An Interview with Merrick Posnansky

Professor Merrick Posnansky has made numerous influential contributions to archaeology and African Studies during the last half century. Foremost among these is his holistic and inclusive archaeological initiatives that have developed informed representations of Africa and Africans in long-term historical perspective and in the present. He helped shape the early development of historical archaeology in Africa and African diaspora archaeology in the Atlantic world. Posnansky also developed university archaeology programs and reoriented museums in Uganda, West Africa, and the Americas, making them living institutions with a mandate to serve the public. He spent two decades in Africa, primarily in Uganda and Ghana, and later worked as Professor of Anthropology and History at UCLA and, for a period, directed the UCLA Center for African Studies. This interview outlines Posnansky’s life, career, and contributions to archaeology and African Studies across three continents. In addition, Posnansky reflects on contemporary archaeology and the discipline’s future prospects and challenges in Africa.     

Innovation,diffusion, and culture contact: The holocene archaeology of Ghana

Stressing recent research, this review of Ghana archaeology highlights what we know of the advent of sedentism, agriculture, iron technology, and urbanism in Ghana and examines how certain patterns in Ghanaian prehistory depart from the expectations of the progressive evolutionary model that has framed our understanding of world prehistory. It is also argued that the archaeology of Ghana has much to contribute to current debates on the relationship between material culture and identity, and the impact of the Atlantic economy on non-European peoples, and to our understanding of cultural diversity in the past.     

Civitatis Ghaniensis Conditor: Kwame Nkrumah,symbolic nationalism and the iconography of Ghanaian money 1957 – the Golden Jubilee

ABSTRACT. During his tenure as premier from independence in 1957 until he was ousted by a military and police coup in 1966, Kwame Nkrumah was the living personification of the Ghanaian nation‐state. As the self‐proclaimed Civitatis Ghaniensis Conditor– Founder of the State of Ghana – his image was minted on the new national money and printed on postage stamps. He erected a monument of himself in Accra, changed the national anthem to make references to himself, customised the national flag to match the colors of his CPP party, made his birthday a national day of celebration (National Founder's Day), named streets and universities after himself, and amended the constitution whereby he became Life President. Since the coup, many of the symbols of nationhood that Nkrumah constructed have been debated, demolished, reconsidered and reengineered by successive governments to rewrite the Ghanaian historical narrative. This article analyses the contentions of one of Nkrumah's first expressions of symbolic nationalism – that of the national coinage.     

Virtual Forum: Archaeology and Decolonization

In this forum, patiently achieved through months of cyber-work, participants Nayanjot Lahiri (India), Nick Shepherd (South Africa), Joe Watkins (USA) and Larry Zimmerman (USA), plus the two editors of Arqueología Suramericana, Alejandro Haber (Argentina) and Cristóbal Gnecco (Colombia), discuss the topic of archaeology and decolonization. Nayanjot Lahiri teaches archaeology in her capacity as Professor at the Department of History, University of Delhi. Her books include Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered (2005) and The Archaeology of Indian Trade Routes (1992). She has edited The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization (2000) and an issue of World Archaeology entitled The Archaeology of Hinduism (2004). Nick Shepherd is a senior lecturer in the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, where he convenes the program in public culture in Africa. He sits on the executive committee of the World Archaeological Congress, and is co-editor of the journal Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress. In 2004 he was based at Harvard University as a Mandela Fellow. He has published widely on issues of archaeology and society in Africa, and on issues of public history and heritage. Joe Watkins is Choctaw Indian and archaeologist Joe Watkins is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He is 1/2 Choctaw Indian by blood, and has been involved in archaeology for more than thirty-five years. He received his Bachelor’s of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Oklahoma and his Master’s of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University, where his doctorate examined archaeologists’ responses to questionnaire scenarios concerning their perceptions of American Indian issues. His current study interests include the ethical practice of anthropology and the study of anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and Aboriginal populations, and he has published numerous articles on these topics. His first book Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice (AltaMira Press, 2000) examined the relationships between American Indians and archaeologists and is in its second printing His latest book, Reclaiming Physical Heritage: Repatriation and Sacred Sites (Chelsea House Publishers 2005) is aimed toward creating an awareness of Native American issues among high school students. Larry J. Zimmerman is Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies and Public Scholar of Native American Representation at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. He is Vice President of the World Archaeological Congress. He also has served WAC as its Executive Secretary and as the organizer of the first WAC Inter-Congress on Archaeological Ethics and the Treatment of the Dead. His research interests include the archaeology of the North American Plains, contemporary American Indian issues, and his current project examining the archaeology of homelessness. Originally published in Spanish in Arqueología Suramericana 3(1), 2007     

The emergence and institutionalization of feminist geography in Ghana

Abstract

The emergence and institutionalization of feminist geography in Ghana was in tandem with the global feminist movement in the 1970s and its subsequent international women’s conferences. This paper discusses the pioneering work and research at the Department of Geography and Resource Development, University of Ghana, and its effect on the institutionalization and diffusion of feminist geography in Ghana. Through research and external collaborations, the need for gender as an academic discipline was strongly argued for and instituted as an undergraduate course at the Department of Geography and Resource Development, University of Ghana. These external collaborations with other feminist geographers in international geography associations and universities served as a boost as they created opportunities for highlighting the spatial variations in the role and situation of particularly women’s lives in Ghana. Subsequently, there was a diffusion of feminist geography research and its institutionalization as an academic sub-discipline in Geography departments in other Ghanaian universities. These notwithstanding, the departments of Geography in Ghanaian universities are still dominated by male faculty members. Moreover, research work has been mainly in the field of human geography more than the physical aspects calling for the mainstreaming of gender issues in all the systematic branches of the discipline.     

