Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T13:53:48.691Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Double, Double, Toil, and Trouble: the Ergonomics of African History1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

David Henige
David Henige*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The longtime-accepted equation of Xian with the Siamese kingdom of Suhkothai having been discarded now …

Knowledge and speculation would appear to have been confused.”

“Considering the enormous output … of theories concerning the Assyrian kings and their chronology—by far the greater art of which has proved untenable in the light of later discoveries and most of which, as we can see now, might well have

been avoided by refraining from premature speculation …

As I was growing up—when the automobile was becoming a standard accoutrement—two large car parks were in the downtown area of the city where I lived. These were not street level but were laid out 15 to 25 feet below the streets, and thousands of cubic yards of dirt had been removed to create these. Since then, much reconstruction (“urban renewal”) has occurred in the area, which entailed putting back just about as much dirt as had been removed earlier. Doubtless, each project required an enormous amount of time, labor, and money, yet the end result was a configuration very much like that which had existed before one minute, one bead of sweat, and one dollar had been spent. Some might regard this as simply an accommodation of differing needs for different times, whereas others might wonder how necessary it all had been—why, for instance, was it thought useful to render these car parks subterranean in the first place. Was the dirt needed elsewhere? Or were they make-work public works projects during economic downtimes? In short, what was the point? After all, the car parks were surrounded by imposing concrete walls, ramps were constructed to gain access; even the floors were concrete to neutralize the elements.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 34 , 2007 , pp. 103 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This paper was first presented at the Wisconsin@45 Symposium held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 2005.

References

2 Ishii, Yoneo, “Exploring a New Approach to Early Thai History,” Journal of the Siam Society 92(2004), 37Google Scholar. The identification had been unquestioned orthodoxy from 1914 to 1989.

3 Inikori, Joseph E., “The Known, the Unknown, the Knowable, and the Unknowable: Evidence and the Evaluation of Evidence in the Measurement of the Atlantic Slave Trade” in Ghana in Africa and the World: Essays in Honor of Adu Boahen, ed. Falola, Toyin (Trenton, N.J., 2003), 536Google Scholar. By essay's end Inikori feels that progress in this respect has been made through mathematics and evidence that is “properly understood and imaginatively deployed.”

4 Poebel, Arno, “The Assyrian King List from Khorsabad,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2(1943), 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The occasion for this observation was the publication of the first complete list of Assyrian kings. Hitherto, the names of these rulers had tended to emerge sporadically one or a few at a time, whereas the Khorsabad list had 117 names, each one conveniently arranged in chronological order. It would be no exaggeration to estimate that the output based on pre-Khorsabad information aggregated to tens of thousands of pages over about a century.

5 Bahn, Paul G., “Ötzi's New Home,” Archaeology 52/1(01-February 1999), 68–71Google Scholar; Barfield, Lawrence, “The Iceman Reviewed,” Antiquity 68(1994), 10–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 The unedifying saga through 1998 is chronicled in Fowler, Brenda, Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier (New York, 2000)Google Scholar.

7 Hodder, Ian, The Archaeological Process: an Introduction (Oxford, 1999), 138–44Google Scholarpassim.

8 Gostner, P. and Vigl, E. Egarter, “Report of Radiological-Forensic Findings on the Iceman,” Journal of Archaeological Science 29(2002), 323CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the circumstances of the discovery see Cullen, Bob, “Testimony from the Iceman,” Smithsonian 33/11(02 2003), 42–49Google Scholar.

9 For elaborate scenarios to account for his death—all of them rendered obsolete at a stroke—see, e.g., Spindler, Konradet al., The Man in the Ice (New York, 1994), 250–54Google Scholar; Loy, Tom, “Blood on the Axe,” New Scientist (12 09 1998), 40–43Google Scholar.

10 Examples festoon Fowler, Iceman.

11 Sharp, David, “Time to Leave Ötzi Alone?” Lancet 360(16 11 2002), 1530CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

12 On this see, among others, Tucker, Aviezer, Our Knowledge of the Past: a Philosophy of Historiography (Cambridge, 2004), 208–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Eduard Egarter Vigl, cited on http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060230. For a log of recent developments see www.mummytombs.com/mummy/locator/featured/otzi.news.htm.

14 Gostner, /Vigl, , “Report,” 325Google Scholar, which was received by the journal on 27 September 2001. Or perhaps he fell on the arrow while wrestling an auroch.

15 Sulzenbacher, Gudrun, The Glacier Mummy: Discovering the Neolithic Age with the Iceman (Bolzano, 2002), 48Google Scholar. Note the extravagant sub-title.

