Bibliographical essays

Summary

THE LEGACY OF PREHISTORY

The initial and main impetus for the study o f African prehistory, which began in the latter part o f the last century, has come from t w o directions: on the one hand from French geologists, palaeontologists and archaeologists working in the Maghrib and later in the Sahara, who applied the western European terminology; and, on the other hand, from investigators in South Africa who introduced their o w n terminology (Goodwin and Lowe, 1929) because of the morphological differences between the artefact assemblages from Africa and Europe and the lack o f reliable means of dating and making correlations over such great distances. Over the past twenty years, the significant contributions of the radiometric and palaeo-magnetic chronologies have provided a n ew dimension to palaeo-anthropological and archaeological studies in Africa. This dating evidence is set out in detail in Bishop and Miller (1972), and this and later Quaternary chronology is summarized in J. D . Clark (1975). A l t h o u g h w o r k began later in East Africa (L. S. B . Leakey, 1931), the v e r y rich finds from the Rift V a l l e y are n ow the main source o f knowledge o f early hominid anatomy and behaviour. Today there are few parts o f the continent where prehistoric investigations have not been carried out, although, as yet, systematic studies in some regions, such as the West African Sahel, Ethiopia and Mozambique have only recently begun.