This article outlines recent developments in the archaeology of North Africa, and how our views have evolved in the four years since the previous survey. The principal changes, as such, are that in eastern North Africa, for the first time, sties have been found which fall between the Middle and Late Palaeolithic, thus beginning to close a disconcerting gap in the archaeological record; further evidence is available from the eastern and central Sahara that cattle may have been domesticated in North Africa at least as yearly as anywhere else in the world; and we now begin to have a picture of the complex series of local adaptations developed by Neolithic groups along the extreme western edge of the Sahara, which has hitherto been an archaeological vacuum. Research elsewhere in North Africa is devoted to fleshing out our still skeletal view of ways of life in the Late or Epipalaeolithic and, above all, in the Neolithic, when the use of domesticated plants or animals began to have its first effects on human societies. Archaeological research into the historical periods is less active, but parts of the central Sahara may reflect happenings in more active areas to the North, serving as refuges for the series of peoples displaced by the mainstream of history.

The archaeological study of African agricultural history has concentrated more on origins and the identification of crop remains than on farming techniques and ancient fields. The latter rarely survive, and even then may be of indeterminate age and apparently atypical, such as hillside terracing or irrigation systems. The subject has been further bedevilled by these unusual instances of preserved fields being regarded as relics of ‘intensive’ cultivation by ‘vanished civilizations’. However, a clearer understanding of African agriculture, through ethnographic and ecological approaches, reveals not only its basically extensive character but also the infinite variety of local specializations (or cultural–environmental adaptations, combining ancient African domesticates and introduced crops which have been ‘Africanized’). This provides a perspective for examining peculiarities of the present and past and claimed instances of ‘intensification’. Conversely the concept of specialization allows us to use, with caution, the preserved remains of old field systems to illustrate more typical ones. Many of the archaeological survivals were not so much ‘intensive’ as ‘over-specialized’, often in isolated and circumscribed situations, notably remote hills in both western and eastern Africa. A moderate example is Inyanga in eastern Zimbabwe with its extensive terraced hillsides of the later Iron Age. Here most of the terraces were not irrigated, but there are hints of complex seasonal arrangements and field techniques. A more extreme, even ‘ultra-specialized’ agricultural system, also of the later Iron Age, which was abandoned in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, is that of Engaruka in the northern Tanzanian rift. This was an essentially isolated and self-sufficient settlement in dry country, absolutely dependent on its exquisite irrigation devices. Eventually this community expired, as its soil was exhausted and its water supplies declined.

Finally, there are instances in nineteenth-century East Africa, and from earlier in West Africa, of more open cultural–economic systems producing a surplus for caravans, markets and towns. Technologically these have been no more accomplished or ‘intensive’ than the specializations discussed, but developmentally their achievement has been more effective.

It is widely believed that pre-colonial Africa south of the Sahara had no problem of poverty (and no beggars or ascetics) except in those few areas which already possessed intensive agriculture, literacy, world religions, and classes with stratified subcultures. This article uses the records of missionaries and evangelists living in nineteenth-century Yoruba towns to demonstrate the existence of paupers, beggars, ascetics and (with less certainty) charitable practices. It also considers the means by which the poor sought to survive. The article suggests that the absence of poverty from pre-colonial Africa is a myth and that the subject deserves fully study.

The compound system that was to become a striking feature of most mining enterprises in Southern and Central Africa was first introduced in the diamond mines at Kimberley. In the period of open mining (1871–1884), Africans lived in open compounds, which gave them the freedom to spend their leisure time where they pleased. In the period of underground mining (beginning in 1885), Africans were isolated from the surrounding town in closed compounds. The closed compounds of the De Beers Consolidated Company were soon regarded as models of social welfare and aspects of their system were copied at other mining centres in Africa. However, this article questions this model for the period before 1903, when there was a complete reconstruction of the compound system and a great improvement in living conditions. Before 1903 the health and mortality record of Kimberley's closed compounds was as bad, in some cases worse, than its imitators to the north in a comparable period of development. In the period of open mining African miners died of sanitation-related diseases. However, when they were forced to live in closed compounds, lung diseases, and in particular pneumonia, which was directly attributable to overcrowded accommodation, poor diet and inadequate protection against major changes in temperature, became the greatest killer on the diamond fields. It is argued here that closed compounds were more models of labour control than of social welfare before 1903. The role and functions of the De Beers convict station are compared with the advantages mining companies derived from closed compounds. Managerial ideology about compound philanthropy is called in question, and it is shown how the closed compound system contributed towards the creation of a disciplined work force, part of which was permanently resident in Kimberley.

Weyane was a spontaneous, localized peasant uprising with limited objectives. It occurred in 1943 because several disaffected social groups in the eastern part of Tigrai believed that they could defeat or at least extract substantial concessions from a weak transitional government. The multiplicity of objectives roughly correspond to the divergent interests of the participants: the sectarian nobility wanted a greater share in the regional reallocation of power, the semi-pastoral communities of the lowlands were interested in pre-empting feudal incorporation, and the highland cultivators wanted to terminate the excessive demands of officialdom and militia. The convergence of these forces made Weyane possible; the disorganization of the ruling strata and the subsequent defection of a segment of the territorial nobility enormously enhanced the peasants' capacity for collective action. But this very heterogeneity comprised the peasants' objectives. The revolt lacked a coherent set of goals, nor did it have a specific program for social action. The rebels attacked neither the legitimacy of the monarchy nor the ideological basis of the Ethiopian aristocracy. In the end, Weyane buttressed the feudal order, and was probably instrumental in strengthening Ethiopia's neo-colonial link with the West. In the aftermath of rebellion, the Tigrai nobility did get its rights and prerogatives recognized, to the same extent that the nobility in the other northern provinces did. The government undercut the nobility's political autonomy, but paid the price of reinforcing their social position. On the other hand, in reaction to Weyane, the state destroyed the social basis of clan authority and autonomy, and reduced the Raya and Azebo to landless peasants. Weyane marked the end of conflict between centrifugal and centralizing forces, but did not eliminate the social roots of popular protest.