‘When the Bull Elephants Fight’: Kwame Nkrumah,Non-Alignment,and Pan-Africanism as an Interventionist Ideology in the Global Cold War (1957–66)

From independence onwards, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana pursued a position of positive neutrality and non-alignment. Historians claim that the Congo crisis and the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 led Nkrumah to question the viability of strict non-alignment. Newly declassified Ghanaian sources and an analysis of the components that make up the pan-African ideology, however, suggest that these events validated Nkrumah's pan-African worldview. Only a combination of continental unification and non-alignment was considered to be an effective strategy to avoid a repetition of the Congo debacle. Ghana's public diplomacy tactics switched from targeting political activists to convincing people through a vociferously anti-colonial propaganda campaign, a modification that cast doubt on the sincerity of Ghanaian neutrality at a moment when non-alignment actually began to affect Ghanaian diplomacy on all levels.     

SOUSA VITERBO AND THE IDEA OF INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of Sousa Viterbo's contribution to industrial archaeology. This Portuguese historian and archaeologist not only employed and printed both the terms ‘archaeology of industry’ and ‘industrial archaeology’ in the late 19th century, but also left behind a number of writings which secure his place as a true ancestor of the current industrial archaeology. Selected excerpts of three of Viterbo's texts written between 1896 and 1902 are here translated into English for the first time.     

Walter Taylor and the history of American archaeology

Walter Taylor’s place in the history of archaeology is well secured. Not only is he noted for his uncredited anticipation of the theoretical and methodological innovations of the 1960s and 1970s in his infamous book A Study of Archeology, but he is also well-known for committing professional suicide by short-sightedly attacking numerous key figures in American archaeology for their methodological shortfalls, and yet never publishing a report utilizing his controversial method. Although these statements have inundated the historical literature on American archaeology, they are received wisdom rather than the reality of Taylor’s contributions to the field. Many aspects of Taylor’s conjunctive approach were at odds with the stated aims of processual archaeology. Although Taylor did not live up to his critics’ (or his own) demands for a grand display of his approach, he did on several occasions demonstrate its potential. The irony of Taylor in the history of archaeology is not that he was uncredited for his prescience or that his attacks on the archaeological establishment were a naïve failure; but rather that he receives too much credit for what he didn’t do, and not enough for what he did.     

The Invention of Prehistory and the Rediscovery of Europe: Exploring the Intellectual Roots of Gordon Childe’s ‘Neolithic Revolution’ (1936)

Journal of World Prehistory - This article re-examines the ‘neolithic revolution’—Gordon Childe’s great contribution to prehistoric archaeology. Childe first articulated his...     

The Internationalism of German Castle Research: Bodo Ebhardt,His European Network,and the Construction of 'Castle Knowledge'

Abstract

Recent monographs and articles emphasize the strong impact of nationalism and racist thinking on archaeology. In contrast to the treatments which focus on single nation states and on archaeology as a politically legitimate science, this paper explores the tension between internationalism and racist premises in German castle research, and how it manifests itself in the construction of knowledge about medieval castles across national borders. I will focus on Bodo Ebhardt, Germany's most famous and influential castle researcher of the first half of the 20th century. The analysis of his scientific work, and of his personal contact with other European researchers as well as with German politicians and patrons, will shed light on the changes and continuities in his network, and in particular on his construction of the past that was influenced by the formation of this network, which, in turn, affected his assessment of medieval castles.     

Macmillan,Nkrumah and the 1961 Application for European Economic Community Membership

The views held by African Commonwealth leaders are absent from the historiography of the Britain's first EEC application, despite their value for understanding why the Macmillan government experienced such difficulty in reorienting its foreign policy towards Europe. Between July 1961, when Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah established his opposition to the application, and January 1963, when it was vetoed by French President Charles de Gaulle, the Anglo-Ghanaian relationship was characterized by tension and acrimony. This article seeks to understand the impact of Nkrumah's objections to the application and Macmillan's reaction to Nkrumah's concerns. Though the Ghanaian President alone did not alter the course of Britain's approach to the Community, he did add to the tense atmosphere in which London considered how to approach the Commonwealth. Furthermore, Macmillan's efforts to maintain a positive relationship with Nkrumah, in the context of the Cold War, demonstrate the reluctance with which the prime minister loosened ties with the Commonwealth.     

