Download or read book Current Archaeological Research in Ghana written by Timothy Insoll and published by British Archaeological Reports Oxford Limited. This book was released on 2008 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 74 Series Editors: John Alexander, Laurence Smith and Timothy Insoll

Download or read book Current Perspectives in the Archaeology of Ghana written by Anquandah, James and published by Sub-Saharan Publishers. This book was released on 2015-04-26 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays on archaeology and heritage studies is authored by local and expatriate scholars who are either past or current practitioners in archaeological work in Ghana. They are from Ghana, UK, US and Canada. The subject matter covered includes the history and evolution of the discipline in Ghana; the method and theory or 'how to do it' in archaeology, field research reports, and syntheses on findings from past and recent investigations. The eclectic or multidisciplinary strategy has been the research vogue in Ghanaian archaeology recently, and this is reflected in the various chapters. The essays engage with current theoretical trends in global archaeology and also focus on the role and status of archaeology as a discipline in Ghanaian society today. Archaeology is a relatively 'novel' subject to many in Ghana. This Reader will, therefore, be a huge asset to local students and experts alike. Foreign scholars will also find it very useful.

Download or read book Temporalising Anthropology written by Timothy Insoll and published by Africa Magna Verlag. This book was released on 2013 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the results of significant fieldwork completed in the Tong Hills of Northern Ghana, an area currently inhabited by the Talensi ethno-linguistic group. Although made anthropologically renowned by the anthropologist Meyer Fortes, the archaeology and material culture of the Talensi Tong Hills had largely been neglected until the research initiated by the authors. Extensive archaeological surveys and excavations were completed allied with ethnoarchaeological and ethnobotanical research on shrines, sacrifice, and indigenous medicine. The data is presented and described, and a settlement chronology for the region reconstructed. The results of the geological, organic geochemical, petrographic, and archaeometallurgical analysis are provided. The function of shrines and the meaning of 'shrine' as a concept are evaluated, and indigenous medicinal practices, their links with shrines, and their substances, materiality, and archaeological implications assessed with reference to the primary empirical material gathered. Ritual, performance, and its inter-relation with the past and the archaeological record are also considered so as to question the 'timelessness' of previous anthropological presentations. The Tong Hills are also discussed with reference to their place in the wider history and archaeology of the region. This book will be useful to anyone interested in the archaeology and anthropology of African indigenous religions and ritual practices, as well as those interested in West African history, and the relationship between archaeology and anthropology.

Download or read book Materializing Colonial Encounters written by François G. Richard and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-09-19 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the material production and expression of colonial experiences in Africa. It combines archaeological, historical, and ethnographic sources to explore the diverse pathways, practices, and projects constructed by Africans in their engagement with the forces of colonial modernity and capitalism. This volume is situated in ongoing debates in archaeological and anthropological approaches to materiality. In this respect, it seeks to target archaeologists interested in the conceptual issues provoked by colonial enfoldments. It is also concerned with increasing the visibility of relevant African archaeological literature to scholars of colonialism and imperialism laboring in other fields. This book brings together an array of junior and senior scholars, whose contributions represent a rich sample of the vibrant archaeological research conducted in Africa today, blending conceptual inspiration with robust fieldwork. The chapters target a variety of cultural, historical, and colonial settings. They are driven by a plurality of perspectives, but they are bound by a shared commitment to postcolonial, critical, and material culture theories. While this book focuses on western and southern Africa – the sub-regions that boast the deepest traditions of historical archaeological research in the continent – attention was also placed on including case-studies from traditionally less well-represented areas (East African and Swahili coasts, Madagascar), whose material pasts are nevertheless essential to a wider comprehension of variability and comparability of ‘modern’ colonial conditions. Consequently, this volume lends a unique wide-ranging look at African experiences across the tangle of imperial geographies on the continent, with case-studies focusing on Anglophone, Francophone, and Dutch-speaking contexts. This volume is an exciting opportunity to present this work to wider audiences and foster conversations with a wide community of scholars about the material fashioning of colonial life, relations, and configurations of power.

