The politics of making archaeological knowledge in South Africa: comments on a symposium
In keeping with the APC’s focus on research into South Africa’s long past, we publish here a report by APC honorary research associate John Wright on a series of archaeology symposia he attended at Wits.
‘Twenty Years of Franco-South African Cooperation in Archaeology’. This was the overall title of a series of symposiums organized by the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand on 12-16 October 2015. The series was the brainchild of Adrien Delmas, director of research at IFAS since 2012, who has a strong interest in intellectual history and whose own research aims to bring together the history of written culture and of European imperialism.
The first symposium, on ‘Twenty years of partnership’, was held at the University of Pretoria and dealt mainly with reports on excavations jointly undertaken by French and South African archaeologists at a number of hominin fossil sites and ‘Middle Stone Age’ sites in South Africa. In addition, one report was on French and South African collaboration in rock art research.
Three further symposiums were held at the University of the Witwatersrand, respectively on ‘History of archaeology in South Africa’, ‘Past experiences and new perspectives in rock art studies’, and ‘Lithic technology: overview and prospectives’. The fifth and final symposium, on ‘The relationship between the east African coast and the continental hinterland from the 11th to the 17th century’, was scheduled for the Wits campus, but had to be moved off-campus to IFAS as the Wits student protest movement against fee increases gathered momentum.
I attended the symposium on the history of archaeology and part of the one on connections between the east African coast and its hinterland. My interest was primarily in the ways in which participants took up issues relating to the politics of making archaeological knowledge, so I focus here only on the first-mentioned symposium. These comments are not intended as a comprehensive report: I highlight points that particularly caught my attention and interest.
In introducing the symposium on ‘History of archaeology in South Africa’, Adrien Delmas, posed two questions. The first was ‘Why should the history of archaeology matter?’ In answer, he drew from Foucault’s method of investigating the making of knowledge to insist that archaeologists cannot take the state of knowledge in the discipline for granted, and need to dig deep into the question of where their own ideas and assumptions come from.
The second was ‘How to make archaeology from South Africa?’ His point here was that, while archaeology in this country has a long institutional history, its practitioners need to do more to avoid isolation and parochialism. In particular, they need to see themselves not as on the ‘periphery’ of metropolitan knowledge-making but as part of a network in which ideas circulate globally.
The keynote address was given by Janette Deacon, formerly of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Stellenbosch, on the topic ‘The multiplier effect of familiar facts and fallacious assumptions in the history of Later Stone Age research’. She showed how the idea of the Later Stone Age as an expression of the technology of the ancestors of the historical ‘San’ was built up incrementally from the early 20th century onwards by numbers of archaeologists at numerous sites. Many of them were concerned to modify and expand on received ideas, but none challenged the basic notions set out from the 1920s onward by the big names in the field: Goodwin, Van Riet Lowe, Desmond Clark, and Inskeep.
Deacon’s talk was a useful historical exposition in narrow disciplinary terms, but it did not come anywhere near raising issues about the politics of making archaeological knowledge through decades of settler colonialism. This was very much the tenor of comments from the floor, which focussed on issues of terminology and naming in LSA studies, and how they have been tied up with specific colonial mindsets. As one speaker put it, the names used by archaeologists for the variant cultures of the LSA mean nothing to the great majority of people in South Africa.
Nor did Deacon take us into an issue which today is being highlighted in research done by a number of younger archaeologists in South Africa: the degree to which regional variability shows up in the material cultures that are commonly lumped together under the label ‘Later Stone Age’. More and more these variants are seen as different in important respects from the material cultures of the 20th-century ‘San’ which are often used as analogies for interpreting LSA archaeological finds.
The implications of this perspective for established practices in the discipline are far-reaching. As archaeologist Justin Pargeter puts it, ‘[T]he over-emphasis on the LSA as a representation of San prehistory reduces LSA studies and continues to jeopardise the place of these modern communities in contemporary southern Africa’ (The Digging Stick, Dec. 2014, p. 1).
In a presentation titled ‘The unfulfilled dream: the failure of the Transformation Charter in archaeology’, Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu (University of Pretoria) registered his frustrations that little had been done in archaeological circles or by government since the establishment of constitutional democracy in South Africa in the 1990s to increase the number of black students taking courses in archaeology, and to open up the profession to black graduates. Plans made within the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists in 2007 to ‘transform’ archaeology through a Transformation Charter had never been actively implemented. The need now, as Ndlovu saw it, was for the Association to actively raise funds to establish career posts in museums and heritage institutions to which successful black students could be appointed.
Eric Worby (Wits) touched on a topic that drew a lot of attention in the media in South Africa and abroad in 2015 in his presentation ‘A star is born: Homo naledi and the history of paleoanthropological performance’. His focus was on the way in which Wits palaeontologist Lee Berger staged the public announcement of a new fossil find some two years after its discovery. Worby’s pertinent historical points were that palaeoanthropology has deep roots in European imperial history, with the exhibition and performance of ‘Africa’ in Europe going back to the early 19th century. Discussion of his talk focussed on the power of scientists to name their discoveries, with the big question here being why Berger had chosen an African name for the fossil, and how he had acquired the right to do the naming.
