archaeologists working in Africa recover and make sense of those
8
traces, though for lack of space it does not review the theoretical frameworks they use. It also
introduces all of the other articles included in the Archaeological Methods and Sources section of
the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History <http://africanhistory.oxfordre.com/> so that
readers can better grasp where those contributions fit within the broader scope of archaeological

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

activity in Africa as a whole. The article begins by reviewing how archaeological sites are found
and documented, whether by excavation or through the study of upstanding monuments and
landscapes. Because bringing order to the past is essential for its study, it next considers how
archaeologists order their material chronologically and spatially, stressing the importance of
“context” and “association”. It then introduces some of the key approaches archaeologists
employ to answer such basic questions as: How were African societies organized? In what kinds of
environment did they live? What foods did they eat and what tools did they use? How were these
made and obtained? What were people like physically, and what contacts did they have with
others? How did they construct a sense of identity for themselves as individuals and
communities, whether in terms of gender (see “The Archaeology of Gender in Sub-Saharan
Africa”), age, ethnicity, descent, or any other parameter? Archaeologists’ answers to these
questions hold importance for all aspects of Africa’s past, particularly those out of reach of
written or remembered histories by reason of their antiquity or those whose histories focus on
politics and the concerns of the elite few rather than the day-to-day lives of the many (see
“Documenting Precolonial Trade in Africa” and “Primary Historical Sources in Archaeology:
Methods”).

Locating Sites

Although some sites of archaeological interest (e.g., Great Zimbabwe) may be obvious, the
9
majority are not and require systematic search if they are to be identified. Previous work in an
area, consultations with local communities, and references in historical sources are all potential
sources of information, but in many cases systematic field survey is required in order to find and
record as wide a range of sites as possible. For reasons of time and cost archaeologists typically
select parts of their overall study area for intensive examination. Although not always used,
probabilistic sampling techniques allow the results obtained from that sample to be generalized
to the wider region with a quantifiable degree of confidence. Variables thought relevant to the
past societies in question—for example, topography and ecology—can be used to “stratify” a
sample, combining the benefits of random selection with prior knowledge when selecting the
areas to be searched.

Typically, those areas are inspected on foot (but sometimes from vehicle or even horseback),
recording the position, context, and content of such traces of past human activity as may be
present using maps, GPS technology, photographs, and predesigned forms intended to produce
data of comparable quality across all sites. Traversing linear transects set across a region’s
environmental grain may be particularly productive as they are, in principle, easy to lay out and
follow, will intersect a range of ecological variability, and require less movement back and forth
than visits to multiple individual sampling locations within the same area. On a very large
geographical scale development projects such as the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline provide a
10
special case of such transects over hundreds of kilometers. However, all over Africa
archaeological fieldwork is increasingly undertaken where infrastructural projects (dams,
pipelines, roads, housing developments, etc.) are located, rather than because of purely research
11
considerations.

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

Pedestrian survey is far from the only way of finding sites. Aerial photography, for example,
played a major part in detecting stone-built settlements of the 2nd millennium AD in South
12
Africa’s Free State province in the 1960s. A decade later Jim Denbow realized that in eastern
Botswana farmer villages could be picked out from the air as dense, lighter-colored stands of
13
African foxtail grass (Cenchrus ciliaris) growing in dung-enriched former cattle enclosures.
Today, satellite imagery and other forms of remote sensing (such as airborne laser scanning),
including Google Earth, provide new means of locating sites ahead of ever entering a region.
Recent examples include further work on the distribution of stonewalled structures on South
Africa’s highveld, mapping of Garamantian and early Islamic settlements in the Libyan Sahara,
14
and detection of Holocene shell middens on the coast of Eritrea. Documenting sites in areas of
conflict as part of efforts to mitigate damage from looting and other forms of vandalism, an
15
increasing problem across North Africa, in particular, also draws on remote sensing techniques.
Offshore, however, exploration of shipwrecks, an important source of evidence for
intercontinental contact and trade, continues to focus largely on already known wreck sites and
16
harbors or to depend upon serendipitous discoveries.

Whether on land or under the water, archaeologists select only some sites for excavation and even
in these cases less intrusive forms of on-site reconnaissance normally come first. The techniques
involved are numerous and at their most basic involve planning whatever may be visible at the
surface and locating, identifying, and—in some cases—removing for more detailed study visible
scatters of ceramics, stone tools, or other artifacts. On thickly stratified sites, such as those found
in West Africa’s Sahel, however, such material may only reflect the most recent periods of
occupation, with older levels left unrepresented. Various forms of subsurface detection can be
used to get around this or to explore sites that are otherwise beyond the archaeologist’s reach. At
Jenné, Mali, for example, a densely built-up town of more than 30,000 people, coring was used to
17
access ceramics, datable charcoal, and other finds at multiple locations across the site.

Geophysical survey is also increasingly common, although the availability of what is typically
costly equipment still disproportionately favors its deployment north of the Sahara. Several
techniques exist, notably magnetometry, fluxgate gradiometry, and electrical resistivity survey.
They vary in the speed with which they can be applied, the depths they can reach (1 to 0.3–1.5 m,
but much deeper in the case of ground-penetrating radar), and the kinds of features they can
detect (brick, fired clay floors, potsherd concentrations, smelting furnaces, ditches, pits etc.). A
recent review emphasizes their complementarity, along with the (perhaps obvious) fact that best
results will come where, as at the Swahili town of Songo Mnara, Tanzania, they are integrated
18
with studies of surface artifact distributions and geochemical analyses of soils.

Excavation

Confirmation of what is below the surface and access to it on more than the most limited scale
can, however, come only from excavation. In this sense digging remains a fundamental part of
the archaeologist’s toolkit. Several principles are key, foremost among them once again the
necessity of keeping as detailed a set of records as possible given that the removal of
archaeological deposits necessarily entails their destruction. Insofar as future researchers can

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

replicate any particular excavation, this depends entirely on the quality of the plans, drawings,
photographs, written records, and—sometimes—video recordings made during the original
fieldwork. Collectively, such records provide the context of the finds made, that is, the specific
patterns of physical association relating them to each other and to the sediments in which they
were found. Finds without context may still be informative, but their scientific significance is
inevitably compromised by the lack of data regarding where and with what they were found; the
majority of the well-known terracotta figurines from Mali’s Inland Niger Delta or Nigeria’s Jos
19
Plateau are cases in point and underline the destruction of information that looting entails.

Along with context and association, stratigraphy is a third essential principle of excavation. Put
simply, archaeological deposits build up in sequence, with younger layers lying above those that
are older in date. The archaeologist’s task is to differentiate between those layers and to remove
them in the reverse order to that in which they formed. Differences in the color and texture of
sediments provide the basis for distinguishing between one layer and another, aided in some
cases by traces of surviving architecture (brick, mudbrick, or stone walls, daga, stone, or gravel
floors) in some sites. Where differences in the soil cannot be discerned, or where natural
stratigraphic layers are considered too thick to maintain adequate control, arbitrary horizontal
“spits” may be used instead. Varying in depth between as little as 2 cm and as much as 10 cm in
modern excavations, their use should always be a matter of last recourse to avoid conflating finds
from different sedimentary contexts. However, the ease with which spits can be employed
compared to the slow teasing out of complex stratigraphic relationships has meant that they have
often been used much more widely than is ideal, with an inevitable loss of contextual control.

If stratigraphy and—where necessary—spits provide control in the vertical dimension, then a

metric grid mapped in relation to a fixed datum point underpins it horizontally. Minimally, such
grids can locate finds to within a single square meter or less (for example, a 0.5 x 0.5 m quadrant).
However, modern technology provides ways of rapidly recording the precise location of
individual finds in three dimensions in ways unimaginable just a couple of decades ago using such
technologies as a Total Station. It and similar devices have also facilitated larger scale, open-plan
exposures of archaeological horizons, not least where architectural remains able to provide a
spatial framework for excavation are absent; one important consequence for many urban sites
has been the recognition of more ephemeral buildings and of the social importance of open
20
spaces between structures.

Rarely, if ever, can—or should—archaeological sites be excavated in their entirety; logistics,

funding, and ethics all counsel against this. They must therefore be sampled in ways that attempt
to explore as representative a range of locations as possible. Sieving deposits enhances the
recovery of smaller finds, such as beads or rodent dentitions that may be invaluable as evidence of
past trade or environmental conditions once identified. However, sieving (screening) was far
from universally employed in the past, and its effectiveness varies enormously depending on the
mesh sizes employed and on whether water is used to help break down sediments, something
that is not always feasible. Taking samples with specific aims in mind can further enhance the
comprehensiveness of what is recovered, for example the soil samples intended for
morphological, geochemical, and phytolith analyses to investigate the use of space in domestic
21
and public areas at Songo Mnara. But whatever combination of strategies is employed, they

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

need to be fully documented, especially with regard to whether sieving has been used (and with
what size of mesh) and to any decisions not to keep—or analyze—everything found. Older
excavations frequently failed to do this, compromising their ability to answer questions posed
using newly invented methodologies and different research agendas.