Download or read book Imagining Vernacular Histories written by Mobolanle Ebunoluwa Sotunsa and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining Vernacular Histories is centered on the idea of engaging with indigenous African cosmologies that signal at pluriversality. In conversation with Toyin Falola’s reading of the African pluriverse and his exploration of the idea of “ritual archives,” the contributors to this volume rethink the historical archive in search of vernacular histories. Simultaneously, they recognize the contributions from various other disciplines in pluralizing the term vernacular. The book brings together a wide range of topics, such as reflections on African historiography; the relationship between memory, history and literature; gender relations; and the construction of historical archives. While appropriating Falola’s conception of vernacular histories, the contributors collectively argue that pluriversality and ritual archives can potentially rescue African historical and creative scholarship from the sustained practices of epistemicide. Simultaneously, Imagining Vernacular Histories focuses on the emerging interdisciplinary conversations on constructing the pluriverse as well as on the geopolitics of knowledge production. Through a critical appreciation of Falola’s engagement with the ideas of postcoloniality, decolonizing epistemologies, and pluriversality, this book locates his scholarship in relation to postcolonial theory emerging from the Global South.

Download or read book Market as Place and Space of Economic Exchange written by Hans Peter Hahn and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of commodification, material culture has particular properties hitherto considered irrelevant or neglected. First, the market is a spatial structure, assigning special properties to the things offered: the goods and commodities. Secondly, the market defines a principle of dealing with things, including them in some contexts, excluding them from others. The contributions to Market as Place and Space address a variety of aspects of markets within the framework of archaeological and anthropological case studies and with a special focus on the indicators of practices attached to the commodities and their valuation.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology written by Peter Mitchell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 1077 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides a comprehensive 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. It includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates and situates the subject's contemporary practice.

Download or read book Divine Consumption written by Stephen A. Dueppen and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kirikongo is an archaeological site composed of thirteen remarkably well-preserved discrete mounds occupied continually from the early first to the mid second millennium AD. It spans a dynamic era that saw the growth of large settlement communities and regional socio-political formations, development of economic specializations, intensification in interregional commercial networks, and the effects of the Black Death pandemic. The extraordinary preservation of architectural units, activity areas and industrial zones provides a unique opportunity to discern the cultural practices that created stratified mounds (tells) in this part of West Africa. Building from a new detailed zooarchaeological analysis and refinements in stratigraphic precision, this book argues that repeated ritual activity was a significant factor in the accumulation of stratified archaeological deposits. The book details consistencies in form and content of discrete loci containing animal bones, food remains, and broken and unbroken objects and suggests that these are the remnants of sequential ancestor shrines created when domestic spaces were converted to tombs or dedicated mortuary monuments were constructed. Continuities and transformations in ancestral rituals at Kirikongo inform on earlier West African ritual practices from the second millennium BC as well as political and social transformations at the site. More broadly, this case study provides new insights on anthropogenic mound (tell) formation processes, social zooarchaeology, material culture theory, historical ontology, and the analysis of ritual and religion in the archaeological record.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines written by Timothy Insoll and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-13 with total page 1123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figurines dating from prehistory have been found across the world but have never before been considered globally. The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines is the first book to offer a comparative survey of this kind, bringing together approaches from across the landscape of contemporary research into a definitive resource in the field. The volume is comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible, with dedicated and fully illustrated chapters covering figurines from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia and the Pacific laid out by geographical location and written by the foremost scholars in figurine studies; wherever prehistoric figurines are found they have been expertly described and examined in relation to their subject matter, form, function, context, chronology, meaning, and interpretation. Specific themes that are discussed by contributors include, for example, theories of figurine interpretation, meaning in processes and contexts of figurine production, use, destruction and disposal, and the cognitive and social implications of representation. Chronologically, the coverage ranges from the Middle Palaeolithic through to areas and periods where an absence of historical sources renders figurines 'prehistoric' even though they might have been produced in the mid-2nd millennium AD, as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a synthesis of invaluable insights into past thinking on the human body, gender, identity, and how the figurines might have been used, either practically, ritually, or even playfully.

