Timothy Clack

Place-making, participative archaeologies and Mursi megaliths: some implications for aspects of pre- and proto-history in the Horn of Africa

Abstract Here we present the context and nature of findings from the first season of archaeological survey and trial excavation in an area of Ethiopias Lower Omo Valley. With the exception of well-documented early hominin discoveries, the region has previously been overlooked as a wilderness absent of human inhabitation. Such an outlook has fostered various consequences for strategies of legal, research and conservation policy within the regional boundaries of Mursiland in particular. In this paper recent discoveries of megalithic circular platforms and other archaeological remains are introduced against their dynamic local and regional placement within present-day understandings of place. Furthermore, we emphasise the value of a participative archaeology research framework in which accountability is directed towards common ground between multiple “stake-holders” within the design and dissemination of the research agenda. This demonstrates important possibilities for intricate understandings of wilderness and landscape linked to heritage, conservation, development and tourism.

Mursi ox modification in the Lower Omo Valley and the interpretation of cattle rock art in Ethiopia

Abstract Cattle are a key focus of traditional pastoralist societies in eastern Africa and also figure prominently in the rock art of the region. In both contexts, their cultural and social significance is underscored by colour and decoration. The contemporary Mursi of south-west Ethiopia transform favourite oxen in various ways, including horn alteration, ear cutting and decorative pattern branding. These practices may provide direct insight into cattle portrayal in Ethiopian rock art, where abstract or non-realistic symbols depicted on cattle coats could indicate the modification, alteration or beautification of cattle in prehistoric societies.

Sheltering experience in underground places: thinking through precolonial Chagga Caves on Mount Kilimanjaro

Abstract Questions centring on the significance, occupation and renovation of subterranean features have remained largely unasked and unanswered by archaeologists. This is cause for great concern considering the importance of ‘underground’ elements in archaeological landscapes of diverse periods. This paper examines how insights derived from ethnographic and ethnohistoric study among the Chagga of Mount Kilimanjaro, Northern Tanzania, who extensively utilized underground fastnesses in precolonial times, might be used to inform cave archaeologies. These features were used to shelter people and provisions during episodes of conflict between rival chiefdoms and patrilineages and were also ritually significant. Today these features have fallen into disuse but they retain significance in local traditions. It is posited that cave archaeologies should explicitly consider the meaningfulness of the ‘cave experience’ in their reconstructions of the past and also take advantage of such reconstructions to challenge the primacy too often afforded the ocular.

At the end of military intervention : historical, theoretical and applied approaches to transition, handover and withdrawal

British decolonisation from India and Pakistan underscores some of the factors common to other transitions, such as domestic public opinion, the effect of one’s own casualties on that opinion, the limitations of force and the concerns about published timetables for withdrawal.

Introduction: Anticipating Future Stabilisation

Preventing conflict is better than intervening in one once it is underway, but stabilisation is inherently difficult, not least because few agree on its extent, timing, limits and definition. This introduction indicates the scope of the volume, its examples of stabilisation, navigation through the theoretical literature, and the critiques of the existing policies and doctrines. Johnson and Clack draw out the practical guidance on stabilisation and conflict prevention, while seeking to highlight the key emergent issues. They explain the military roles are training and mentoring, making stand-off interventions, building capacity, and creating ‘investments’ for future stability.

Negotiating the Boundary

The historic study of human origins has choreographed both popular and intellectual conceptions of our species and its ancestry. A commonality in many accounts is the articulation of some fashion of journey from animal to human, a metaphysical narrative of severance (see Stoczkowski 2002). In this perspective either a species is human or it is not, end of discussion. The alternative and perhaps too readily discounted position is to collapse the boundaries of the animal, note that difference is by degree and not kind, and consider beings-intheir-environments. There are, of course, credibility problems with both accounts, and all of the anthropological fields are culpable for their lack of engagement with this issue, as well as related issues. One potential way forward is discussion concerning some of the most fundamental categories we use in relation to such topics: culture, tradition, sociality, animal, and human. Through its intense scrutiny of culture in otherthan-human animals and in bringing together a diversity of opinion and studies from what was a previously scattered and esoteric literature, this volume is most welcome and deserving of attention. Indeed, if we maintain that culture is a substantial part of what defines the human—and, for that matter, that there are clear differences between humans and nonhumans— then it is imperative for us to consider the biogenetic precursors, cognitive mechanisms, and behavioral foundations underlying culture, learning, transmission, and tradition in other species, especially perhaps those most resembling ourselves. The collection is opened by the introduction, where, in addition to outlining the rationale behind the book and its structure and describing the origins of certain key terms that feature in the relevant, mainstream disciplinary outputs of biology, psychology, and primatology, the editors also provide historic contextualization to the major debates characterizing research into animal culture. In chapter 2 Frans de Waal and Kristin Bonnie, both strong advocates of animal culture, claim that certain learning is born out of the desire to conform and thus can be independent of external reinforcement. In part this relates to mirror neurons and other forms of hardwired social facilitation that certain social animals seem to exhibit in helping them “tune” into the various actions and intentions of other group members. Using chimpanzees and capuchins as cases in point, they demonstrate that as social learning is subject to group modifiers and motivators, it is much more than individual learning in social contexts. William McGrew, another long-standing supporter of the position that chimpanzees possess culture, uses chapter 3 to review the variation that has been documented for chimpanzee behavior across Africa. He also makes the point that as we have no direct access into the mind of any primate (human or otherwise), the inferential and methodological instruments of cultural anthropology can be of great assistance to the primatologist, especially if anthropological work shifts its focus from the content to the mechanism of transmission. Chapter 4, by Carel van Schaik, notes that the inferential keystones of comparative geography are pretty solid, and it works through such an approach for orangutans. The author explains that certain geographically variable patterns can be most parsimoniously explained as innovations spread by social learning, although some ecological and genetic effects are also deemed significant. Indeed for van Schaik it is the interaction between ecology, genetics, and cultural transmission that requires future attention. Andrew Whiten revisits his “method of exclusion” in chimpanzee culture research in chapter 5. He acknowledges, somewhat refreshingly, that most of the evidence available is circumstantial. The point is well made that animal traditions are analogues rather than homologues of human culture, and there is also an important discussion concerning the status of terminology. In fact, definitional concerns are, quite rightly, given primacy by many of the contributions, having been identified as central to any progression of understanding. In many respects the battery of opinion in the “culture wars” relates to rudimentary and conflicting conceptualizations. Even in this volume we have scholars working past one another, with culture defined, for example, as multidimensional learning and transmission (McGrew); as composed of multiple traditions, group-typical behavioral repertoires, and interpopulation variation (van Schaik); and as a socially learned complex with symbolism and a ratchet effect (Hill). It is disappointing that despite the aims of the editors, the contributors were not able to reach any kind of compromise relating to definition; such remains a vital project for the future. In chapter 6, Hal Whitehead presents the often overlooked evidence for cetacean culture. He makes a compelling case, while working through data on humpback and sperm whales, that novel statistical methods with similarity matrices at their core can be used to isolate forms of cultural variation. Chapter 7, by Brooke Sargeant and Janet Mann, also concerns aquatic mammals. They focus on intrapopulation variation in the foraging behavior of Shark Bay dolphins and include some tantalizing thoughts about social meaning and specific foraging behaviors. These two contributions are excellent not simply in terms of their well-presented research results but because they force us to consider explicitly the environmental context of animal culture and its correspondence to interindividual difference and synchrony. Kevin Laland, Jeremy Kendal, and Rachel Kendal, preferring a minimalist definition of culture and deploying an im-