Scott MacEachern

Genes, Tribes, and African History.

Over the past 40 years, traditional perspectives on the constitution of human groups have been subjected to stringent critique within anthropology. This began with the dismantling of accepted “race” divisions after World War II and continued with analyses of the meaning and reality of African “tribal” distinctions from the 1960s until the present. Archaeologists, ethnographers, linguists, and historians of Africa now work within a research milieu where social interactions, cultural exchange, and the dynamic nature of group identifications are accepted as a normal part of the human experience. At the same time, new techniques have been developed for the examination of human history, techniques based upon an expanding repertoire of tools for the analysis of genetic variability in human populations. Perhaps the most striking result of this research has been Cavalli‐Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes. Rather less attention has been paid, however, to the conceptual relationships between the human groups defined through such analyses, in Africa and elsewhere, and those defined through other kinds of research. This paper is a preliminary examination of the fit between genetic, archaeological, and ethnographic data on the African past.

Seeing like an oil company’s CHM programme Exxon and archaeology on the Chad Export Project

James Ferguson’s 2005 article ‘Seeing Like an Oil Company’ powerfully described the development of resource-extraction enclaves in African states, and the complex landscape of globally integrated and excluded territories that such enclaves produce. In this article I discuss the experience of doing cultural heritage management within one such enclave: the patchwork of protected camps, rights-of-way and air-conditioned Land-Cruisers associated with the Chad Export Project and oil production in southwestern Chad, one of the poorest countries on Earth. I will particularly examine the relationships between such ‘CHM enclaves’ and the development of national archaeological capabilities in African countries.

Foreign countries: The development of ethnoarchaeology in sub-Saharan Africa

Ethnoarchaeological research in sub-Saharan Africa began as a distinct study in the late 1960s and early 1970s and developed rather differently in different areas of the continent. This variability is related to a number of research circumstances in these regions: the presence of an important francophone archaeological tradition in West Africa, palaeoanthropological studies that have taken place in East and southern Africa over the last 60 years, and a concentration upon the study of forager groups in different parts of the continent. Ethnoarchaeology in West Africa, in East and Central Africa, and in southern Africa are examined in turn, with particular attention paid to the influence of research lineages in each region and to changes in methodologies and theoretical perspectives through time.

Cultural resource management and Africanist archaeology

Among the general public, the extraordinarily important role played by cultural resource management (hereafter CRM) procedures in the conservation of archaeological materials usually goes unrecognized. Popular images of the swashbuckling adventures of Indiana Jones, or somewhat more generally of intrepid archaeologists making the latest Fiild of the Century, do not accord well with the concept that the remains of past human activities are actual resources, ones that can and should be managed in the interest of nations and their citizens. All too often, the significance of CRM legislation and the archaeological research that stems from it is not recognized even by academic archaeologists, in part because publication procedures and venues are so different in the worlds of academic and contract archaeology.

Africanist archaeology and ancient IQ : racial science and cultural evolution in the twenty-first century

Abstract Over the last two decades, a number of psychometric researchers have claimed that very substantial differences in intelligence exist among modern human racial groups, as these groups are traditionally defined. According to these researchers, African populations suffer severe cognitive deficits when compared to other modern humans. Philippe Rushton, particularly, places these claimed mental deficits in an evolutionary context, advancing environmental explanations for such deficits and asserting that such cognitive differences existed prehistorically as well. Such substantial cognitive differences should be evident in human behavioural patterns, and thus in the archaeological record. Archaeological data can thus be used to test these claims about human evolutionary development and modern human cognitive difference. Examination of the archaeological record does not support the claims made by these researchers. This suggests that regional differences in IQ test score results should not be ascribed to variations in human evolutionary development.