Download or read book Identity Meets Nationality written by Helen Lauer and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2011 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions about how social conditioning and historical circumstances influence assumptions about who we are and how others perceive who we are have attracted wide ranging discussion across the disciplines in the arts, humanities and allied sciences. Simultaneously, since the Independence period, scholars have deliberated over the varied implications of new states emerging throughout Africa. The peer-reviewed selected papers for this anthology represent a cross section of the diverse perspectives reflecting research and cross-disciplinary collaborations undertaken by members of the University of Ghana faculty and graduate students working in archaeology, literary criticism of African as well as English and Russian literatures, economics, history, cognitive psychology, linguistics, dance, music, philosophy, sociology, and the study of religions.

Download or read book Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa written by Peter R. Schmidt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides new insights into the distinctive contributions that community archaeology and heritage make to the decolonization of archaeological practice. Using innovative approaches, the contributors explore important initiatives which have protected and revitalized local heritage, initiatives that involved archaeologists as co-producers rather than leaders. These case studies underline the need completely reshape archaeological practice, engaging local and indigenous communities in regular dialogue and recognizing their distinctive needs, in order to break away from the top-down power relationships that have previously characterized archaeology in Africa. Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa reflects a determined effort to change how archaeology is taught to future generations. Through community-based participatory approaches, archaeologists and heritage professionals can benefit from shared resources and local knowledge; and by sharing decision-making with members of local communities, archaeological inquiry can enhance their way of life, ameliorate their human rights concerns, and meet their daily needs to build better futures. Exchanging traditional power structures for research design and implementation, the examples outlined in this volume demonstrate the discipline’s exciting capacity to move forward to achieve its potential as a broader, more accessible, and more inclusive field.

Download or read book British Forts and Their Communities written by Christopher R. DeCorse and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the military features of historic forts usually receive the most attention from researchers, this volume focuses instead on the people who met and interacted in these sites. Contributors to British Forts and Their Communities look beyond the defensive architecture, physical landscapes, and armed conflicts to explore the complex social diversity that arose in the outposts of the British Empire. The forts investigated here operated at the empire's peak in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, protecting British colonial settlements and trading enclaves scattered across the globe. Locations in this volume include New York State, Michigan, the St. Lawrence River, and Vancouver, as well as sites in the Caribbean and in Africa. Using archaeological and archival evidence, these case studies show how forts brought together people of many different origins, ethnicities, identities, and social roles, from European soldiers to indigenous traders to African slaves. Characterized by shifting networks of people, commodities, and ideas, these fort populations were microcosms of the emerging modern world. This volume reveals how important it is to move past the conventional emphasis on the armed might of the colonizer in order to better understand the messy, entangled nature of British colonialism and the new era it helped usher in. Contributors: Zachary J.M. Beier | Flordeliz T. Bugarin | Robert Cromwell | Christopher R. DeCorse | Liza Gijanto | Guido Pezzarossi | Douglas Pippin | Amy Roache-Fedchenko | Gerald F. Schroedl | David R. Starbuck | Douglas C. Wilson

Download or read book Germany and Its West African Colonies written by Wazi Apoh and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2013 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: West African history is usually seen as mainly influenced by English or French colonialism. There is a new interest in German colonialism, but most research is done in European archives and with a European point-of-view. This book explores German colonial exploits and their consequences in Ghana, Togo, and Cameroon, mostly from an African point-of-view. By means of research on sites of the colonial hinterland and the agency of entangled people, the book reveals the simmering impact of the past encounters on indigenous religious, cultural, political, and socio-economic developments in West Africa. (Series: African Studies / Afrikanische Studien - Vol. 49)

Download or read book Theory in Africa Africa in Theory written by Stephanie Wynne-Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory in Africa, Africa in Theory explores the place of Africa in archaeological theory, and the place of theory in African archaeology. The centrality of Africa to global archaeological thinking is highlighted, with a particular focus on materiality and agency in contemporary interpretation. As a means to explore the nature of theory itself, the volume also addresses differences between how African models are used in western theoretical discourse and the use of that theory within Africa. Providing a key contribution to theoretical discourse through a focus on the context of theory-building, this volume explores how African modes of thought have shaped our approaches to a meaningful past outside of Africa. A timely intervention into archaeological thought, Theory in Africa, Africa in Theory deconstructs the conventional ways we approach the past, positioning the continent within a global theoretical discourse and blending Western and African scholarship. This volume will be a valuable resource for those interested in the archaeology of Africa, as well as providing fresh perspectives to those interested in archaeological theory more generally.