Rock Art and Other Monuments

What is sometimes referred to as the “built” component of the archaeological record provides
opportunities for learning about the past that do not require excavation. Once found through
regional survey projects, rock art sites, for example, are typically documented using a
combination of written records with photography and/or tracing. Although it is an exaggeration
to claim that photography is in some sense more “objective,” it undoubtedly has the advantage of
speed, allowing more images and sites to be recorded in a given span of time. New digital
enhancement techniques allow details of now-faded images to be seen much more clearly,
22
revealing important new information. Tracing, on the other hand, while slow and requiring
considerable experience, can identify subtleties that escape the camera. Scientific advances across
a range of fields allow micro-sampling of individual painted images to deliver an increasing
wealth of information about the pigments used to make them, the inclusion in them of ritually
23
significant substances of plant or animal origin, and the date at which they were created. Rock
engravings, on other hand, remain much more difficult to date except by content and context. As
to what rock art meant, archaeologists can, in some areas, draw upon the ethnography of the
descendants of those who made it, or that of their relatives: Bushman (San) rock art in southern
Africa is the best known example of this (“Ethnographic Analogy in Archaeology: Methodological
Insights from Southern Africa”; “The Archaeology of Gender in Sub-Saharan Africa”), although
even here alternative—or, more accurately, complementary—perspectives exist, emphasizing,
among other topics, considerations of gender, the spatial organization of images, and the
behavior of the animals depicted (see “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Precolonial Sub-Saharan
24
African Farming and Herding Communities” and “Researching Rock Art: Methods”). Beyond
southern Africa, ethnographically grounded understandings of rock art have been advanced in
Zambia/Malawi (for Chewa initiation ceremonies and secret societies, see “The Archaeology of
Gender in Sub-Saharan Africa), Uganda, and Kenya/Tanzania (Maa cattle brands and shields), but
convincing explanations of meaning that go beyond speculation are still lacking in other areas,
25
such as the Sahara. There, phenomenologically influenced interpretations focusing on how rock
26
art was materially constituted and experienced offer a new way forward.

Other “built” aspects of the archaeological record invite different interpretive strategies.
Monumental architecture, for example, can be approached through formal analyses of spatial
structure that explore its potential for movement and visibility. At the Swahili town of Gede,
Kenya, this has shown how the so-called “palace” complex underwent a series of changes
27
reflecting shifting concerns regarding privacy, accessibility, and control of access. Though their
28
study is informed by known Swahili uses of space, it does not depend upon them. Other
approaches to the “built” record rest more heavily upon claims of continuity between the
archaeological past and the ethnographic present or historic records. Tom Huffman’s
interpretation of the organization of space at Great Zimbabwe and other stonewalled, elite-linked

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

settlements of the Zimbabwe Culture is perhaps the best-known example, but is contested by
other researchers, in part because of concerns that it does not readily allow for changes in how
individual sites grew and developed over time (“Primary Historical Sources in Archaeology:
29
Methods”).

Archaeological Landscapes

Archaeological sites do (did) not exist in a vacuum, but rather within a landscape minimally
comprising themselves, the relations between those living at them, and the physical environment
in which they and those relations are (were) embedded and expressed. That environment,
moreover, is (was) not merely a set of resources (firewood, plant foods, animals, soils, etc.) that
people exploit(ed), but also a complex system of ideas conferring meaning on and attributing
history to specific features within it (hills, lakes, streams, rivers, forests, etc., as well as humanly
made or modified monuments). Landscapes, then, are material manifestations of the relationship
between humans and the environment, the perspective, in other words, of historical ecology and
one that explicitly recognizes how humans transform and alter the settings in which they live
(“Interactions between Precolonial Foragers, Herders, and Farmers in Southern Africa”;
“Primary Historical Sources in Archaeology: Methods”; “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
30
Precolonial Sub-Saharan African Farming and Herding Communities”).

Archaeologists have explored these ideas in several ways. One involves joining hands with
palaeoenvironmental scientists to emphasize the recovery of evidence that speaks to how
landscapes and the ecological communities associated with them have changed over time
(“Paleoenvironmental Science: Methods”): geomorphological work, studies of soil profiles, and
retrieval of cores from wetland settings suitable for pollen analysis may all be involved here, as
exemplified by projects in Tanzania that have revealed much more complex interactions between
people’s farming, herding, and iron-smelting activities, climate change, and ecological
31
succession than official colonial or postcolonial emphases on human destructiveness suggested.
Other studies have placed greater emphasis on the ritual and sacred aspects of landscapes, for
example in investigating Talensi shrines in northern Ghana, or the ways in which the inhabitants
of the Hueda kingdom in southern Bénin constructed and maintained shrines as places of
32
veneration and political action that helped bind them together. Investigating how people
deliberately set out to alter the environment in which they lived in order to enhance agropastoral
production represents a third concern, most clearly evident perhaps in investigations of the
irrigation systems at the Tanzanian site of Engaruka and the agricultural terraces of Zimbabwe’s
Nyanga Highlands, but they are far from alone, as work on South Africa’s Bokoni Escarpment or
33
in Kenya’s Pokot and Marakwet regions readily shows (“Archaeozoology: Methods”). All these
projects combine historical and ethnographic research with careful archaeological mapping,
survey, and excavation, along with attempts at reconstructing past environmental conditions.

Though not unique to archaeology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) finds increasing
application in all these endeavors. GIS offers a way of acquiring, storing, manipulating,
interrogating, and displaying a wide range of spatial information, including the production of
maps and the statistical analysis of data. GIS also provides a highly versatile means of combining

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

archaeological evidence with information about environmental variation and can directly
incorporate information on site and find locations obtained using GPS technology and Total
34
Stations. Examples include: analysis of spatiotemporal patterning in the location of hunter-
gatherer activities in South Africa’s Seacow Valley over the past 700,000 years, a study drawing
on almost 14,000 individual sites; investigation of the placement (for enhanced conspicuousness
and visibility) of DGB sites with their associated stone walls, platforms, and terraces in
Cameroon’s Mandara Mountains; and definition of tourist access to rock art sites in Libya’s
35
Acacus Mountains. Combining GIS with remote sensing data to explore environmental
influences on archaeological site distributions may prove particularly valuable, especially where,
36
as in Libya, physical access is difficult.

A Matter of Time

One of the pioneers of precolonial African history, Roland Oliver, once declared that what
37
archaeologists could offer him and his colleagues was “dates.” Even in the 1960s, of course,
archaeology was more than a mere calendrical handmaiden of history, but setting what it
discovers in temporal sequence remains a fundamental concern. Without a sound chronology, in
short, there can be no convincing interpretation of the African past. How do archaeologists tackle
this challenge (“Primary Historical Sources in Archaeology: Methods”)? At the level of the
individual site, the principles of stratigraphic superimposition and association remain key:
individual features and layers of sediment are deposited and created one above the other with the
youngest on top, and items found together are—in the absence of evidence of disturbance—
presumed to belong together. A third basic tool is seriation, that is, the ordering of assemblages
of artifacts by changes in their attributes. Most frequently for those periods of principal interest
to historians, this involves the decoration applied to pottery, and its application has been a
mainstay of ceramic analysis across Africa and beyond. However, seriation per se does not tell us
the direction in which a sequence of changes is to be read (though stratigraphy and association
may) nor the rates at which the changes identified happened. Indeed, with all three principles we
are left only with a relative chronology that says nothing about how old any part of a given
sequence is. For that, additional information is required.