Analysis of Feature Intervisibility and Cumulative Visibility Using GIS, Bayesian and Spatial Statistics: A Study from the Mandara Mountains, Northern Cameroon

The locations of diy-geδ-bay (DGB) sites in the Mandara Mountains, northern Cameroon are hypothesized to occur as a function of their ability to see and be seen from points on the surrounding landscape. A series of geostatistical, two-way and Bayesian logistic regression analyses were performed to test two hypotheses related to the intervisibility of the sites to one another and their visual prominence on the landscape. We determine that the intervisibility of the sites to one another is highly statistically significant when compared to 10 stratified-random permutations of DGB sites. Bayesian logistic regression additionally demonstrates that the visibility of the sites to points on the surrounding landscape is statistically significant. The location of sites appears to have also been selected on the basis of lower slope than random permutations of sites. Using statistical measures, many of which are not commonly employed in archaeological research, to evaluate aspects of visibility on the landscape, we conclude that the placement of DGB sites improved their conspicuousness for enhanced ritual, social cooperation and/or competition purposes.

Ethnoarchaeology as slow science

ABSTRACT In recent years, the purpose and objectives of ethnoarchaeology have been called into question. In this paper, we propose that ethnoarchaeology might best be considered a form of ‘slow science’ that works to counterbalance ‘big science/fast science’ approaches in archaeology. We consider the interpretative challenges facing archaeology and the risks posed by a shift to fast science approaches that emphasize large-scale, strategic and analytically focused ‘big data’ analyses. We draw on recent literatures that define ‘désexcellence’ and ‘slow science’ approaches, which forefront ethically driven and collaborative research, and suggest that ethnoarchaeology might be well positioned to redefine itself as a form of slow science. Doing so, however, requires redefining ethnoarchaeology’s field objectives and its relations to research subjects.

Monumental architecture in mountain landscapes: the diy-geδ-bay sites of northern Cameroon

The DGB sites are complexes of dry-stone terraces and platforms in the Mandara Mountains of northern Cameroon. They constitute the earliest well-established evidence for human occupation of this region and raise important questions about the nature of monumentality, relationships with social complexity and areal culture history. The present state of knowledge of the DGB sites and questions arising are summarised and reviewed. While it appears that the sites represent indigenous responses to major areal droughts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this is neither a complete explanation nor does it address the relationship between the montagnards and the state societies at that time developing in the surrounding plains. Deeper understanding of the DGB sites requires research into their variation and their roles within inhabited landscapes, as well as a reformulation of largely implicit models of historical process and agency corresponding to a topographical dichotomisation of mountain and plains.

Wandala and the DGB sites: political centralisation and its alternatives north of the Mandara Mountains, Cameroon

The DGB sites, with their striking dry-stone architecture, are the largest and among the earliest archaeological sites in the northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. Even given their size and internal complexity, they provide only ambiguous messages about what power and authority might have looked like in the region five centuries ago. At the same time, these sites are situated in proximity to the heartland of the Wandala polity, which was first noted in European and Arabic sources over the period of DGB occupation. Over the next centuries, Wandala progressively differentiated itself from neighbouring Chadic-speaking communities, adopting the political appurtenances and expansionist tactics of an Islamic Sudanic state. This paper discusses the implications of this geographic and political proximity for both Wandala and the occupants of the DGB sites.

Beyond the belly of the house Space and power around the Mandara Mountains

The northeastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon and Nigeria are occupied at high population densities, with households spread across an abrupt mountain landscape. Ritual and political power in this area inheres to a great extent to the physical being of the mountains themselves. The exercise of such power is dispersed within mountain households, with few opportunities for aggregation of authority through control of communal activity in public spaces. The plains around these mountains are occupied at lower densities, by nucleated Islamic communities integrated within the Wandala state. Fewer roles for household ritual remain, and communal activity in public spaces is controlled by Wandala elites. Archaeological data indicate that the predecessors of both mountain and plains societies were iron-using communities in the plains around the massif. This article discusses the evolution of ritual and political systems over the last two millennia, from the plains to the mountains above them, and the implications of those changes for our understanding of how prehistoric groups in this area would have used public and private spaces.