Archaeology, anthropology and community in Africa: lessons from Congo and Ghana.

Mitchell, Peter

JAMES DENBOW. The archaeology and ethnography of Central Africa, xi+232 pages, 85 b&w illustrations. 2014. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 9781-107-04070-0 hardback 60 [pounds sterling] & $99.

TIMOTHY INSOLL, RACHEL MACLEAN & BENJAMIN KANKPEYENG. Temporalising anthropology: archaeology in the Talensi Tong Hills, northern Ghana Journal of African Archaeology Monographs 10). 270 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. 2013. Frankfurt: Africa Magna; 978-3-937248-35-6 hardback 55 [euro].

Anthropology and archaeology have a longstanding, if sometimes ambivalent, relationship, and in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, few archaeologists working in the Holocene, at least, would wish to forego drawing upon ethnographic data as a source of inspiration or more precise analogies. Those ethnographic data are, however, themselves the product of long, complicated histories and cannot be projected onto past societies in any straightforward or unanalysed fashion. Both the well-known Kalahari Debate in southern Africa (in which the author of one of the books under review played a notable part; Wilmsen & Denbow 1990) and studies of the impact on West and Central African societies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the introduction of New World crops (e.g. Guyer 1991) demonstrate this point. Key questions for archaeologists must therefore include how most productively to interrogate the ethnographic and ethnohistoric data available to them, how to be sure that the parallels on which they draw are robust and linkable to the material record that they excavate, and how their own fieldwork can contribute a historical dimension to an ethnographic record that--in any professional anthropological sense--is invariably of twentieth-century vintage. At the same time, Africanist archaeologists, whether expatriate or not, must increasingly account for what they do and how they do it to the communities among whom they work. Exploring connections between ethnographic and archaeological evidence and approaches makes this both an opportunity and a challenge, linked intrinsically to one of African archaeology's most pressing problems: the preservation and management of the continent's heritage. Though originating in very different parts of Africa, both the volumes considered here address these same issues.

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Jim Denbow's book, The archaeology and ethnography of Central Africa, focuses on the Loango Coast of Congo. It provides a detailed account of the Ceramic Later Stone Age and Iron Age sites excavated there in the early 1980s in fieldwork commissioned by the Conoco Oil Company, an American multinational. The oldest sites (reported in Chapter 5) date back as far as the beginning of the last millennium BC and reflect an archaeological association between pottery, stone tools and carbonised oil palm nuts that extends north and south of the Loango Coast and is generally associated with the initial southward expansion from Cameroon of farmers speaking Bantu languages. Iron was introduced to the region around the third/fourth centuries BC, though smelting itself seems to have been practised only at more inland locations. Chapter 6 discusses Iron Age sites of the first millennium AD, Chapter 7 those from the second, while Chapter 8 provides a well-rounded synthesis of archaeological, linguistic and genetic data pertaining to the expansion of food production into southern Africa, where Denbow has also worked. The Spaced Curvilinear Ware of the Loango Coast forms part of the same ceramic tradition as pottery found in sixth/eighth-century contexts at Divuyu, northern Botswana.

But this volume is much more than a standard fieldwork report and synthesis, preceded by relevant background data on environment and subsistence (Chapter 3) and field methodology (Chapter 4). For running through it, and forming the whole of Chapter 2, is a strong element of personal history that explains how Denbow became involved in Congolese archaeology, the logistical, political and medical challenges that confronted him and his colleagues, and their at-times fraught relationship with the international corporations who variously thought of archaeology as a good thing to be seen doing or a marked inconvenience to their 'development' of the Loango Coast. These passages give readers a good sense of how fieldwork is often actually done, but also bring home Denbow's commitment to engaging seriously with local communities, even if scheduling difficulties hindered sustained collaboration with Congolese colleagues. Nevertheless, and with some lasting success (pp. 175-76), his work succeeded in drawing the attention of the Congolese authorities to the existence and significance of their country's archaeological record, even if its fragility and under-resourced protection and monitoring remain very real preoccupations.