One means of placing archaeological materials in absolute time is to use what is known as cross-
dating, in other words the presence in an archaeological assemblage of items that are, within
limits, already known to be of a certain age. Given the very limited use of writing in sub-Saharan
Africa only rarely will such items carry an absolute date of their own, though examples exist, such
38
as the early second-millennium Islamic tombstones from Gao in Mali. Much more commonly,
archaeologists work with objects such as pottery made in chronologically well-defined contexts
beyond Africa and subsequently imported to the continent through complex systems of trade and
exchange (“Documenting Precolonial Trade in Africa”). Blue-on-white Chinese porcelain, for
example, of the reign of the Ming emperor Hongzhi (1488–1521) found at Great Zimbabwe
39
confirms that the site continued to be occupied into the sixteenth century. While we cannot be
sure precisely when such porcelain reached Great Zimbabwe or was deposited there, we do know
that it cannot have been before the end of the 1400s, that is, its presence serves as a terminus post

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quem—a date after which—for the context in which it was found. Conversely, a late-19th-
century copper percussion cap in undisturbed deposits at the surface of Volstruisfontein rock
shelter, South Africa, provides a terminus ante quem—an upper age limit—for the glass beads and
other items of European manufacture left there by the site’s post-contact Bushman
40
inhabitants. Glass beads can themselves, of course, carry chronological information, although
the temporal boundaries associated with specific types or production centers are often broader
41
than those for pottery. So, too, do the clay tobacco pipes found at many 17th- to 19th-century
42
centers of European trade and settlement along the African coast.

Advances in physics and chemistry have produced many techniques now able to give tolerably
precise absolute ages to a wide range of materials (“Scientific Dating Methods in African
43
Archaeology”). Note, however, the adverb “tolerably” because in all cases the “absolute” ages
obtained will be accompanied by a standard error and must actually be understood as a statement
of probability rather than as a direct equivalent to the calendrical age inscribed on a coin or in a
text. Discussion of what is by far the most widely used technique—radiocarbon dating—will
make this clear.

In very simple terms, radiocarbon dating depends upon the fact that while alive all organisms
acquire carbon from their environment in the form of food (carbon dioxide for use in
photosynthesis in the case of plants). But there are, in fact, three isotopes of carbon, one of which
14
( C) is radioactive. Because carbon is continually being absorbed, the ratio between it and the
12 14
most common isotope, C, remains constant during life, but changes after death as C atoms
continue to undergo radioactive decay and transform into atoms of nitrogen. Knowing the ratio of
12 14
C to C in the atmosphere when an organism was alive, the rate at which decay occurs, and the
14
amount of C remaining in an organic sample, it is thus possible to calculate when that sample
14
ceased to absorb C, that is, when it died. For example, a seed of pearl millet (Pennisetum
glaucum) from the site of Karkarichinkat, Mali, has been dated using the radiocarbon method to
4011±33 years BP (Before Present, a conventional baseline equivalent to AD 1950, the year after
44
the technique was invented). Given unavoidable uncertainties involved in the measurement
process, what this means is that this seed has a 68.2 percent probability of being between 4044
and 3978 years older, and a 95.4 percent probability of being 4077 to 3945 years older, than AD
1950.
14
In fact, matters are not so simple given that the quantity of C in the atmosphere, and thus
available to living plants and animals, has not remained constant over time. Radiocarbon “dates”
are thus not expressed in true, solar years, but must instead be calibrated in order to convert
them to calendrical ages. Several calibration curves exist and are available online
(e.g.,OxCal <https://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/oxcal/OxCal.html>), being based for the last 10,000 years or
so primarily on dating the annual growth rings in certain tree species. In the case of our Malian
millet seed, calibration shows that it has a 95.4 percent probability of having formed and been
harvested between 2620 and 2467 BC, an “absolute” time span of almost 200 years. Though this
may seem a large range, within individual site sequences and across them it is possible to narrow
this by using Bayesian statistics, a methodology that is being increasingly applied. Also
increasingly common are detailed reassessments of the reliability of existing sets of dates that

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

take into account variation in the quality of the materials dated and the techniques used to
remove potential contaminants before dating, as well as the size of the associated errors. Much
more work of this kind is likely in the near future as archaeologists exploit the growing numbers
of radiocarbon dates to assess large-scale spatial and temporal trends in cultural processes such
45
as the spread of food production, pottery, and metallurgy.

Another important development has been the increasing application of Accelerator Mass
12 14
Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating. Instead of estimating the ratio of C to C by the
14
number of C atoms that decay over a given time, this directly counts those that are present. The
result is that, as with the Karkarichinkat millet seed, much tinier samples can be dated than was
once the case. One important advantage of this is that it is often now possible to obtain an age for
what one wishes to know rather than having to assume that that event is correctly associated with
the material (typically charcoal) being dated. For example, AMS dating of several sheep bones
from sites in South Africa showed that in most cases they were several hundred years younger
than the deposits in which they had been found, that is, that they were out of context and not
correctly associated with the charcoal-based radiocarbon dates with which they had previously
46
been linked, rendering them irrelevant to determining when sheep first entered that region.
Conversely, AMS dating of a cow horn core from northwestern South Africa established the
47
presence of cattle there several centuries earlier than was once thought.

For the historian, what this means can be summarized in a few brief statements: radiocarbon
dating can be applied to anything that is organic, with short-lived organisms providing the
tightest possible dating and charcoal—usually ubiquitous on most archaeological sites—a highly
suitable material; its wide applicability makes it the basis of most archaeological chronologies in
Africa for the past 40,000 years; individual dates are less dependable than broad patterns if
contamination or context are in question; they are also always probability statements, not precise
calendrical ages; it is essential to be clear whether one is citing calibrated or uncalibrated ages
and what calibration program has been used; and the original “raw” determination, standard
error, and identifying laboratory code should always be provided alongside any calibrated age
because calibration programs are subject to continual revision.

What has been said of radiocarbon dating applies in general terms to many of the other dating
techniques that can provide ages for archaeological finds in absolute time. Over the time spans of
interest to most historians two, in particular, are important in Africa: thermoluminescence (TL)
and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). The first measures the amount of energy trapped in
the lattice structure of crystalline materials (typically clay) as radioactive elements decay. As
heating those materials above 500˚C releases that energy as light (hence the term
“thermoluminescence”), the effect of firing pottery or otherwise baking clay (for example, in a
house floor) is to reset that clock to zero; subsequent measurement of the energy accumulated by
reheating the sample in a laboratory allows the time elapsed since the first heating to be
estimated. Though less widely used than radiocarbon, TL has proved important in dating West
African terracotta figurines and statues for which contextual information is often lacking,
48
including those from the Jenné area of Mali. Potsherds, burnt stone, and fired clay crucibles
49
have also been dated, for example to provide a chronology for glass production at Ife, Nigeria.

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OSL dating works in a similar way, but dates minerals that have been exposed to light, rather than
heat, with sunlight acting as the trigger for “resetting the clock.” As with TL, measurement of
background radiation at the site concerned is essential, as is avoiding any possibility of
contamination from potentially mixed sedimentary environments; more so than for radiocarbon
dating, samples therefore frequently need to be taken by specialists. Average values derived from
measuring multiple quartz grains from individual sediment samples are preferable to bulk
sampling in order to identify and discard aberrant grains whose presence may reflect post-
50
depositional mixing of sediments of different age. Compared to TL, however, OSL has thus far
found most of its applications either in the Pleistocene or in dating geomorphological features,
such as sand dunes or flood deposits. OSL dating of sediments containing stone tools at Lakaton’i
Anja rock shelter, Madagascar, to the 2nd and 3rd millennia BC is an outstanding example to the
contrary, because it documented a wholly unsuspected human (hunter-gatherer, presumably ex-
African) presence on the island millennia before its settlement by Austronesian-speaking
51
farmers from Southeast Asia.
14
One final point is worth making. Because of fluctuations in C production in the upper
atmosphere, there have been moments at which the radiocarbon calibration curve is essentially
“flat.” At such times a single radiocarbon determination may cover several hundred actual years,
rendering it impossible to use radiocarbon to produce a precise chronology. One such “plateau”
inconveniently falls midway through the mid-1st millennium BC, exactly the time at which iron-
smelting seems likely to have been adopted in parts of West and East Africa. Pinpointing where
and when metallurgy came into use will therefore demand much greater use of alternative
techniques like TL and OSL that can be applied directly to ancient furnaces instead of having to
work with unacceptably broad estimates based on dating charcoal of uncertain age and
52
association. Dating of more recent iron-smelting furnaces in Swaziland exemplifies the
53
potential of these other methodologies.

The Spatial Organization of African Cultures

As well as ordering their material in time, archaeologists also devote considerable efforts to
ordering it in space. Here, the concept of “culture” (sometimes replaced by “tradition” or
“industry”) is key. Archaeologists have used it to group together sites with recurring associations
of similar artifacts within definable geographical areas (“Primary Historical Sources in
Archaeology: Methods”). Typological classification of pottery, an inherently plastic material
offering endless opportunities for variation in shape, size, and decoration, forms the basis for
many of these groupings (see “Ceramics, Foodways, and Consumption: Methods” and “Pottery
chaînes opératoires as Historical Documents”), but other forms of material culture have also been
employed, including stone tools and patterns of settlement organization. Often, the groupings
thus defined have been assumed to equate to an ethnically or linguistically definable “people,”
one often identified with entities known from ethnographic, historical, or linguistic evidence.
Older archaeological literature, in particular, was prone to such equations, in part because of a

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

wish to contribute to broader historical debates in the absence of much explicitly archaeological
evidence: repeated efforts to correlate different cultural groupings in East African prehistory with
54
various Cushitic- and Nilotic-speaking populations offer one illustration.

