African archaeology
"A study of the pre-history of the African continent until the second millennium AD"
David Phillipson
Translated by Dr. Osama Abdel-Rahman Elnur
Alja Publishing, Malta 2001
David Phillipson, Curator at the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and Lecturer in Prehistory. He traveled extensively in the African continent and wrote extensively on the subject of African archaeology. Before publishing this book on African archeology in its first edition in 1985, Phillipson published a book on the prehistory of eastern Tanzania (1976) and another on the late phase of the prehistory of eastern and southern Africa (1977). He returned in 1993 to publish the second edition of the book African Archeology, and this second edition was reprinted in 1994, which we are pleased to translate into Arabic. Phillipson now has a new book in print about the ancient history of agriculture and pastoralism in Ethiopia.
Phillipson's efforts continued through a series of research papers on African archeology in annuals, periodicals, and specialized magazines, which the reader can find in the bibliography shown at the end of this book.
We present here the introduction written by the author for this important book.
This book attempts to provide a contemporary summary and interpretation of the archaeological evidence of early hominids in Africa from their first appearance until the time when written history became the primary source of information. Chronologically, this period covers all of history except for a small portion of the time during which the Earth contained a human population. It now seems possible that Africa is the place where humans first arose a little over three million years ago. On the other side of the chronological scale, the oldest written records associated with Africa are those left by the ancient Egyptians beginning five thousand years ago. For other parts of the continent, especially the inland areas south of the equator, there are no such records except those that are not more than a century or two old.
The period of time preceding written history is known as prehistory. This term is not entirely appropriate for Africa for several reasons. First, there were long periods, especially in the northern part of the continent, when written records were available, but they did not provide sufficient information about many aspects of contemporary life. There are also many cases in which the available written records were made by foreigners and often give an incomplete account of events that the authors did not correctly understand. Such conditions confront prehistoric archaeologists in many regions of the world, but they lead to the emergence of specific problems in some parts of Africa due to the shallow temporal depth of local education. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a different approach to these aspects of African culture, an approach that must replace written literature in other regions. This includes sophisticated oral tradition which, in many societies, preserves people's accumulated wisdom, including details of their past history. Once again, language itself plays a major role in determining the sense of belonging of a people or an individual. Since there are no models for ancient languages, much can be understood about the nature of the interrelationships of ancient populations through studying current linguistic forms and their distribution. Methods for interpreting these sources of information about the African past will be discussed later, and an attempt will be made to link their evidence to those derived from archaeology.
Given the enormous time span of African prehistory, and the great diversity that characterized the human societies that emerged on the continent, it becomes clear the necessity of using diverse approaches to explain Africa's past. Studies in the field of linguistics and oral tradition can, of course, be used for relatively recent periods. However, for most of the time period that is the focus of this book, archeology constitutes the main source of our basic information, and in some cases it may even be the only source of evidence about human activities.
Archaeological data provide a picture of the past that is fundamentally different from that which can be reconstructed from written or oral sources, although archaeological sources may, in some cases, become complementary to the latter two types of sources. It is impossible for an archaeologist who studies illiterate people to understand the names or personalities of individuals. He usually finds it difficult to reach more than general conclusions about social systems and political situations. But, on the other hand, the archaeologist's interpretation of technical skills or economic activities, especially hunting, agriculture, or herding of domesticated animals, is more complete and more reliable than those that can be obtained through other forms of research. For this reason, archeology can make a significant contribution not only to the study of prehistory, but also because it paves the way for us to have a more in-depth understanding of the most modern societies, including societies for which abundant written records are available. For those studying Africa, the data of archaeological research represent a major source of information about the continent’s past. Indeed, they represent the primary source for the greater part of the prehistory, in addition to contributing greatly to our understanding of the most modern stages. In Africa, the shallow depths of time to which archaeological research can usually be applied greatly expand our historical perspective on contemporary trends and events, and it can rightfully be claimed that our understanding of pressing and vital problems such as desertification and tribalism is enhanced by the results of archaeological research, with clear implications for economic and political development. However, African archeology is closely related to what extends beyond the borders of its continent itself. Archaeologists and prehistoric scholars in other regions find much to learn from the African archaeological record, not only in terms of the unparalleled information it contains about the earliest stages of human evolution but also in terms of methodological aspects. Because most of Africa has been exposed to relatively smaller environmental changes compared to what was witnessed in the previously frozen areas of Eurasia and North America, vast data have been available in Africa that would help explain prehistoric subsistence activities. In addition, Africa provides wonderful possibilities for confronting the degree of archeology with the degree of studies in the field of linguistics and oral history, and for interpreting the meaning of rock art in light of the currently prevailing belief systems, as we will discuss later.
The study of African archaeology has developed in two main directions. The civilizations that knew writing in Egypt and North Africa were studied in varying ways over the course of two hundred years, while prehistory in regions farther south found serious attention for the first time in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. These two fields of study have long been separated from each other, and their approaches have only recently begun to merge. The focus of research and geographical coverage of the Sahara and beyond the Sahara has remained irregular, with traces of large areas still virtually unexplored. Necessarily, a great deal of effort was directed to clarifying the basic successive stages and creating a terminological structure for prehistory. Only recently has it become practically possible to present a coherent, comprehensive vision, as is the reality of our attempt, and to provide acceptable explanations for the trends and developments that have found expression in the archaeological record.
The classification of archaeological materials into successive phases, industries, and compounds now appears to be a somewhat artificial division of what is in fact continuous diversity in time and space. Each must acknowledge that carefully demarcated boundaries between cultural regions can exist and have already existed in some cases, and that change in style and technology has continued at faster rates in some cases than in others.
Contrary to assumptions often put forward in the past, it has now been recognized that analogue measurements of distributions of material culture do not necessarily correspond to those of human societies as recognized on socio-political, linguistic and other grounds. The importance of classifying material culture into groups in the case of early prehistoric industries is increasingly doubted because we are so rarely aware of the purposes for which particular tools were made. There is often difficulty in distinguishing between diversity resulting from differences in function, from stylistic tradition, from detail, or from other elements such as the abundance of raw materials. In addition, a particular society may engage in distinct lifestyles: in cases on a seasonal basis, possibly even in isolated areas and environments: so different archaeological collections may represent different activities of a single group. On the other hand, it was also pointed out that certain topics or specific methods of material culture can perform a symbolic function through their association with a specific society or part of a society, as is the case, for example, with some of the iron-smelting furnaces that Shields referred to.
Therefore, this book presents African prehistory from a vision characterized by an emphasis on the development of the economy and the general lifestyle without neglecting the definition, succession, and interrelationships of the named industries. Be that as it may, given the current state of studies in the field of African archaeology, we still need to partially preserve the ancient structure. In many parts of the continent, as will become clear in later chapters, no directed and agreed-upon archaeological research programs have been established. There are many regions, and even entire countries, in which incidental discoveries or findings resulting from isolated excavations, usually poorly documented, constitute the only data on which a synthesis can be built. In such a situation, the archaeologist can consider himself lucky if he succeeds in providing general lines for the succession of industrial stages, which constitutes a basic requirement and a precondition for the detailed study of ancient lifestyles and patterns of resource exploitation.
To undertake the task of writing a concise overview of African archaeology, such as is contained in this book, selection and necessarily simplification were necessary in some cases. While some regions provided abundant and diverse archaeological data, other regions were able to provide only scarce and limited material. Thus, in some parts of this book, each site studied is mentioned, while in other parts of the book, only a more general picture emerges, drawn from a series of comparative studies. As a result, we can expect fundamental shifts in interpretation as research and exploration progress.
When constructing an overview of African prehistory, special attention must be paid to establishing a reasonable chronological framework. Age estimates based on radiocarbon analyzes represent a special type of problem, as knowing the relationship between radiocarbon ages on the one hand and true ages on the other hand becomes possible only for the most recent periods. In this book, ages are indicated in the manner described below to reduce confusion and enable comparison between dates derived from different sources and through multiple approaches:
a) In Chapters 2 through 5, ages are given in the form “about such and such a year ago”, that is, since today’s date. These ages apply to stages beyond 7,000 years and should all be taken as estimates. They are ages derived from a variety of sources, mainly - for the last fifty thousand years - radiocarbon, and no attempt has been made to examine or correct them unless this is clarified.
b) In Chapters 6 through 8, dates from 5000 BC are given “in years BC, or AD.” Here the radiocarbon dates are examined and expressed in calendar years according to the Stovrocra calculation. At certain periods, this examination allows only relative ages to be suggested as a result of the variation in radiocarbon content in the atmosphere. Exact dates such as 146 BC. Drawn from historical sources. All ages mentioned in these three chapters are therefore intended to be comparable to each other, but not necessarily equal to those given in Chapters Two through Five.
Since much more data relevant to absolute chronology is now available than the authors of previous synthesises were able to use, and in view of the above-mentioned evidence of different rates of development in different regions, this book does not use terms based on broad technical chronological branches such as “Late Stone Age,” “Neolithic,” or “Iron Age.” It has long been recognized that such terms cannot be precisely defined, but their informal use continues, often at the expense of clarity, and they are therefore avoided in this book.
Language represents an important means of classifying the people of Africa. It constitutes a criterion that has fundamental significance on an individual's sense of identity and belonging to a group. Besides, it has historical validity since we obtain our knowledge of our first language from other members of that group to which we belong by birth and/or upbringing.
There is broad agreement among linguists regarding the major language families in Africa. The diagram in Figure 3:1 shows the distribution of these language families. The languages spoken today in the northern and northeastern regions of the continent belong to the main family generally known as "Afro-Asiatic" or "Eritrean". This family includes the Berber languages of North Africa, the Cushitic dialects centered in Ethiopia and Somalia, as well as the widespread Semitic languages, whose current membership includes Arabic, Amharic, and Hebrew.
To the south emerges an irregularly shaped region covering a large part of the central and southern Sahara, in addition to southern Sudan, the Nile Valley, and part of the surrounding savannah extending to parts of East Africa, where the current languages are mostly classified as Nilotic-Saharan, with their main branches being Nilotic and Sudanese. Some linguists believe that Songhai, which constitutes the spoken language around the Niger Bend, is related to the Nilotic-Saharan group. The current fragmentary distribution of the Nilo-Saharan languages may be an indication that these languages were previously spread over a wider area.
Most of the current languages of West Africa belong to the Niger-Congo language family which can be extended to include the Kordofan languages spoken in western Sudan and the Nile Valley. These languages have developed a known reach in West Africa. On the other hand, the distribution of one subgroup of the Niger-Congo languages extends to include larger parts of central and southern Africa, with the exception of the far southwest, where the Bantu languages prevail. It is noted that despite the large spread area of the Bantu languages, they show a relatively strong degree of similarity to each other. The southern border of the Bantu languages is approximately the northern border of the tropical forest zone. In the forested sector of the savannah, the Oumawa and Ubangi languages belong to the Niger-Congo family.
As will be explained in Chapter 7, there is good evidence that Bantu-speaking peoples spread from the northwest region to the latitudes adjacent to the equator over the course of the past few thousand years. These populations settled in significant parts of this region, or absorbed peoples who spoke the languages of the Khoisan family, as is found now in the far southwestern parts of the continent. These are the Khoi and San languages (whose speakers are in some cases called by the pejorative terms Hottentot and Bushmen and whose speakers have retained their hunting and herding lifestyles to this day). There are indications of the spread of languages related to the Khoisan in early times as far north as the present Kenya-Tanzania border, but further west the extension of their northern spread is less reliable.
These modern languages provide the data on which linguists base their conclusions. By studying the distribution of modern linguistic forms, the linguist is able to reconstruct some of the features of the languages of the past from which modern languages are derived, and to suggest the regions in which those ancestral languages were spoken. The vocabulary known about those ancestral languages can tell us something about the lifestyles of their speakers and about the things they were used to. Words, as a result of the emerging contact between peoples, are transmitted from one language to neighboring languages. Those transmitted words can also be traced. Through such studies, it becomes possible to reconstruct the linguistic prehistory of Africa in a coherent manner.
We do not, of course, have specific information about the varying speeds at which the process of linguistic change proceeds. Only in the case of languages with a long written history is it possible to calculate this speed accurately. Linguistics alone can provide only a relative order of processes and events besides a very tentative representation of temporal extensions. It is necessary to look with some caution at chronological formulas (a method of calculating the ages in which linguistic developments occurred), especially when applied to non-written content, since these formulas assume that linguistic change occurs at a consistent rate. However, when there are links between independent trends based mainly on archeology and linguistics, the chronology of linguistics can stand on more solid ground. Historical reconstruction based on the basis of linguistic studies can provide specific support for the archaeological evidence in areas that have not been subjected to extensive excavation work, and because many aspects of intergroup relations that linguistic studies highlight are difficult to clarify on the basis of archaeological evidence. Such linguistic restructuring is associated with the last five to six thousand years, although attempts were made to apply these approaches at earlier stages.
To give a proper interpretation of the historical lineages retained in many African societies, we must recognize the role that these lineages play in societies and the reasons behind their reassembly. Oral traditions are often carefully preserved and retold among people who have a centralized political system. In such cases, the function of historical lineages is usually focused on supporting the existing authority, for example, by explaining the origin of the clan or ruling family and the way in which its members claim their right to exercise rule. Many societies recognize this aspect of oral tradition and have official historians whose duty is to preserve orthodox versions of the state's history and pass it on to subsequent generations.
There is general agreement that traditions that claim to be related to events more than four or five centuries ago must be interpreted with special caution. Absolute chronology (in the Western sense of the concept) does not constitute a focus of interest for keepers of oral traditions, and events may in some cases have occurred in a period much earlier than their literal interpretation to which narratives proceed. Oral historical narratives, as is the case with written history, show a tendency to focus on political events and the activities of prominent figures. Therefore, it is not an alternative to archeology as a source of historical information. Compiling a comprehensive picture of Africa's past becomes possible only through available sources.
The recognizable archaeological picture of Africa's past is of great importance to the study of human prehistory. Evidence of the lifestyle and physical characteristics of the first early humans is currently available only from African sites. While it is difficult to provide conclusive proof that humans first evolved in Africa, there is a strong possibility that this is the case. The frequency of African hunter-gatherer societies is the most extended in time and also the most diverse of the known frequencies. It extends from the origins of humanity to the present day and provides, potentially, an evolutionary link between the studies of primate behavior specialists and social anthropologists. It demonstrates adaptation to a wide variety of environments, ranging from deserts and high-glaciation latitudes on the one hand, to rainforests and coastal swamps on the other. The fundamental initial changes occurred over two or three million years and are the changes that concern us here, but these changes were not on the same scale in Africa as those witnessed in the northern latitudes. Although the distribution of environmental changes has undergone numerous shifts, the extent of conditions exploited by prehistoric hunter-gatherers has been preserved in Africa in a way that is unparalleled on other continents where humans lived in the Middle Pleistocene or earlier times. This continuity, both in ecology and in the hunter/gatherer lifestyle itself, gives Africa an unparalleled range of possibilities for interpreting major trends and processes in human evolution.
Clark had noticed that progress in stone tool manufacturing technology followed similar paths and stages in most parts of the world. The manufacture of pointed blades of the type that characterized the Upper Paleolithic in Europe and West Asia was considered a precursor to the development of food production, and thus a precursor to the eventual development of non-literate civilizations. This hypothesis has been questioned, particularly for Africa, based on the fact that this type of industry was not common in sub-Saharan Africa, while microlithic industries of the type made by early food producers in Europe and the Near East existed there from a very early date. Recent research has confirmed the validity of this observation and proven the existence of microlithic industries in South Africa at a more ancient date than anywhere else in the world. Not only are they much older than European and Asian blade industries, but they are also associated with the most ancient fossils known to date, which can be safely traced back to modern humans, sapiens sapiens (i.e., anatomically modern humans - the translator). These discoveries become even more important as a result of contemporary genetic research indicating that all populations of the modern human species could have descended from an African ancestor. Far from being a backwater as previously assumed, Africa may have been a global leader in the evolution of our species as well as its technical development in the Upper Pleistocene.
The current research has also included a reassessment of the evidence for sedentary life forms and food production in Africa. These developments can be seen, at least in sub-Saharan Africa, as having occurred gradually and independently of similar processes in other parts of the world. It seems that sedentary life appeared in what is now the southern desert and the plain in the form of water-rich environments that prevailed there at the beginning of the Holocene. It is now recognized that this region represents the home of many plant species that have subsequently been domesticated as important food crops here and in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and additional crops have been developed in Ethiopia, and others in the tropical forest fringes. Although domesticated animals (which roamed sub-Saharan grasslands) were apparently brought from elsewhere, it has become clear that Africa was an essential area for the primary cultivation of various vegetables, yams, rice and dry grains.
With the exception of the Egyptian Nile Valley, no other part of the African continent witnessed the emergence of a local non-literate civilization, because external influences had a clear contribution to the emergence of the Sudanese Nilotic city of Meroe, the city of Axum, and the civilization of the eastern coast of Africa. What are the main elements that contributed to the emergence of a non-literate civilization in Egypt and elsewhere and were absent in the rest of Africa? The Egyptian Nile Valley is distinguished by the high fertility of its soil as a result of the river's seasonal floods. But on the other hand, the deserts surrounding the place hindered any physical expansion of the population crowded on both banks of the river beyond the capacity of the fertile valley to accommodate them. Similar situations prevailed in other early urban centers: the Indus Valley, the Euphrates Island, the Yellow River, Mexico, and others. The resulting pressure required control that could only be achieved through a socio-political system, a highly complex codified system of the kind that would not be suitable for the smaller, less complex societies found in most other parts of the continent. It may be said that the richness of the African environment and its lack of physical barriers is what has usually allowed, at least in part, African societies to develop their own forms and systems free from the restrictions imposed by illiterate civilization.
But it would be more relevant to our topic to pay attention to what Africa has accomplished rather than what it has not accomplished. At the core of our topic is assessing the development of African societies as revealed by archaeology and other sciences, from an internal point of view before resorting to comparison with their counterparts in other parts of the world. This makes it possible to evaluate African achievements in their African content, and to estimate the extent of economic and technical activities, socio-political systems, and beliefs that have been developed according to varying population densities, physical barriers, means of transportation, and available resources. This way we can see the optimal way in which different environments were exploited. We can see why bronze mold casting technology has reached such a high level of recognized skill in West Africa while other aspects - such as transportation - have seen little change over long periods. We can value oral tradition as a counterpart to written literature, and gaze with amazement at ancient art forms made of wood and other ephemeral materials that are currently known to us from modern examples. African archeology provides us with a new and unique view of the development of culture leading to modern societies, which today are considered not as failures that fell into a byproduct during the growth of the industrial revolution, but as examples of different expressions of human culture that are fully adapted to the circumstances of their practitioners.
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