Africa has the longest and arguably the most diverse archaeological record of any of the continents. It is where the human lineage first evolved and from where Homo sapiens spread across the rest of the world. Later, it witnessed novel experiments in food-production and unique trajectories to urbanism and the organisation of large communities that were not always structured along strictly hierarchical lines. Millennia of engagement with societies in other parts of the world confirm Africa's active participation in the construction of the modern world, while the richness of its history, ethnography, and linguistics provide unusually powerful opportunities for constructing interdisciplinary narratives of Africa's past. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. As well as covering almost all periods and regions of the continent, it includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates, and situates the subject's contemporary practice within the discipline's history and the infrastructural challenges now facing its practitioners. Bringing together essays on all these themes from over seventy contributors, many of them living and working in Africa, it offers a highly accessible, contemporary account of the subject for use by scholars and students of not only archaeology, but also history, anthropology, and other disciplines.

A landmark introduction to the archaeology of Africa that challenges misconceptions & claims about Africa's past and teaches students how to evaluate these claims. Provides an unprecedented and exciting introduction to the archaeology of AfricaChallenges misconceptions & claims about Africa's past and teaches students how to evaluate these claims Includes a thoughtful introduction that explores the contexts that have shaped archaeological knowledge of Africa's past Lays out research questions that have shaped the contours of African archaeology Comprised of chapters specifically written for thi.

Scholarly work that attempts to match linguistic and archaeological evidence in precolonial Africa

Historical Archaeology in Africa is an inquiry into historical questions that count, proposing different ways of thinking about historical archaeology. Peter Schmidt challenges readers to expand their horizons . Confronting topics of oral traditions, the role of cultural landscapes in social memory, and historical misrepresentations of various cultures, Schmidt calls for a new pathway to an enriched, more nuanced, and more inclusive historical archaeology. Allowing Africa to speak for itself without colonial interpreters, Historical Archaeology in Africa will be of interest not only to historians and archaeologists, but to all concerned with Africa's past and present.

This volume explores the range of interactions between the historical sources and archaeology that are available on the African continent. Written by a range of experts on different aspects of African archaeology, this book represents the first consideration of historical archaeology over the African continent as a whole. This seminal volume also explores Africa's place in global systems of thought and economic development and is of interest to historical archaeologists and historians.

This is the first book devoted to the archaeology of African life on both sides of the Atlantic; it highlights the importance of archaeology in completing the historical records of the Atlantic world's Africans. Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora presents a diverse, richly textured picture of Africans' experiences during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and offers the most comprehensive explanation of how African lives became entangled with the creation of the modern world. Through interdisciplinary approaches to material culture, the dynamics of a comparative transatlantic archaeology is developed.