Several caveats are in order, however. First, emphasizing the creation of “types” to which
artifacts are assigned, while providing a ready means of recognizing similarities at the grand
scale, obscures variation and change within those types themselves, particularly in attributes
55
deemed unimportant. Second, definitions of archaeological cultures inevitably incorporate a
degree of arbitrariness based on the criteria and starting point chosen; using different criteria
56
and different assemblages as the basis for comparison generates different results. Third, the
assumption that the degree of interaction between human groups—and thus the likelihood of
their belonging to the same “people”—straightforwardly mirrors the degree of similarity in their
artifacts does not always hold, any more than the assumption that artifacts reflect ethnic identity.
Ian Hodder’s work among the Tugen, Pokot, and Njemps communities of Kenya’s Lake Baringo
Basin unambiguously showed instead that clear boundaries might not be matched by a lack of
interaction, that identities, while springing from shared histories and cultural norms, are
malleable, and that people actively use material culture according to their needs and
circumstances (“Ceramics, Foodways, and Consumption: Methods”; “Pottery Chaînes Opératoires
57
as Historical Documents”; “The Archaeology of Gender in Sub-Saharan Africa”). Ever since,
archaeologists have increasingly recognized that the stylistic identities they define “may not
necessarily correspond to other linguistic, ethnic, or social models” and that people frequently
draw instead upon common and long-standing shared systems of symbols to express multiple,
58
variable, often situationally fluid identities. Even in southern Africa, where ethnographic data
do support a close correspondence between settlement pattern, beadwork, and ceramic design,
most of the archaeological groups recognized likely equate to large-scale linguistic groupings
rather than specific polities, and other approaches to understanding ceramic variation are
59
increasingly being explored. The takeaway message for non-archaeologists? Be aware that
archaeologically defined entities reflect particular theoretical and methodological trajectories
60
that demand critical questioning, rather than direct transference into ethnic or other identities.

Analyzing Archaeological Finds

A short introductory article like this leaves little scope for a comprehensive assessment of the
kinds of artifacts and other remains of past human activity that archaeologists may recover in
excavation or from surface collections. Thus, no more than a sample of the kinds of research
domains that perhaps command (and merit) greatest attention is presented here. That no one
individual is likely to be competent in more than one or two of those domains underlines the
overwhelming importance of multidisciplinary research in tackling almost all archaeological
fieldwork or post-excavation projects (for example, “Interactions between Precolonial Foragers,
Herders, and Farmers in Southern Africa”; and “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Precolonial
Sub-Saharan African Farming and Herding Communities).

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One of the things of which we can be certain is that people in the past had to eat. Analysis of plant
and animal remains is one way through which information about their diet can be obtained
(“Archaeobotany: Methods”; “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Precolonial Sub-Saharan African
Farming and Herding Communities”; “Archaeozoology: Methods”). Bones, for example, when
carefully analyzed with the benefit of a comparative reference collection will identify the species
present at a site, something to which newly evolving techniques capable of identifying species-
specific proteins (ZooMS proteomics) or ancient DNA will increasingly contribute (for example,
61
by documenting the earliest evidence for ivory trading in southern Africa). Calculating the
relative importance of different taxa is less easy. Of two commonly used measures, the Number of
Identified Specimens (NISP) does not take account of differences in the number of skeletal parts
between species, bone fragmentation, or whether animals arrived at a site whole or already
butchered (in which case some bones may have remained at the kill site). Conversely, while the
Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI) needed to account for the bones present avoids the risk of
counting the same specimen twice, it exaggerates the importance of rare taxa and again does not
address the question of how the remains arrived. Calculations of available meat weight (which
may be affected by age, sex, and cultural preferences regarding edibility) also require careful
evaluation. Moving beyond the realm of calculation, an animal’s age at death may—in
conjunction with a clearly defined breeding season—allow its time of death (and thus the season
62
of a site’s occupation) to be defined. Analysis of age/sex patterns across an assemblage can
suggest whether certain kinds of animals were selectively hunted or, for livestock, kept primarily
63
for meat or dairy production. Cut marks on bones can in turn identify how animals were
64
butchered and processed, not only for food, but also for products such as leather.

Plant remains usually survive far less well, partly because plant tissues are often less resistant to
the ravages of time, partly because plants contain fewer inedible residues (cf. bone, horn, teeth).
Being smaller and less obvious to begin with, plant remains are also more difficult to recover
from excavation, especially without using flotation or wet-screening deposits. Tubers, roots, and
other soft tissues may be particularly difficult to retrieve relative to seeds, though even these
65
often survive poorly in tropical African soils. In hyperarid conditions, however, as in Roman
and Islamic ports on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, preservation may be excellent, and carbonized
remains also often survive well, along with the impressions left on the surface of pottery by seeds
and grains when it was fired; one of the earliest investigations of sub-Saharan cereal
66
domestication (at Dhar Tichitt, Mauritania) depended almost entirely on their analysis.
Phytoliths—microscopic silica bodies found in plant cells—also survive well and have the added
virtue of being produced in large numbers. Perhaps the best-known example of their application
to recent African history is the identification of banana (Musa sp.) phytoliths in a mid-1st-
millennium BC context at Nkang, Cameroon, 1,000 years or so before their supposed introduction
to the other side of the African continent, though as its critiques show the identifiability of
67
phytoliths to particular taxa of archaeological or historical interest can be an issue.

How people used the preparation, consumption, and disposal of the foodstuffs that they ate and
drank in ways that asserted, contested, or created identities for themselves and vis-à-vis others
is something that can also be addressed—in conjunction with the analysis of plant and animal
remains—by considering the kinds of ceramics and other vessels (for example, those of glass)

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employed to cook and serve meals or beverages (“Ceramics, Foodways, and Consumption:
Methods”). However, for more direct evidence of what people ate we must turn to human remains
themselves. Coprolites and stomach contents have only rarely been reported in Africa, but the
continent’s archaeologists have a long history of using stable isotope analyses to learn about the
68 12 13
diets of past individuals. Differences in the ratio of C to C between different plant groups or
between marine versus land plants, translated into the tissues of animals and then of people at
higher trophic levels, can allow estimates to be made of the intake of terrestrial versus marine
foods in areas like South Africa’s Cape or of shifts between consuming tropical and temperate
15 14
cereals. The ratio of two nitrogen isotopes ( N, N), on the other hand, estimates animal to plant
food consumption (“Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Precolonial Sub-Saharan African Farming
and Herding Communities”). At the late-17th-century site of Vergelegen near Cape Town, for
example, these methods suggested that a woman (probably enslaved) had grown up eating rice
69
somewhere in the Indian Ocean world only to switch to a diet heavy in fish later in life.
Strontium isotopes provide yet another source of information, though as this case shows their
87 86
analysis too may be relevant to diet: the Sr/ Sr ratio varies according to bedrock geology, is
transmitted up the food chain with negligible change, and can thus be used to track movements
across a landscape, for example of livestock herds in precolonial southern Africa; hunter-
gatherers, pastoralists, and farmers in the Libyan Sahara; or even the transportation of first-
70
generation enslaved Africans to the Caribbean.

How people made and then used tools and artifacts of all kinds represents another major set of
questions. Study of the three most common classes of material culture—stone tools, pottery, and
metal—has some common approaches. These include a growing emphasis (especially in the first
two cases) on detailing the precise sequence of actions involved from raw material selection
through to eventual discard using the concept of a chaîne opératoire (“Ceramics, Foodways, and
Consumption: Methods”; “Pottery Chaînes Opératoires as Historical Documents”). Establishing
what this may have been is informed by experimental work on the part of the archaeologist and
by detailed study (in the case of ceramics) of how items are still made and used today (“Ceramics,
Foodways, and Consumption: Methods”); stone tool production and even iron-smelting
(“African Iron Production and Iron Working Technologies: Methods”), which has received a great
deal of attention from archaeologists seeking to reconstruct how it was traditionally conducted,
71
are, on the other hand, essentially defunct. Nevertheless, the commitment of archaeologists to
learning from local populations about how other traditional technologies were created and
employed remains an invaluable source of information about the past, even if the analogies
drawn between “then” and “now” must always be made with due regard to situating
ethnographic sources in their historical context (to avoid presenting people as never-changing)
and to providing a set of causal links that substantiate the parallel being made (for example,
similarities of subsistence or environment). Claims of ancestry/descent between the source of an
analogy and the archaeological group to which it is applied must likewise be robustly argued,
rather than simply asserted through a “direct historical approach.” Working back from the
ethnographically or historically “known” to the archaeologically “unknown,” as Ann Stahl has
72
done in Ghana, thus has much to commend it. That said, analogy—and ethnographic data in

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

general—are essential tools for any archaeological analysis, whether in Africa or elsewhere
(“Primary Historical Sources in Archaeology: Methods”; “Ethnographic Analogy in Archaeology:
73
Methodological Insights from Southern Africa”).

So too are laboratory-based analyses of artifacts (“African Iron Production and Iron Working
Technologies: Methods”). Growing ever more informative and abundant, they can address how
objects were made and used and from where they came. Archaeometallurgists, for example,
employ a wide variety of techniques (including reflected and transmitted light optical
microscopy, X-ray fluorescence, and X-ray diffraction) to analyze slags, clay tuyères and
furnaces, and finished metal artifacts in order to ascertain the details of metal production,
revealing both geographical and temporal differences in how this was conducted (“Precolonial
Metallurgy and Mining across Africa”; “African Iron Production and Iron Working Technologies:
Methods”). Iron has attracted the most attention, but copper, tin, gold, and bronze have all been
74
investigated. Metal was, of course, also widely traded, both into and out of Africa. Some studies
have used isotope ratios to track this, suggesting, for example, that some of the copper employed
to make the famous Igbo Ukwu bronzes is likely to have been of North African (i.e., trans-
Saharan) origin, but that bronze items from sites of the Zimbabwe culture were definitely
produced in southern Africa from local sources, rather than using metal imported from across the
75
Indian Ocean.

Glass and glass beads constitute another important pyrotechnology. It is now clear that glass was
manufactured in late 1st/2nd-millennium AD Nigeria rather than always being imported to sub-
Saharan Africa, but even where this was so glass beads themselves might be melted down and
76
recast into novel forms, as at Mapungubwe in 13th-century South Africa. The vast majority of
glass beads used in precolonial Africa were nevertheless introduced via complex trade networks
77
from sources ultimately as distant as South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
Analyses of their chemical composition provide increasing precision on the sources used at
78
particular times and in particular networks (“Documenting Precolonial Trade in Africa”).
Ceramics, too, can be sourced from their physico-chemical make-up, although here thin-section
79
petrography is the dominant technique used. Scientific studies of pottery technology, as
opposed to ethnographically informed investigations of how pots are made, are nevertheless still
80
rare.

Biomolecular studies are also now expanding apace (“Ceramics, Foodways, and Consumption:
Methods”; “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Precolonial Sub-Saharan African Farming and
Herding Communities”; “Archaeozoology: Methods”). As well as documenting early dairy use in
early Holocene ceramics from the Sahara, they have suggested that pots used by pastoralists in
South Africa’s southwestern Cape were mainly used to process seal meat, identified adhesives
used to mount stone tools (in conjunction with morphological studies of surviving micro-
residues and use-wear), and provided new ways of identifying plant consumption and cooking
81
techniques in pre-agricultural and agricultural populations in Sudan. But it is perhaps the
possibilities of recovering and identifying ancient DNA from plant, animal, and human sources
82
that have elicited greatest interest. Africa—outside Egypt—remains grossly understudied in
this regard, and in many areas high temperatures or humidity may render preservation difficult.
Nevertheless, several impressive studies have already been undertaken, including identifying the

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Introduction to Archaeological Methods and Sources

possible progenitors of the domestic donkey and of the wheat grown by the indigenous
83
inhabitants of the Canary Islands. Analysis of the DNA of modern plant and animal populations
is also proving informative, for example in showing that Madagascar’s chickens, cattle, and other
domestic animals have African, rather than Southeast Asian, origins (“Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on Precolonial Sub-Saharan African Farming and Herding Communities”;
84
“Archaeozoology: Methods”; “Paleoenvironmental Science: Methods”). Similar analyses, of
course, are also increasingly commonplace for assessing the history of Africa’s human
inhabitants, though they have not always been undertaken with due care for sample provenance,
appropriate caution concerning the correlation of results with archaeological phenomena, or
85
recognition of the malleability of individual and group identities. Recovery of ancient DNA from
86
human remains is, however, still rare south of the Sahara. Along with the stable isotope studies
discussed earlier, most bioanthropological studies therefore continue to emphasize more
traditional approaches focused on markers of diet, disease, and life history evident in individual
87
skeletons.

Primary Sources
African archaeology’s primary data are housed in a vast number of museum and university collections within Africa
and beyond. Virtually all countries have national museums and most have a variety of regional ones as well; in
addition to retaining collections from past research projects, they may also be repositories for the documentary,
photographic, and other records arising from them. In some countries they also act as centers for recording the
location and status of archaeological sites, although in others (e.g., South Africa) this is the responsibility of separate
national and provincial heritage agencies. In addition to specialized monographs, the results of archaeological
research in Africa are published in national and international journals. Three (African Archaeological Review, Azania:
Archaeological Research in Africa, Journal of African Archaeology) have pan-continental remits, while Southern African
Humanities and the South African Archaeological Bulletin principally cover areas south of the Zambezi; Sahara, Sudan
and Nubia and Libyan Studies provide extensive coverage of much of northern Africa. New research is also
communicated via Africa-specific archaeological conferences including those of the Association of Southern African
Professional Archaeologists (ASAPA), the PanAfrican Archaeological Association (PAA), the Society of Africanist
Archaeologists (SAfA), and the West African Archaeological Association (WAA).

African Archaeological Review <http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/anthropology+%26+archaeology/journal/

10437>.

Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa <http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/raza20/current>.

Journal of African Archaeology <http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/21915784>.

Libyan Studies <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/libyan-studies>.

Sahara <http://www.saharajournal.com/>.

Southern African Humanities <http://www.sahumanities.org/ojs/index.php/SAH>.

Sudan and Nubia <http://www.sudarchrs.org.uk/>.

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ASAPA <http://asapa.co.za/>.

PAA <http://www.panafprehistory.org/en/>.

SAfA <http://www.safa.rice.edu/>.

WAA <https://www.ug.edu.gh/waaagh/>.

Further Reading
Hall, Martin. Archaeology Africa. Cape Town: David Philip, 1996.

Huffman, Thomas. A Handbook to the Iron Age: The Archaeology of Pre-Colonial Farming Societies in Southern Africa.
Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008.

Insoll, Timothy. Material Explorations in African Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Livingstone Smith, Alexandre, Els Cornelissen, Olivier Gosselain, and Scott MacEachern, eds. Field Manual for African
Archaeology <http://www.africamuseum.be/research/publications/rmca/online/fmaa>. Tervuren: Royal Museum for
Central Africa, 2017.

Mitchell, Peter, and Paul Lane, eds. The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/
9780199569885.001.0001>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Renfrew, Colin, and Paul Bahn. Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice. London: Thames and Hudson, 2016.

Stahl, Ann, ed. African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Wynne-Jones, Stephanie. A Material Culture: Consumption and Materiality on the Coast of Precolonial East Africa.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Notes

1. See papers in Peter Robertshaw, A History of African Archaeology (London: James Currey, 1990).

2. Timothy Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

3. Compare Charles Orser, A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World (New York: Plenum Press, 1996).

4. Andrew Reid and Paul Lane, eds., African Historical Archaeologies (New York: Kluwer Academic, 2004).

5. Jan Vansina, “Historians, Are Archaeologists Your Siblings?” History in Africa 22 (1995): 369–408; compare Peter
Robertshaw, “Sibling Rivalry: The Intersection of Archaeology and History,” History in Africa 27 (2000): 261–286; and
Susan Keech McIntosh, ed., Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).

6. Gérard Chouin, “Archaeological Perspectives on Sacred Groves in Ghana,” in African Sacred Groves: Ecological
Dynamics and Social Change, ed. Michael Sheridan and Celia Nyamweru (Oxford: James Currey, 2008), 178–194.

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7. David Clarke, “Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence,” Antiquity 47 (1973): 6–17.

8. For a recent survey see Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Jeff Fleisher, Theory in Africa, Africa in Theory: Locating Meaning
in Archaeology (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015).

9. John Bower, “A Survey of Surveys: Aspects of Surface Archaeology in Sub-Saharan Africa,” African Archaeological
Review 4 (1986): 21–40.