Download or read book Breaking Images written by Gianluca Miniaci and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2023-02-16 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeological remains are ‘fragmented by definition’: apart from exceptional cases, the study of the human past takes into account mainly traces, ruins, discards, and debris of past civilizations. It is rare that things have been preserved as they were originally made and conceived in the past. However, not all the ancient fragmentary objects were the ‘leftovers’ from the past. A noticeable portion of them was part and parcel of the ancient materiality already in the form of a fragment or damaged item. In 2000, John Chapman, with his volume Fragmentation in Archaeology, attracted the attention of scholars on the need to reconsider broken artifacts as the result of the deliberate anthropic process of physical fragmentation. The phenomenon of fragmentation can be thus explored with more outcomes for a category of objects that played an important role inside the society: the figurines. Due to their portability and size, figurines are particularly entangled and engaged in social, spatial, temporal, and material relations, and – more than other artifacts – can easily accommodate acts of embodiment and dismemberment. The act of creation symmetrically also involves the act of destruction, which in turn is another act of creation, since from the fragmentation comes a new entity with a different ontology. Breaking contains the paradigms of life: creation and reparation, destruction and regeneration. The scope of this volume is to search for traces of any voluntary and intentional fragmentation of ancient artifacts, creating, improving, and sharpening the methods and principles for a scientific investigation that goes beyond single author impression or sensitivity. The comparative lens adopted in this volume can allow the reader to explore different fields taken from ancient societies of how we can address, assess, detect, and even discuss the action of breaking and mutilation of ancient figurines.

Download or read book Archaeology of Spiritualities written by Kathryn Rountree and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeology of Spiritualties provides a fresh exploration of the interface between archaeology and religion/spirituality. Archaeological approaches to the study of religion have typically and often unconsciously, drawn on western paradigms, especially Judaeo-Christian (mono) theistic frameworks and academic rationalisations. Archaeologists have rarely reflected on how these approaches have framed and constrained their choices of methodologies, research questions, hypotheses, definitions, interpretations and analyses and have neglected an important dimension of religion: the human experience of the numinous - the power, presence or experience of the supernatural. Within the religions of many of the world’s peoples, sacred experiences – particularly in relation to sacred landscapes and beings connected with those landscapes – are often given greater emphasis, while doctrine and beliefs are relatively less important. Archaeology of Spiritualities asks how such experiences might be discerned in the archaeological record; how do we recognize and investigate ‘other’ forms of religious or spiritual experience in the remains of the past?. The volume opens up a space to explore critically and reflexively the encounter between archaeology and diverse cultural expressions of spirituality. It showcases experiential and experimental methodologies in this area of the discipline, an unconventional approach within the archaeology of religion. Thus Archaeology of Spiritualities offers a unique, timely and innovative contribution, one that is also challenging and stimulating. It is a great resource to archaeologists, historians, religious scholars and others interested in cultural and religious heritage.

Download or read book Revelations of Dominance and Resilience written by Apoh, Wazi and published by Sub-Saharan Publishers. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinua Achebe ("The art of fiction”) famously observed that until lions have their own historians “the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” In this volume chronicling the complex imperial and colonial entanglements of the Kpando region in eastern Ghana over recent centuries, the lions have found their proverbial historian. Drawing on an array of sources—archaeological, oral historical and documentary—Wazi Apoh brings locally nuanced perspective to the complex social political economic entanglements among Akpini, German and British actors. His illumination of previously silenced histories provides a rich platform from which to provoke us to imagine and act on the possibilities for restorative repatriation in the present. Its novel combination of historical study with analysis of ongoing dialogues over repatriation is a unique contribution to African studies.