3 - Contexts

Summary

Understanding the past requires understanding how it has been created. This is not simply about improving methodologies, but also the theoretical approaches employed and the broader socio-political framework within which they are applied. This chapter therefore delineates major developments in southern African archaeology from its nineteenth-century origins to the present, situating them with respect to the region’s wider history and the broader social and political context in which they emerged. It also considers how archaeological research was constrained by, but simultaneously challenged, structures of racial oppression during the twentieth century, differences in the experience of southern Africa’s states (including research disparities within and between them), some of the key paradigms within which archaeological research is currently conducted, and the problems encountered in making archaeology accessible to all sections of society. Another theme concerns the theoretical and methodological challenges that archaeologists face when invoking the ethnographies of southern Africa’s recent or contemporary inhabitants to help understand the past revealed by their research.