10. Philippe Lavachery et al., Komé-Kribi: Rescue Archaeology along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, 1999–2004
(Frankfurt: Africa Magna Verlag, 2010).

11. Noemie Arazi, “Cultural Research Management in Africa: Challenges, Dangers and Opportunities,” Azania:
Archaeological Research in Africa 44 (2009): 95–106.

12. Timothy Maggs, Iron Age Communities of the Southern Highveld (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Natal Museum,
1976).

13. James Denbow, “Cenchrus ciliaris: An Ecological Indicator of Iron Age Middens Using Aerial Photography in Eastern
Botswana,” South African Journal of Science 75 (1979): 405–408. For a much more recent example of this kind of
approach, this time in Sierra Leone, see Sean Reid, “Satellite Remote Sensing of Archaeological Vegetation Signatures
in Coastal West Africa,” African Archaeological Review 33 (2016): 163–182.

14. Karim Sadr, “A Comparison of Accuracy and Precision in Remote Sensing Stone-Walled Structures with Google
Earth, High Resolution Aerial Photography and LiDAR: A Case Study from the South African Iron Age,” Archaeological
Prospection 23 (2016): 95–104; Martin Sterry et al., “DMP XIII: Reconnaissance Survey of Archaeological Sites in the
Murzuq Area,” Libyan Studies 42 (2011): 103–116; and Matthew Meredith-Williams et al., “4200 New Shell Mound Sites
in the Southern Red Sea <http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.37.2>,” Internet Archaeology (2014).

15. Robert Bewley et al., “Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa: Introducing the EAMENA
Project,” in CAA2015: Keep the Revolution Going: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference on Computer Applications
and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, ed. Stefano Campana et al. (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2016), 919–932.

16. Bruno Werz, Diving Up the Human Past: Perspectives on Maritime Archaeology, with Special Reference to
Developments in South Africa Until 1996 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1999); Edward Pollard, “The Maritime
Landscape of Kilwa Kisiwani and its Region, Tanzania, 11th to 15th Century AD,” Journal of Anthropological
Archaeology 27 (2008): 265–280; and, for example, Shadreck Chirikure et al., “Maritime Archaeology and Trans-Oceanic
Trade: A Case Study of the Oranjemund Shipwreck Cargo, Namibia,” Journal of Maritime Archaeology 5 (2010): 37–55.

17. Roderick McIntosh et al., “Exploratory Archaeology at Jenné and Jenné-jeno (Mali),” Sahara 8 (1996): 19–28.

18. Carlos Magnavita, “Contributions of Geophysics to Field Research in Sub-Saharan Africa: Past, Present and Future,”
Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 51 (2016): 115–141; Kate Welham et al., “Geophysical Survey in Sub-Saharan
Africa: Magnetic and Electromagnetic Investigation of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Songo Mnara, Tanzania,”
Archaeological Prospection 21 (2014) 255–262; and Jeff Fleisher and Federica Sulas, “Deciphering Public Spaces in
Urban Contexts: Geophysical Survey, Multi-Element Soil Analysis, and Artifact Distributions at the 15th-16th-Century
AD Swahili Settlement of Songo Mnara, Tanzania,” Journal of Archaeological Science 55 (2015): 55–70.

19. For counter-examples see Adria LaViolette, Ethno-Archaeology in Jenné, Mali: Craft and Status among Smiths,
Potters and Masons (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2000); and Tanja Männel and Peter Breunig, “The Nok
Terracotta Sculptures of Pangwari,” Journal of African Archaeology 14 (2016): 313–329.

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20. Jeffrey Fleisher and Adria LaViolette, “Elusive Wattle-and-Daub: Finding the Hidden Majority in the Archaeology of
the Swahili,” Azania 34 (1999): 87–108; and Jeffrey Fleisher and Stephanie Wynne-Jones, “Finding Meaning in Ancient
Swahili Spatial Practices,” African Archaeological Review 29 (2012): 171–207.

21. Federica Sulas and Marco Madella, “Archaeology at the Micro-Scale: Micromorphology and Phytoliths at a Swahili
Stonetown,” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 4 (2012): 145–159.

22. For example, Jeremy Hollman, “Bees, Honey and Brood: Southern African Hunter-Gatherer Rock Paintings of Bees
and Bee Nests, uKhahlamba-Drakensberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 50
(2015): 343–371.

23. For example, Adelphine Bonneau, David Pearce, and Mark Pollard, “A Multi-Technique Characterization and
Provenance Study of the Pigments Used in San Rock Art, South Africa,” Journal of Archaeological Science 39 (2012):
287–294; and Adelphine Bonneau et al., “The Earliest Directly Dated Rock Paintings from Southern Africa: New AMS
Radiocarbon Dates,” Antiquity 91 (2017): 322–333.

24. David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, San Spirituality: Roots, Expression, and Social Consequences (Walnut Creek,
CA: AltaMira Press, 2005). See, for example, John Parkington, “Interpreting Paintings without Commentary,” Antiquity
63 (March 1989): 13–26; Ann Solomon, “Gender, Representation and Power in San Ethnography and Rock Art,” Journal
of Anthropological Archaeology 11 (1992): 291–329; and Jeremy Hollmann, “‘Big Pictures’: Insights into Southern
African San Rock Paintings of Ostriches,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 56 (2001): 62–75.

25. On Zambia/Malawi, see Benjamin Smith, “Forbidden Images: Rock Paintings and the Nyau Secret Society of
Central Malawi and Eastern Zambia,” African Archaeological Review 18 (2001): 187–212; and Leslie Zubieta, The Rock
Art of Mwana wa Chentcherere II Rock Shelter, Malawi (Leiden, The Netherlands: African Studies Centre, 2006). On
Uganda, see Catherine Namono, “Soaring Spirits: Rock Art, Initiation and the Sor Secret Society of Spirit Mediums of
Karamoja, Uganda,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 52 (2017): 283–304. On Kenya/Tanzania, see Richard
Gramly, “Meat-Feasting Sites and Cattle Brands: Patterns of Rock-Shelter Utilization in East Africa,” Azania 10 (1975):
107–121. On the Sahara, see Benjamin Smith, “Rock Art Research in Africa,” in The Oxford Handbook of African
Archaeology, ed. Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 145–162.

26. Victoria Waldock, “Mobilising Stone: Investigating Relations of Materiality, Movement and Corporality in Holocene
Saharan Rock-Art” (DPhil thesis, Oxford, 2017).

27. Monika Baumanova and Ladislav Smejda, “Structural Dynamics of Social Complexity at the ‘Palace of Gede,’
Kenya,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 52 (2017): 71–99.

28. The symbolism of Swahili domestic architecture was first studied by Linda Donley-Reid, for example, “Life in the
Swahili Town House Reveals the Symbolic Meaning of Spaces and Artefact Assemblages,” African Archaeological
Review 5 (1987): 181–192.

29. Thomas Huffman, Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe (Johannesburg:
Witwatersrand University Press, 1996). See, for example, David Beach et al., “Reviews of T. N. Huffman, Snakes and
Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 52 (1997): 125–138; and
Innocent Pikirayi and Shadreck Chirikure, “Debating Great Zimbabwe,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 46
(2011): 221–231.

30. William Balée, Advances in Historical Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

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31. Peter Schmidt, “Historical Ecology and Landscape Transformation in Eastern Equatorial Africa”, in Historical
Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, ed. Carole Crumley (Santa Fe: School of American Research
Press, 1994), 99–126; and Paul Lane, “Environmental Narratives and the History of Soil Erosion in Kondoa District,
Tanzania: An Archaeological Perspective,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 42 (2009): 457–483.

32. Timothy Insoll, Rachel MacLean, and Benjamin Kankpeyeng, Temporalising Anthropology: Archaeology in the
Talensi Tong Hills, Northern Ghana (Frankfurt: Africa Magna Verlag, 2013); and Neil Norman, “Liquid Gods within
Cellular Landscapes: Micro-Monuments, Ethnic Pluralism and the Political Landscape of Hueda, Bénin, 1650–1727,”
Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 49 (2014): 3–20.

33. John Sutton, “Engaruka: The Success and Abandonment of an Integrated Irrigation System in an Arid Part of the
Rift Valley, c. 15th to 17th Centuries,” in Islands of Intensive Agriculture in Eastern Africa: Past and Present Perspectives,
ed. Mats Widgren and John Sutton (Oxford: James Currey, 2004), 114–132; Daryl Stump, “The Development and
Expansion of the Field and Irrigation System at Engaruka, Tanzania,” Azania 41 (2006): 69–94; Robert Soper, Nyanga:
Ancient Fields, Settlements and Agricultural History in Zimbabwe (Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 2002); Mats
Widgren et al., “Precolonial Agricultural Terracing in Bokoni, South Africa: Typology and Exploratory Excavation,”
Journal of African Archaeology 14 (2016): 33–53; and see, for example, Matthew Davies, Timothy Kipruto, and Henrietta
Moore, “Revisiting the Irrigated Agricultural Landscape of the Marakwet, Kenya: Tracing Local Technology and
Knowledge over the Recent Past,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 49 (2014): 486–523.