16 Vigl, Eduard Egarter, cited in Cullen, , “Testimony,” 48Google Scholar, with emphasis added.

17 Several websites (e.g., www.iceman.it and www.archeaeologiemuseu.it) have been established, which are sure to expedite new rounds of hypothesizing.

18 Sulzenbacher, , Glacier Mummy, 48Google Scholar. “[A]n embarrassing find,” as Pain, Stephanie, “Was It Murder?” New Scientist (4 08 2001), 12Google Scholar, kindly put it, given that the mummy was scanned at least five times while at Innsbruck, including three times by “computer tomography.”

19 The pre-academic phase of the Bantu problem is treated at length in Vansina, Jan, “The Bantu in the Crystal Ball,” HA 6(1979), 287–333Google Scholar; 7(1980), 293-325.

20 The classic, if succinct, exposition, so influential as virtually to be monopolistic for a while, was Oliver, Roland, “The Problem of the Bantu Expansion,” JAH 7(1966), 361–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Colin Flight discussed the ways in which a small group of centrally-located, proselytizing, and media-controlling Africanists propounded and promulgated this earliest orthodoxy; see his “The Bantu Expansion and the SOAS Network,” HA 15(1988), 261–301Google Scholar.

22 E.g., J.H.C., Williams, Beyond the Rubicon: Romans and Gauls in Republican Italy (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar; Burns, Thomas S., Rome and the Barbarians, 100 B.C.—A.D. 400 (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar.

23 For arguments for and against the Aryan Invasion Theory see Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies at http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/. The indigenous alternative suffers from the incubus of strongly nationalist, traditionalist, sometimes violent, support.

24 For some thoughts of this see Robertson, John H. and Bradley, Rebecca, “A New Paradigm: the African Iron Age without Bantu Migrations,” HA 27(2000), 287–323Google Scholar

25 E.g., Dillehay, Thomas D., Monte Verde: a Late Pleistocene Site in Chile (2 vols.: Washington, 1989)Google Scholar; The First Americans: Search and Research, ed. Dillehay, Thomas D. and Meltzer, David J. (Boca Raton, 1991)Google Scholar; Dillehay, Thomas D., The Settlement of the Americas: a New Prehistory (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Adovasio, J.M., The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

26 For the most recent set of essays addressing the revived and expanded issues, see Entering America: Northeast Asia and Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, ed. Madsen, D.B. (Salt Lake City, 2004)Google Scholar. See also Straus, Lawrence G., Meltzer, David J., and Goebel, Ted, “Ice Age Atlantis? Exploring the Solutrean-Clovis ‘Connection’,” World Archaeology 37(2005), 507–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Fiedel, Stuart J., “Older than We Thought: the Implications of Corrected Dates for Paleoindians,” American Antiquity 64(1999), 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For arguments in favor of this seemingly rogue date see González, Silviaet al., “Human Footprints in Central Mexico Older than 40,000 Years,” Quaternary Science Reviews 25(2006), 201–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Earlier than ten to fifteen years ago it probably would have been impossible to get a paper like this published in a scholarly journal.

28 It is just this fear of unmasking my ignorance of the principles of historical linguistics that keeps me from wondering at greater length how Ehret, Chistopher (The Civilizations of Africa: a History to 1800) [Oxford, 2002], 15)Google Scholar can make the astonishing claim that “two of the early African religions … were distinctly monotheistic thousands of years before the idea of monotheism ever occurred to Middle Easterners of Europeans,” and support it with a casual and unexplained reference to a single word. Is it no longer the case that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?

29 Morley, Sylvanus G., The Ancient Maya (Stanford, 1946), 262Google Scholar. Cf. ibid., 70.

30 Webster, David, “The Not So Peaceful Civilization: a Review of Maya Warfare,” Journal of World Prehistory 14(2000), 65–119CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and the many sources cited there.

31 Ehret, , Civilizations, 2Google Scholar. Earlier, , in his An African Classical Age (Charlottesville, 1998), 144–46Google Scholar, Ehret tempered his discourse somewhat and offered the glimmerings of an argument.

32 For a discussion of some consequences of this see Henige, David, “The Implausibility of Plausibility/the Plausibility of Implausibility,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 30(2004), 311–35Google Scholar.

33 Redford, D.B., “The Writing of the History of Ancient Egypt” in Egyptology at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hawass, Zahi (3 vols: Cairo, 2003) 2:7Google Scholar.

34 To quote a biblical archeologist on the matter.