Mining And Metallurgy In Negro Africa

The second 'African Mining' conference is planned for June 1991, and follows the first, very successful, event held in May 1987. That full four-year period was characterized by substantial changes in the political and economic climate of many countries in both hemispheres. Copper prices were relatively firm, and the advance and steady demand for nickel and ferrochromium stabilized important sectors of the mineral industry, certainly in Zimbabwe. The promise for gold remained unfulfilled, but the smaller, relatively flexible, mines survived and only the large, deep and low-value mines seem seriously at risk. None of this has affected the hungry, and intensive exploitations from surface to the water-table have revealed many targets of promise to those willing to take the risks. The pattern in Southern Africa was extraordinarily stable among the turmoil, with independence for Namibia, adjustments in South Africa and a gradual shift to market economies in the region. The pace of exploration has increased to recover some part of the progress that was lost in the Independence struggle, and atthe end of the first decade in Zimbabwe, for example, oil is being sought in the Zambesi Rift, following the investigation of the Luangwa in Zambia, and there are exciting exploration projects for methane released from coal, deep in its basins.

The idea of an inherent backwardness of technology and material culture in early sub-Saharan Africa is a persistent and tenacious myth in the scholarly and popular imagination. Due to the emergence of the field of African studies and the upsurge in historical and archaeological research, in recent decades the stridency of this myth has weakened, and the overtly racist content of arguments mustered in its defense have tended to disappear. But more important are transformations in social, political, and cultural consciousness, which have worked to reshape conceptualizations of African peoples, their histories, and their cultures. Precolonial African Material Culture offers a thorough challenge to the myth of technological backwardness. V. Tarikhu Farrar revisits the early technology of sub-Saharan Africa as revealed by recent research and reconsiders long-possessed primary historical sources. He then explores the ways that indigenous African technologies have influenced the world beyond the African continent.

Gold. Copper. Iron. Metal working in Africa has been the subject of both public lore and extensive archaeological investigation. Here, four of the leading contemporary researchers on this topic attempt to provide a complete synthesis of current debates and understandings: Where, how, and when was metal first introduced to the continent? How were iron and copper tools, implements, and objects used in everyday life, in trade, in political and cultural contexts? What role did metal objects play in the ideological systems of precolonial African peoples? Substantive chapters address the origins of metal working and the technology and the various uses and meanings of copper and iron. An ethnoarchaeological account in the words of a contemporary iron worker enriches the archaeological explanations. This book provides a comprehensive, timely summary of our current knowledge.

This book seeks to communicate to both a global and local audience, the key attributes of pre-industrial African metallurgy such as technological variation across space and time, methods of mining and extractive metallurgy and the fabrication of metal objects. These processes were transformative in a physical and metaphoric sense, which made them total social facts. Because the production and use of metals was an accretion of various categories of practice, a chaine operatoire conceptual and theoretical framework that simultaneously considers the embedded technological and anthropological factors was used. The book focuses on Africa’s different regions as roughly defined by cultural geography. On the one hand there is North Africa, Egypt, the Egyptian Sudan, and the Horn of Africa which share cultural inheritances with the Middle East and on the other is Africa south of the Sahara and the Sudan which despite interacting with the former is remarkably different in terms of technological practice. For example, not only is the timing of metallurgy different but so is the infrastructure for working metals and the associated symbolic and sociological factors. The cultural valuation of metals and the social positions of metal workers were different too although there is evidence of some values transfer and multi-directional technological cross borrowing. The multitude of permutations associated with metals production and use amply demonstrates that metals participated in the production and reproduction of society. Despite huge temporal and spatial differences there are so many common factors between African metallurgy and that of other regions of the world. For example, the role of magic and ritual in metal working is almost universal be it in Bolivia, Nepal, Malawi, Timna, Togo or Zimbabwe. Similarly, techniques of mining were constrained by the underlying geology but this should not in any way suggest that Africa’s metallurgy was derivative or that the continent had no initiative. Rather it demonstrates that when confronted with similar challenges, humanity in different regions of the world responded to identical challenges in predictable ways mediated as mediated by the prevailing cultural context. The success of the use of historical and ethnographic data in understanding variation and improvisation in African metallurgical practices flags the potential utility of these sources in Asia, Latin America and Europe. Some nuance is however needed because it is simply naïve to assume that everything depicted in the history or ethnography has a parallel in the past and vice versa. Rather, the confluence of archaeology, history and ethnography becomes a pedestal for dialogue between different sources, subjects and ideas that is important for broadening our knowledge of global categories of metallurgical practice.

Africa has the longest and arguably the most diverse archaeological record of any of the continents. It is where the human lineage first evolved and from where Homo sapiens spread across the rest of the world. Later, it witnessed novel experiments in food-production and unique trajectories to urbanism and the organisation of large communities that were not always structured along strictly hierarchical lines. Millennia of engagement with societies in other parts of the world confirm Africa's active participation in the construction of the modern world, while the richness of its history, ethnography, and linguistics provide unusually powerful opportunities for constructing interdisciplinary narratives of Africa's past. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date 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. As well as covering almost all periods and regions of the continent, it includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates, and situates the subject's contemporary practice within the discipline's history and the infrastructural challenges now facing its practitioners. Bringing together essays on all these themes from over seventy contributors, many of them living and working in Africa, it offers a highly accessible, contemporary account of the subject for use by scholars and students of not only archaeology, but also history, anthropology, and other disciplines.

Americans from Africa seeks to convey varying perspectives on the "Black Experience" in the United States and its controversial history. This volume, Slavery and Its Aftermath, deals with four major issues: the extent of African influences on the lives of those enslaved and brought to America, beginning with an essay on "Africanisms in Everyday Life" by Melville J. Herskovits; the impact of slavery on personality and social structure, sometimes called "The Elkins Debate;" similarities and differences in life for African Americans in the South and in the North; and matters of community, class, and family, including the full text of the "Moynihan Report" and several pointed critiques.In addition to the commentaries by and on the works of Herskovits, Elkins, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, other contributors to Volume I include Kenneth B. Clark, Mina Caulfield Davis, E. Franklin Edwards, Eugene Genovese, Ulf Hannerz, Charles S. Johnson, Leroi Jones, and Charles Keil.The second volume, Old Memories, New Moods, contains essays on the roots of black protest; the background and character of the Civil Rights Movement; interpretations of the impact and significance of Black Power, and varied views on changing self-images of being African American.