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NEW DIRECTIONS FOR HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY IN EASTERN AFRICA?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2016

PAUL J. LANE
PAUL J. LANE*
Affiliation:
Uppsala University
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Abstract

Recent years have seen growth in the number of historical archaeology studies in Eastern Africa. Combining critical analysis of material remains alongside the available documentary and oral sources, these offer new insights into the precolonial and colonial pasts of the region. However, the field is less well established than in either West or Southern Africa and the full potential of the subdiscipline has yet to be realised. This contribution reviews the main analytical and theoretical trends, drawing on a selection of examples. Several other research themes that might warrant investigation are also identified, and the general lack of engagement with material culture and the archaeology of the last few hundred years on the part of historians, is lamented.

Keywords

Eastern Africahistorical archaeologycolonial encountersslaverymaterial culture
Type
JAH Forum: New Directions in East African Archaeology
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , July 2016 , pp. 173 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Author's email: [email protected]

References

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17 For the purposes of this review, I focus mostly on research in Kenya, South Sudan, and Tanzania (including Zanzibar and Pemba). Studies in Mozambique and Ethiopia have been mostly excluded, although there are obvious parallels and scope for comparative analysis.

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33 Located some 30km inland along the Kavuluni River and settled in the 1880s.

34 Marshall, ‘Maroonage’, 283.

35 See, especially, Croucher, Capitalism, 213–39.

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37 On this latter point, see N. T. Håkansson, ‘Trade, “trinkets” and environmental change at the edge of world-systems: political ecology and the East African ivory trade’, in A. Hornborg, J. Martinez-Alier, and J. R. McNeill (eds.), Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change (Walnut Creek, CA, 2007), 143–62.

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51 For a recent exploration of the cultural biographies of East African ivory and its entangled history in the industrialisation of North America that touches on these issues, see A. C. Kelly, ‘The material lives of ivory and elephants: a historical anthropology of the nineteenth-century ivory trade’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Stanford University, 2014).

52 Although at present this has been limited only to Omani elites; the material traditions and legacies of Indian merchants and other Asian communities remain unexplored from an archaeological perspective, for instance.