While drawing elegantly on ethnohistoric data and the work of Ekholm (1972) and others to understand how trade with Europeans came to subvert indigenous systems of value and political economies, The archaeology and ethnography of Central Africa focuses relatively little on the second of the disciplines in its title. In contrast, Temporalising anthropology aims specifically at adding a historical dimension to the anthropological observations made by Meyer Fortes of the Talensi of northern Ghana in the 1940s. Its authors--Timothy Insoll, Rachel Maclean and Benjamin Kankpeyeng--share Denbow's concern with making the detailed results of fieldwork available and describe here the results of six years of research, principally focused on the material dimensions of Talensi traditions of healing and ritual practice. At the same time, the almost complete lack of prior archaeological work in the Tong Hills, and the relative lack of such research across much of northern Ghana, makes this an important contribution to regional history, as much as it addresses broader questions to do with the archaeology of religion and medicine or the linkage of archaeological and anthropological data.

Beautifully illustrated (including many colour photographs and plans), Temporalising anthropology starts by introducing the Talensi and their homeland before presenting (in Chapters 2 and 3) the results of survey work, focusing first on settlements and other sites and subsequently on shrines. Chapter 4 then details the excavations undertaken, while Chapters 5-7 discuss the ceramic, metallurgical, lithic and other artefacts recovered. One key concern here is to try to establish a chronology for the archaeological record, another to seek connections with contemporary Talensi ritual practice and the mid-twentieth-century versions of it observed by Fortes. Chapters 8 (on faunal remains and sacrifice) and 9 (on medicinal substances and shrines) home in even more tightly on this last question, setting out the implications for archaeological research of contemporary actions, though concluding that little of their substance, and still less of their detail, would likely prove recoverable, let alone interpretable. But this is far from being a cautionary tale about preservation biases. Instead, Insoll and his colleagues show in great richness the diversity, malleability and underlying consistency through time of how Talensi relate to the supernatural, adding a material dimension to Fortes' anthropology that demonstrates the interweaving of everyday and ritual practice, tangible and intangible heritage, and which merits emulation in many other parts of Africa. Nevertheless, limitations on where excavation and survey were possible (see below) ultimately meant that most of the excavated sequences explored predate the seventeenth century, the likely date (as inferred from oral histories) when a distinctly Talensi identity emerged. While continuities in the creation of shrines, the significance of healing, and the complexity of ritual are certainly evident, a clear disjunction remains between archaeological record and ethnographic present.

Insoll et al. make clear many times how the Talensi "steered the[ir] research at every stage" (p. 214), establishing which sites and areas could be surveyed, which excavated and to what extent, and even how they themselves had to dress (or ask permission via sacrifices!) in order to enter certain shrines. Just as much as it is a valuable resource for West African specialists or students of material anthropology, their book therefore stands out as a significant case study for how archaeologists can successfully engage with the communities among whom they work to enhance the latter's knowledge of their own past. One of several appendices (the others mainly report technical analyses of different categories of finds) presents results of a survey of local attitudes to tourism, archaeology and heritage protection. Unsurprisingly, it underlines the keenness of Talensi interest in exercising control over the preservation, presentation and research of the heritage resources within their homeland, but leaves two important questions unanswered: how might community engagement be extended in ways that would allow local people to input more directly into the questions that are researched? And what do we do where, as seems partly true of the Talensi case, no direct connection is evident (or felt) between present-day inhabitants and the remains of the remoter past?

Such questions are not easy to resolve, but the fact that they, along with others about the ethically appropriate relationships that should exist between archaeologists and major development projects, can now be explicitly formulated in an African context testifies to the maturity of African archaeology as a discipline, just as much as the success of the recent Johannesburg conference of the Pan-African Archaeological Association and the Society of Africanist Archaeologists. In furthering these topics, in filling in some of the blanks on the archaeological map, and in contributing to wider debates, the authors of both of these books are to be commended.

References

EKHOLM, K. 1972. Power and prestige: the rise and fall of the Kongo kingdom. Uppsala: Skriv Service.

GUYER, J. 1991. Female farming in anthropology and African history, in M. di Leonardo (ed.) Gender at the crossroads of knowledge: feminist anthropology in the postmodern era: 257-77. Berkeley: University of California Press.

WILMSEN, E.N. & J.R. DENBOW. 1990. Paradigmatic history of San-speaking peoples and current attempts at revision. Current Anthropology 31: 489-524. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/203890

Peter Mitchell, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, St Hugh's College, Oxford OX2 6LE, United Kingdom; and GAES, University of the Witwatersrand, 1 Jan Smuts Avenue, Braamfontein, Johannesburg 2000, South Africa (Email: peter.mitchell@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk)