For centuries Europeans accessed their past through the Other's present. The yawning expanse of deep time opened by Brixham Cave (Trigger 1989:93–94) was rapidly peopled in the image of the world's backward populations, neatly ordered according to the progressive developmentalism of Enlightenment conjectural histories. Book titles evoked the methodology that flowed from a progressive developmental epistemology: Prehistoric Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages (Lubbock 1865), or Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives (Sollas 1915). By traveling in space, Europeans simultaneously traveled in time (Fabian 1983:8; also Thomas [1989]). Uniformitarian premises underwrote the methodology that shaped comparison of past and present; comparing like to like, savage to savage, barbarian to barbarian, prehistorians animated Europe's deep past, beyond the reach of documentary sources. Thus, for Lubbock (1865:426–582), descriptions of “non-metallic modern savages” supplemented the fragmentary insights of mute stone tools (Stahl 1993a:237–242). This comparative method – “that omnivorous intellectual machine permitting the ‘equal’ treatment of human culture at all times and in all places” (Fabian 1983:16–17) – held sway so long as categories of mundane and typological time (ages and stages, terms like traditional/modern, preliterate/literate, precapitalist/capitalist; Fabian 1983:22–23) dominated anthropology.

This chapter turns to the problem of how we envision a lived past in light of the changing disciplinary contours outlined in Chapter I. Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists today share an interest in how local, everyday practices were shaped and reshaped by broader historical forces.

The study of Africa's past has been divided, pie-like, between disciplines with separate yet overlapping histories: history, archaeology, and, more recently, anthropology. These divisions mirror disciplinary boundaries that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as the academy took its modern form. During the present century, these divisions at times blurred, yet each discipline carries with it the freight of its own history (Wolf 1994:1), the assumptions and methods that shape inquiry, the prism through which disciplinary perspectives are refracted. In this chapter, I examine the historic turn in anthropology (cf. McDonald 1996) and its relationship with African history, examining the promise of a robust multidisciplinary understanding of Africa's past. Few studies have delivered on that promise, and I examine how now-rejected paradigms continue to inhibit meaningful integration of historical, anthropological, and archaeological insights into Africa's past. More specifically, I examine a series of epistemological legacies that shape methods of historical reasoning, including progressive evolutionism, the direct historic approach, structural functionalism, and tribal models. I argue that these legacies actively create and maintain a series of silences about Africa's past, silences that are perpetuated by contemporary academic practice.

Silences in the production of history

The textbook history of our youth was a history of states and statesmen, of men primarily, and Europeans predominantly, with a firm focus on events of evident significance. It was a history peopled by few, absent of many.

The notion of the “pre-colonial” as a time “prior to impact” (Ranger 1993:69) is belied by West Africa's long-standing connections with the larger world. Trans-Saharan caravan networks linked West Africa, the Islamic Mediterranean, and, indirectly, Christian Europe from the end of the first millennium ad. Fifteenth-century Portuguese mariners pioneered sea routes, providing an artery for the flow of West African gold to Europe. Later, manufactured goods were ferried to Africa, exchanged for humans exported to bondage in the New World, where they produced raw materials for European industry. This infamous triangle of trade intimately linked the political-economic fates of four continents. Their fates were no less linked with the abolition of the slave trade and the shift to “legitimate” trade early in the nineteenth century. The partitioning of Africa at the Berlin Conference (1884–85) ushered in the relatively brief colonial period, during which the map of Africa took its present form. Growing involvement of European capital and distinctive forms of development (and underdevelopment) ensured continued links between West African nation states and the global economy in the postcolonial period. While the broad strokes of these political-economic developments are well known, their impact on the daily lives of people – especially those living in areas removed from the coast – are poorly understood.

The history of the Banda area, insignificant today from a global economic perspective, mirrors this well-rehearsed series of extraregional developments. Banda has been variably integrated into spheres of power whose geographical focus lay in different directions.

This lengthy chapter is divisible into two parts. In the first we tackle the definition of style and discuss where it resides, how it is produced, its function as a medium of information exchange, and its behavioral basis. In the second, we present critical analyses of four studies of manifestations of stylistic behavior on scales greater than that of a single community, three of which are genuinely regional in their scope. Why devote what might seem disproportionate space to this topic? Because there would be no archaeology if archaeologists did not regard the form of artifacts as in some manner informing on the culture that produced them. In 1912 when the Abbé Breuil (1913) delivered his classic address he relied on morphological differences in a variety of bone and stone tool types to distinguish cultural subdivisions of the European upper paleolithic and as a basis for inferring their evolutionary relationships. A characteristic European neolithic decorative tradition defines the “Linear Pottery culture,” and so on.

We begin by explaining why and how ethnoarchaeology came to be, and give an example from Peru as an illustration of what it is. Then, after explaining the plan of this book, we define the subject and offer a periodized history, concluding the chapter with a glimpse of what it is to be an ethnoarchaeologist.

Why ethnoarchaeology?

Archaeological interpretation is founded and ultimately depends upon analogy – a form of inference that holds that if something is like something else in some respects it is likely to be similar in others. We use it to recognize a flint flake as an artifact or, built into a long chain of reasoning, to impute a tributary mode of production to early civilizations (Trigger 1993: 45–6). Archaeologists draw upon their lives and upon everything they have read, heard about or seen in the search for possible analogies to the fragmentary remains they seek to interpret. By the mid-1950s attention was turning to a new range of questions about the past, to approaches to understanding the patterning in artifact assemblages that would lead beyond cultural chronologies and time-space systematics, the organization of cultural variety into convenient temporally and spatially limited packages such as phases and cultures (Willey and Phillips 1958).

Archaeological and ethnoarchaeological approaches

Ethnoarchaeologists have contributed by providing descriptions of ethnographic specimens – archaeological ethnography (sensu Kent) – to the identification of archaeological artifacts and, through ethnoarchaeology, to interpretation of many aspects of their significance. We shall discuss examples, but need first to answer two not so simple questions: what are artifacts and what do archaeologists hope to learn from them? An artifact is something culturally fashioned, arranged, or substantially modified by humans, for example a basket, a circle of unworked megaliths, or the mark of a plough on a buried land surface. Although the concept covers machines and facilities – airplanes, traps, buildings, and the like – we are concerned in this chapter rather with small, transportable objects, tools, weapons, clothing, and decorative items.

This chapter is concerned with ethnoarchaeological contributions to understanding of subsistence-settlement systems, the broad patterns of interaction between demography, economic adaptations, and the environment that result in distribution across the landscape of interrelated sites of varying importance and function. We take a traditional (but not evolutionary) approach, treating studies of hunter-gatherer settlement before ones relating to pastoralists and cultivators. The chapter concludes by discussing contrasts and the concepts of mobility and sedentism.

Settlement patterns and subsistence-settlement systems

Settlements often leave substantial tangible remains on landscapes, and evidence of what their occupants cultivated, gathered, hunted, bred, and ate is also often preserved. It is on the basis of site types and associated remains of plants and animals that archaeologists make provisional identifications of subsistence adaptations, which are often subsumed under such overly broad categories as “hunter-gatherer” or “farmer.” Archaeologists are interested in the closely interrelated matters of subsistence and settlement for many reasons.

The vast majority of publications on ethnoarchaeology take no explicit theoretical position – which does not mean that they are atheoretical. In this chapter we offer the reader a basic toolkit with which to examine the theory, implicit or explicit, expressed in the ethnoarchaeological literature that we will be considering in the course of this book. For two reasons the toolkit we offer at this stage is a minimal one. First, most of us prefer to deal with theoretical complexities as they arise and in a factual context. Second, this is not the place to attempt to survey the wide web of theoretical positions taken by archaeologists (and to a lesser extent ethnoarchaeologists) following an influx of theory reaching anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s from a variety of sources including the philosophy of science, literary theory, and sociology.

Experience has taught us that some consciousness-raising about the differences between archaeological and ethnoarchaeological fieldwork is necessary before young archaeologists are let loose to deal with live “subjects” in the field. This chapter does a little of that but is no substitute for a manual on research methods and the conduct of ethnographic and sociological fieldwork. Of these there are many (e.g., Bernard 1994; Babbie 1998; Berg 1998) to which we strongly recommend that all refer. A second purpose is to encourage critical reading of ethnoarchaeological studies. We are here concerned to establish standards rather than to criticize particular examples, and we will comment on method in discussion of the case studies treated in later chapters. What information about the production of an ethnoarchaeological work does the reader require to evaluate its conclusions?

After introducing the topic of craft specialization and presenting typologies of the phenomenon, we discuss learning of crafts and apprenticeship, focusing on research in India that combines ethnoarchaeology with cognitive psychology. Most of the ethnoarchaeological literature on craft specialization relates either to ceramics or to metallurgy. As ceramics are extensively treated elsewhere in this book, we here limit ourselves to citing a range of studies relating to forms of craft specialization in pottery manufacture. We then present two contrasting approaches to the analysis of agate beadmaking that have conflicting implications for the interpretation of Harappan archaeology. The larger part of the chapter relates to the ethnoarchaeology of metallurgy. Iron smelting in Africa is emphasized, but we also consider blacksmithing and brasscasting.

Specialist craft production

The rise of craft specialization has been tied to numerous factors, including ranking and power structures … the rise of urbanism … elite and/or ritual goods … restricted access to raw materials … trade and exchange systems … and elite control of markets and allocation of resources … It has often been tied directly to metallurgy …

In this chapter we consider ethnoarchaeological studies of trade and exchange, processes repeatedly implicated by archaeologists in the development of complex societies and societal evolution. Of the limited number available we choose five for special attention. These cover a wide range of socioeconomic complexity.

Exchange, trade, and distribution

Let us use “exchange” as a general term for the transfer of goods and services between people, reserving “trade” for forms that involve at least part-time specialists.