34. Seke Katsamudanga, “Past, Present and Future Applications of Geographic Information Systems in Zimbabwean
Archaeology,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 44 (2009): 293–310.

35. Garth Sampson et al., “A GIS Analysis of the Zeekoe Valley Stone Age Archaeological Record in South Africa,”
Journal of African Archaeology 13 (2015): 167–185; David Wright, Scott MacEachern, and Jaeyong Lee, “Analysis of
Feature Intervisibility and Cumulative Visibility Using GIS, Bayesian and Spatial Statistics: A Study from the Mandara
Mountains, Northern Cameroon,” PLoS ONE 9, no. 11 (2014): e112191; and Savino di Lernia and Marina Gallinaro,
“Working in a UNESCO WH Site. Problems and Practices on the Rock Art of the Tadrart Acacus (SW Libya, Central
Sahara),” Journal of African Archaeology 9 (2011): 159–175.

36. Stefano Biagetti et al., “High and Medium Resolution Satellite Imagery to Evaluate Late Holocene Human-
Environment Interactions in Arid Lands: A Case Study from the Central Sahara,” Remote Sensing 9 (2017): 351.

37. Roland Oliver, “The Problem of the Bantu Expansion,” Journal of African History 7 (1966): 361–376.

38. Paulo de Moraes Farias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles and Songhay-
Tuāreg History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

39. David Collett, A. Vines, and Gwilym Hughes, “The Chronology of the Valley Enclosures: Implications for the
Interpretation of Great Zimbabwe,” African Archaeological Review 10 (1992): 139–162.

40. Sharma Saitowitz and Garth Sampson, “Glass Trade Beads from Rock Shelters in the Upper Karoo,” South African
Archaeological Bulletin 47 (1992): 94–103.

41. Marilee Wood, Interconnections: Glass Beads and Trade in Southern and Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean, 7th to
16th Centuries AD (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2011).

42. Carmel Schrire et al., “The Chronology of Oudepost 1, Cape, as Inferred from an Analysis of Clay Pipes,” Journal of
Archaeological Science 17 (1990): 269–300; and Susan Keech McIntosh, Daphne Gallagher, and Roderick McIntosh,
“Tobacco Pipes from Excavations at the Museum Site, Jenne, Mali,” Journal of African Archaeology 1 (2003): 171–199.

43. Martin Aitken, Science-Based Dating in Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2014).

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44. Katie Manning et al., “4500-Year Old Domesticated Pearl Millet (Pennisetum glaucum) from the Tilemsi Valley, Mali:
New Insights into an Alternative Cereal Domestication Pathway,” Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011): 312–322.

45. Karim Sadr and Garth Sampson, “Through Thick and Thin: Early Pottery in Southern Africa,” Journal of African
Archaeology 4 (2006): 235–252; Thembi Russell and James Steele, “A Geo-Referenced Radiocarbon Database for Early
Iron Age Sites in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Initial Analysis,” Southern African Humanities 21 (2009): 327–344; Friederike
Jesse, “Early Pottery in Northern Africa—An Overview,” Journal of African Archaeology 8 (2010): 219–238; and Katie
Manning and Adrian Timpson, “The Demographic Response to Holocene Climate Change in the Sahara,” Quaternary
Science Reviews 101 (2014): 28–35.

46. Judith Sealy and Royden Yates, “The Chronology of the Introduction of Pastoralism to the Cape, South Africa,”
Antiquity 68 (1992): 58–67.

47. Jayson Orton et al., “An Early Date for Cattle from Namaqualand, South Africa: Implications for the Origins of
Herding in Southern Africa,” Antiquity 87 (2013): 108–120.

48. Bernard de Grunne, Djenné-Djeno: 1,000 Years of Terracotta Statuary in Mali (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2014).

49. Abidemi Babalola et al., “Ile-Ife and Igbo Olokun in the History of Glass in West Africa,” Antiquity 91 (2017): 732–750.

50. Richard Roberts et al., “Optical Dating in Archaeology: Thirty Years in Retrospect and Grand Challenges for the
Future,” Journal of Archaeological Science 56 (2015): 41–60.

51. Robert Dewar et al., “Stone Tools and Foraging in Northern Madagascar Challenge Holocene Extinction Models,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110 (2013): 12583–12588.

52. David Killick, “What Do We Know about African Iron Working?” Journal of African Archaeology 2 (2004): 97–112.

53. Fumiko Ohinata, “Archaeology of Iron-Using Farming Communities in Swaziland: Pots, People and Life during the
First and Second Millennia AD” (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2001).

54. David Phillipson, The Later Prehistory of Eastern and Southern Africa (London: Heinemann, 1979), 82–84; and
Karega-Munene, “The East African Neolithic: A Historical Perspective,” in East African Archaeology: Foragers, Potters,
Smiths, and Traders, ed. Chapurukuha Kusimba and Sibel Barut Kusimba (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2003), 17–32.

55. Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Jeffrey Fleisher, “Fifty Years in the Archaeology of the Eastern African Coast: A
Methodological History,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 50 (2015): 519–541; and Ceri Ashley and Katherine
Grillo, “Archaeological Ceramics from Eastern Africa: Past Approaches and Future Directions,” Azania: Archaeological
Research in Africa 50 (2015): 460–480. One solution is to return to original collections and reanalyze them on a more
quantitative basis. For Early Tana Tradition ceramics on Africa’s East Coast the result—including a searchable online
database—has been to demonstrate significant variation between coastal regions as well as between the coast and
the interior (Jeffrey Fleisher and Stephanie Wynne-Jones, “Ceramics and the Early Swahili: Deconstructing the Early
Tana Tradition,” African Archaeological Review 28 (2011): 245–278).

56. Ian Hodder, The Spatial Organization of Culture (London: Duckworth, 1978).

57. Ian Hodder, Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1982).

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58. Stephanie Wynne-Jones, “Material Culture, Space, and Identity,” in The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology,
ed. Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 182–183, 177–187; and see, for example, Scott
MacEachern, “‘Symbolic Reservoirs’ and Inter-Group Relations: West African Examples,” African Archaeological Review
12 (1994): 205–224.

59. Michael Evers, “The Recognition of Groups in the Iron Age of Southern Africa” (PhD Thesis, University of the
Witwatersrand, 1988); Thomas Huffman, “Regionality in the Iron Age: The Case of the Sotho-Tswana,” Southern African
Humanities 14 (2002): 1–22; and Alex Schoeman, “Southern African Late Farming Communities,” in The Oxford
Handbook of African Archaeology, ed. Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 929–942.

60. François Richard and Kevin MacDonald, eds., Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past: Materiality, History, and the
Shaping of Cultural Identities (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2015).

61. Ashley Coutu et al., “Earliest Evidence for the Ivory Trade in Southern Africa: Isotopic and ZooMS Analysis of
Seventh–Tenth Century AD Ivory from KwaZulu-Natal,” African Archaeological Review 33 (2016): 411–435.

62. For example, John Parkington, “Seasonal Mobility in the Late Stone Age,” African Studies 31 (1972): 223–244.

63. For example, Elizabeth Arnold, “A Consideration of Livestock Exploitation during the Early Iron Age in the Thukela
Valley, KwaZulu-Natal” in Animals and People: Archaeozoological Papers in Honour of Ina Plug, ed. Shaw Badenhorst,
Peter Mitchell, and Jonathan Driver (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008), 152–168.

64. For example, Stephen Dueppen and Cameron Gokee, “Hunting on the Margins of Medieval West African States: A
Preliminary Study of the Zooarchaeological Record at Diouboye, Senegal,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 49
(2014): 354–385.

65. Ruth Young and Gill Thompson, “Missing Plant Foods? Where Is the Archaeobotanical Evidence for Sorghum and
Finger Millet in East Africa?” in The Exploitation of Plant Resources in Ancient Africa, ed. Marijke van der Veen (New York:
Kluwer, 1999), 63–72.

66. Marijke van der Veen, Consumption, Trade and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains from the Roman and
Islamic Ports at Quseir al-Qadim, Egypt (Frankfurt: Africa Magna Verlag, 2011); and Patrick Munson, “Archaeological
Data on the Origins of Cultivation in the Southwestern Sahara and Their Implications for West Africa,” in Origins of
African Plant Domestication, ed. Jack Harlan, Jan De Wet, and Ann Stemler (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 187–210.

