Historical Archaeology In South Africa

Download or read book An Archaeology of Colonial Identity written by Gavin Lucas and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores three key groups: The Dutch East India Company, the free settlers, and the slaves, through a number of archaeological sites and contexts. With the archaeological evidence, the book examines how these different groups were enmeshed within racial, sexual, and class ideologies in the broader context of capitalism and colonialism, and draws extensively on current social theory, in particular post-colonialism, feminism, and Marxism.

Download or read book Historical Archaeology in South Africa written by Carmel Schrire and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume documents the analysis of excavated historical archaeological collections at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. The corpus provides a rich picture of life and times at this distant outpost of an immense Dutch seaborne empire during the contact period. Representing over three decades of excavation, conservation, and analysis, the book examines ceramics, glass, metal, and other categories of artifacts in their archaeological contexts. An enclosed CD includes a video reconstruction plus a comprehensive catalog and color illustrations of the artifacts in the corpus. The parallels and contrasts this volume reveals will help scholars studying the European expansion period to build a richer comparative picture of colonial material culture.

Download or read book The Archaeology of Southern Africa written by Peter Mitchell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-14 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an archaeological synthesis of Southern Africa.

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 369 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 Cognitive Archaeology written by David Whitley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive Archaeology: Mind, Ethnography, and the Past in South Africa and Beyond aims to interpret the social and cultural lives of the past, in part by using ethnography to build informed models of past cultural and social systems and partly by using natural models to understand symbolism and belief. How does an archaeologist interpret the past? Which theories are relevant, what kinds of data must be acquired, and how can interpretations be derived? One interpretive approach, developed in southern Africa in the 1980s, has been particularly successful even if still not widely known globally. With an expressed commitment to scientific method, it has resulted in deeper, well-tested understandings of belief, ritual, settlement patterns and social systems. This volume brings together a series of papers that demonstrate and illustrate this approach to archaeological interpretation, including contributions from North America, Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, in the process highlighting innovative methodological and substantive research that improves our understanding of the human past. Professional archaeological researchers would be the primary audience of this book. Because of its theoretical and methodological emphasis, it will also be relevant to method and theory courses and postgraduate students.

Download or read book A History of African Archaeology written by Peter Robertshaw and published by James Currey Publishers. This book was released on 1990 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeologists have been excavating in Africa for over 200 years. Contributors place the subject within the broader political, social and economic context. Not only have the attitudes and aspirations of both colonialism and nationalism been important influences on the development of African archaeology, but certain discoveries have also had considerable political impact. Contributors include J.D.Clark, Thurstan Shaw and Peter Shinnie, who have been at the forefront of African archaeology for 50 years.

Download or read book Five Hundred Years Rediscovered written by Natalie Swanepoel and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-08-01 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the age of the African Renaissance, southern Africa has needed to reinterpret the past in fresh and more appropriate ways. The last 500 years represent a strikingly unexplored and misrepresented period which remains disfigured by colonial/apartheid assumptions, most notably in the way that African societies are depicted as fixed, passive, isolated, un-enterprising and unenlightened. This period is one the most formative in relation to southern Africa’s past while remaining, in many ways, the least known. Key cultural contours of the sub-continent took shape, while in a jagged and uneven fashion some of the features of modern identities emerged. Enormous internal economic innovation and political experimentation was taking place at the same time as expanding European mercantile forces started to press upon southern African shores and its hinterlands. This suggests that interaction, flux and mixing were a strong feature of the period, rather than the homogeneity and fixity proposed in standard historical and archaeological writings. Five Hundred Years Rediscovered represents the first step, taken by a group of archaeologists and historians, to collectively reframe, revitalise and re-examine the last 500 years. By integrating research and developing trans-frontier research networks, the group hopes to challenge thinking about the region’s expanding internal and colonial frontiers, and to broaden current perceptions about southern Africa’s colonial past.