In broad brushstrokes, Amanda Esterhuysen (Wits) used her presentation, ‘Our time is not your time: the chronopolitics of archaeological impact assessments’, to outline the historical complicity of the discipline of archaeology with colonial ways of thinking. From its beginnings in the 1920s until the 1950s, professional archaeology followed a white South Africanist agenda which saw Africans in the past as having lived in a primitive and unchanging tribal world. The scientistic cognitive archaeology which developed from the 1970s onward was concerned with establishing general laws about African cultures, particularly about the nature of ‘mindsets’, and, in spite of strong criticisms from some archaeologists, it remained stuck with the ‘burden of tribalism’.
The ‘cultural history’ approach to the past which predominates in some archaeological circles today still reflects colonial-era thinking. One or two speakers sought to refute Esterhuysen’s line of argument by pointing out that in the 1970s and 1980s archaeologists in South African had fallen into two camps, one supporting the apartheid government, the other opposing it. They missed her point that, with some exceptions, professional archaeologists of all shades had been unable to break decisively with the tribal paradigm.
For the South African scholars (a majority) present at the symposium, a distinctly novel theme was introduced by Nathan Schlanger (Ēcole des Chartes, Paris) in his presentation, ‘Labour in the history of archaeology: from Europe to the world’. In the 18th century, he told us, antiquarians in France, using the vocabulary of the nobility, had described stone artefacts primarily as ‘weapons’. In the 19th century, as the industrial revolution got under way, scholars began seeing artefacts as ‘instruments’, and describing the work done with them as a move towards ‘civilization’. In this vein, the Universal Exposition held in Paris in 1867 celebrated the glory of labour. (Wikipedia tells us that some of the first stone tools to be recognized as such went on display at the Exposition in a ‘gallery of labour history’.)
Schlanger went on to explain that the notion of the chaîne opératoire, or ‘operational sequence’, which is well established among archaeologists today, was originally based on a particularly French nostalgia for artisanal production in a context where people were being replaced by machines. (Wikipedia again: The notion of the chaîne opératoire ‘functions as a methodological tool for analysing the technical processes and social acts involved in the step-by-step production, use, and eventual disposal of artefacts …’.)
Saul Dubow (University of London), who has the intellectual history of South Africa as one of his fields of research, spoke on ‘The dangerous allure of the archaeological past’. The thrust of his presentation was to warn us against the strong temptation to see archaeology as primarily a science. This was the dominant view among archaeologists in the 1970s and 1980s, the precise period, Dubow reminded us, of high apartheid and its projects of modernization. He warned of the dangers of losing touch with the romantic and mythical side of archaeology, the side which attracts the interest and support of the general public. As he put it, whatever the problems with Raymond Dart’s quirky take on Great Zimbabwe, it is much more fun to read than Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s academic reports.
Debunking such work may not be enough: we have to take seriously its popular appeal. The public may not need as much protection from ‘wrong ideas’ as many academic archaeologists and historians like to think: it is patronizing to see people outside academia as unable to develop sceptical perspectives of their own. Amateurs played a major role in the development of archaeology as a discipline in South Africa, and professionals have a major responsibility to make their ideas publicly accessible.
My own presentation was on the theme ‘Thinking towards a deep history of southern Africa in 2015’. My starting-point here was that until recently the notion of the ‘deep history’ of the region for me meant the period that academic historians left to the archaeologists. In effect this meant the whole of southern African history before the mid-18th century. This was as far back as we historians could take the narratives which we developed on the basis of the available recorded oral evidence.
Our immersion, which in many ways has proved immensely productive, in sources such as the James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples (6 vols., 1976-2014, in progress) thus had its downside. It meant that we tended to neglect ways of framing the chronology of the southern African past that were based on other sources, ranging from the Bible to the documents in Arabic, Persian, Portuguese and other languages that the historian G.M. Theal was drawing attention to a hundred years ago to present-day studies of the historical circulation of goods and ideas across the Indian Ocean. In this post-postcolonial era of South Africa’s history it is time for historians of the eras before the establishment of European colonial rule to lift their gaze more widely.
Presentations made at the symposium which I have not commented on, all of them interesting in their own right, were the following:
P. Bonner (Wits), ‘The invention of the Iron Age: Swazi oral tradition and Northern Nguni historical archaeology’
D. Pearce (Wits), ‘“Really marvellous it is”: changing concepts in the study of southern Cape human burials’
A. Schnapp (Univ. Paris 1), ‘Archaeology and the immaterial: how do societies without monuments manage their past?’
K. Sadr (Wits), ‘The origin of herding in southern Africa and the “Neolithic” concept’.