67. Christophe Mbida et al., “Phytolith Evidence for the Early Presence of Domesticated Banana (Musa) in Africa,” in
Documenting Domestication: New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms, ed. Melinda Zeder et al. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2006), 68–81; and Katarina Neumann and Lise Hildebrand, “Early Bananas in Africa: The State of
the Art,” Ethnobotany Research and Applications 7 (2009): 353–362.

68. Emma Loftus, Patrick Roberts, and Julia Lee-Thorp, “An Isotopic Generation: Four Decades of Stable Isotope
Analysis in African Archaeology,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 51 (2016): 88–114.

69. Judith Sealy et al., “An Historic Skeleton from the Slave Lodge at Vergelegen,” South African Archaeological Society
Goodwin Series 7 (1993): 84–91.

70. Jeannette Smith et al., “Pre-Colonial Herding Strategies in the Shashe-Limpopo River Basin, Southern Africa,
Based on Strontium Isotope Analysis of Domestic Fauna,” Journal of African Archaeology 8 (2010): 83–98; Mary Anne
Tafuri et al., “Mobility and Kinship in the Prehistoric Sahara: Strontium Isotope Analysis of Holocene Human Skeletons
from the Acacus Mts. (Southwestern Libya),” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 25 (2006): 390–402; and Hannes
Schroeder et al., “Trans-Atlantic Slavery: Isotopic Evidence for Forced Migration to Barbados,” American Journal of
Physical Anthropology 139 (2009): 547–557.

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71. For example, Olivier Gosselain, “In Pots We Trust: The Processing of Clay and Symbols in Sub-Saharan Africa,”
Journal of Material Culture 4 (1999): 205–230. Stone tools nevertheless continue to be used to work hides in southern
Ethiopia, where several ethnoarchaeological studies have been undertaken, for example, Kathy Weedman, “An
Ethnoarchaeological Study of Hafting and Stone Tool Diversity among the Gamo of Ethiopia,” Journal of
Archaeological Method and Theory 13 (2006): 188–237. Iron-smelting reconstructions are discussed by Bertram
Mapunda, “The Appearance and Development of Metallurgy South of the Sahara,” in The Oxford Handbook of African
Archaeology, ed. Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 615–626.

72. Ann Stahl, Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of Africa’s Past (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).

73. Nicholas David and Carol Kramer, Ethnoarchaeology in Action (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
and Diane Lyons, “Ethnoarchaeological Research in Africa,” in The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology, ed. Peter
Mitchell and Paul Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 87–102.

74. For example, Duncan Miller, “Smelter and Smith: Metal Fabrication Technology in the Southern African Early and
Late Iron Age,” Journal of Archaeological Science 29 (2002): 1083–1131; and Thomas Thondhlana, Marcos Martinón-
Torres, and Shadreck Chirikure, “The Archaeometallurgical Reconstruction of Early Second-Millennium AD Metal
Production Activities at Shankare Hill, Northern Lowveld, South Africa,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 51
(2016): 327–361.

75. David Killick, “A Global Perspective on the Pyrotechnologies of Sub-Saharan Africa,” Azania: Archaeological
Research in Africa 51 (2016): 62–87. The source of the copper used at Igbo Ukwu has been a longstanding question.
Local Nigerian ore sources were identified by Emenike Chikwendu et al., “Nigerian Sources of Copper, Lead and Tin for
the Igbo-Ukwu Bronzes,” Archaeometry 31 (1989): 27–36. However, a North African (Tunisian) contribution has since
been identified by Frank Willett and Edward Sayre, “Lead Isotopes in West African Copper Alloys,” Journal of African
Archaeology 4 (2006): 55–90.

76. Abidemi Babalola et al., “Ile-Ife and Igbo Olokun in the History of Glass in West Africa,” Antiquity 91 (2017): 732–750;
and Marilee Wood, “Making Connections: Relationships between International Trade and Glass Beads from the
Shashe-Limpopo Area,” South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 8 (2000): 78–90.

77. Marilee Wood, Interconnections: Glass Beads and Trade in Southern and Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean, 7th to
16th Centuries AD (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2011).

78. For example, Peter Robertshaw et al., “Chemical Analysis of Ancient African Glass Beads: A Very Preliminary
Report,” Journal of African Archaeology 1 (2003): 139–146; and Peter Robertshaw et al., “Southern African Glass Beads:
Chemistry, Sources and Patterns of Trade,” Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010): 1898–1912.

79. For example, Alexandre Livingstone Smith, “Pottery Manufacturing Processes: Reconstruction and Interpretation,”
in Uan Tabu in the Settlement History of the Libyan Sahara, ed. Elena Garcea (Florence: All’Insegna del Giglio, 2001),
113–152.

80. But see Barbara van Doosselaere, Le Roi et le Potier: Etude Technologique de l’Assemblage Céramique de Kumbi
Saleh, Mauretanie (5e/6e-17e Siècles) (Frankfurt: Africa Magna Verlag, 2014);and Dirk Seidensticker “Archaeology and
History in Iron Age Settlements in the Congo Basin” in African Archaeology without Frontiers: Papers from the 2014
PanAfrican Archaeological Association Congress, ed. Karim Sadr, Amanda Esterhuysen, and Chrissie Sievers
(Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016), 114–126.

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81. Julie Dunne et al., “First Dairying in Green Saharan Africa in the Fifth Millennium BC,” Nature 486 (2012): 390–394;
Mark Copley et al., “Organic Residue Evidence for the Processing of Marine Animal Products in Pottery Vessels from the
Pre-Colonial Archaeological Site of Kasteelberg D East, South Africa,” South African Journal of Science 100 (2004): 279–
283; Geeske Langejans and Marlize Lombard, “About Small Things and Bigger Pictures: An Introduction to the
Morphological Identification of Micro-Residues on Stone Tools,” in Use-Wear and Residue Analysis in Archaeology, ed.
João Marreiros, Juan Gibaja Bao, and Nuno Ferreira Bicho (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2015), 199–219; and Stephen
Buckley et al., “Dental Calculus Reveals Unique Insights into Food Items, Cooking and Plant Processing in Prehistoric
Central Sudan,” PLoS ONE 9, no. 7 (2014): e100808.

82. Michael Campana, Mim Bower, and Pam Crabtree, “Ancient DNA for the Archaeologist: The Future of African
Research,” African Archaeological Review 30 (2013): 21–37.

83. Birgitte Kimura et al., “Donkey Domestication,” African Archaeological Review 30 (2013): 83–95. Hugo Oliveira et al.,
“Ancient DNA in Archaeological Wheat Grains: Preservation Conditions and the Study of Pre-Hispanic Agriculture on
the Island of Gran Canaria (Spain),” Journal of Archaeological Science 39 (2012): 828–835.

84. Michael Herrera et al., “East African Origins for Madagascan Chickens as Indicated by Mitochondrial DNA <http://
dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160787>,” Royal Society Open Science (2017).

85. Peter Mitchell, “Genetics and Southern African Prehistory: An Archaeological View,” Journal of Anthropological
Sciences 88 (2010): 73–92; and Scott MacEachern “Genetics and Archaeology,” in The Oxford Handbook of African
Archaeology, ed. Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 65–76.

86. But see, for exceptions, Alan Morris et al., “First Ancient Mitochondrial Human Genome from a Prepastoralist
Southern African,” Genome Biology and Evolution 6 (2014): 2647–2653; Marcos Gallego Llorente et al., “Ancient
Ethiopian Genome Reveals Extensive Eurasian Admixture in Eastern Africa,” Science 350 (2015): 820–822; Carina
Schlebusch et al., “Southern African Ancient Genomes Estimate Modern Human Divergence to 350,000 to 260,000
Years Ago,” Science 358 (2017): 652–655; and Pontus Skoglund et al., “Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population
Structure,” Cell 171 (2017): 59–71.

87. For example, Morongwa Mosothwane and Maryna Steyn, “Palaeodemography of Early Iron Age Toutswe
Communities in Botswana,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 59 (2004): 45–51; Isabelle Ribot, Rosine Orban, and
Pierre de Maret, The Prehistoric Burials of Shum Laka Rockshelter (North-West Cameroon) (Tervuren: Royal Museum of
Central Africa, 2001); and Paul Sereno et al., “Lakeside Cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 Years of Holocene Population
and Environmental Change,” PLoS ONE 3, no. 8 (2008): e2995.

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The Archaeology of Political Complexity in West Africa Through 1450 ce

Rock Art Research Methods

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