Excavating Communities: Lewis R. Binford and the Interpretation of the Archaeological Record in Illinois

Lewis Binford’s contributions to field archaeology have been largely ignored in favor of his many contributions to theoretical issues dominating the discipline of archaeology at the end of the twentieth century. We examine Binford’s excavation methods in southern Illinois in the early 1960s and demonstrate how his considered approach served to systematize large-scale site excavation procedures. He adopted the time-honored tool of the salvage archaeologist—heavy equipment—and unapologetically employed it in a fundamentally new way, proving it to be a tool that served the greater goals of archaeological research. We trace the development of field methods and theoretical approaches in two case studies of Illinois archaeology and demonstrate how Binford’s contributions have been incorporated or rejected by subsequent CRM researchers.     

Genealogies of Practice in and of the Environment in Banda,Ghana

Despite recent emphases on both environmental archaeology and practice theory in archaeology, the two are rarely combined. In this paper, we illustrate a genealogies of environmental practice approach that seeks to understand how human actions grounded in familiar repertoires make sense of environmental and political economic change. Employing archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data, we first examine taxon-specific genealogies of practice and then compare them to one another as well as to broader climatic, political, and economic contexts of the last millennium in Banda, west central Ghana. In focusing on the interactivities between different kinds of data, we coax out the strategies used by Banda’s inhabitants to cope with fluctuating environmental and political conditions. We argue that during a several centuries long drought in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries ad, Banda villagers took advantage of a diverse set of economic activities to cope with turbulence, but by the late nineteenth century, these opportunities had dwindled, diminishing the villagers’ practical options.     

Keith Muckelroy: Methods, Ideas and Maritime Archaeology

Between his graduation from the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge University in 1974 and his death in 1980, Keith Muckelroy’s work and ideology were crucial in promoting an alternative research methodology in maritime archaeology. Instead of a particularist or historiographic approach, methods prominent both then and now, Muckelroy’s methodology was grounded in the foundations of the prehistoric archaeology he learned under Grahame Clark and David Clarke at Cambridge, and the basic tenets of New Archaeology maturing in the United States during the 1970s. This paper, which elucidates Muckelroy’s methods and research, is neither a complete biography nor an exhaustive study of his ideas. Although unpublished letters, papers and notes were studied in archives at Cambridge University and the National Maritime Museum, there is still much more to be learned from many of his former colleagues and their memories—only a handful of those individuals were consulted during the creation of this work. Nevertheless, this paper was written in the hope that by understanding Muckelroy’s ideas, and placing them in the larger framework of the discipline of archaeology, maritime archaeologists who are attempting to pursue a variety of approaches may find inspirations, models and, perhaps, questions that still need to be answered.     

Crossing disciplinary boundaries: On Gutorm Gjessing's archaeology and his conversion to ethnography

Gutorm Gjessing was one of the most influential investigators in Norwegian archaeology. He is particularly known for his monumental works on the Arctic Stone Age, which proposed an alternative to south‐north diffusionism. In 1947 Gjessing suddenly left archaeology in favour of ethnography at the Oslo Ethnographic Museum, which also led his carrier in a downhill direction. This article is partly biographical and partly analytical and claims that Gjessing's archaelogical works and theories in the 1930s ‐ 40s were only marginally non‐conformist, since they largely reflected current viewpoints in European culture‐historical archaeology. Gjessing's view of culture is located in culture‐historical archaeology and American cultural anthropology and it is compared with the anthropology of the “British School”. Also analyzed is how Gjessing in some respects placed himself on the fringe of the establishment. It is not pretended to give any definite answers, rather it is focused upon questions which can be raised and provides a more nuanced picture of” the mythology which has surrounded Gutorm Gjessing, both as archaeologist and anthropologist.     

Archaeology in the Lettered City

The ‘lettered creole’ Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora is widely seen as an antiquarian who collected textual materials associated with the indigenous past. But Sigüenza's historical interest exceeded both the textual and the indigenous. Following a popular insurrection in 1692, which left the viceroy's palace in ruins, Sigüenza was asked to present a proposal for segregating Mexico City into distinct Spanish and Indian zones. He framed his project not as an attempt to trace a new line but as the recuperation of an old one, ‘excavating’ the original plan laid out by Hernán Cortés. Drawing on recent work in the field of archaeology and proposing a revisionist history of Mexican archaeology, this essay reads Sigüenza's interventions in the wake of the uprising as articulating an ‘archaeology of the colonial present’ whose modalities include both digging and ‘walking in the city.’ This operation renders the Spanish city a colonial ruin to be curated by a creole administrative apparatus. For the first time, the Spanish present has become the colonial past.     

A Better Savage than the Savages: Thor Heyerdahl's Early Ethnographical Attempts and their Importance for the Development of the ‘Kon-Tiki Theory’

ABSTRACT

In this paper Thor Heyerdahl's early attempts at ethnography and his first contact with Polynesian archaeology are discussed. It is argued that Heyerdahl, prior to his first Pacific expedition to the Marquesas Islands in 1937, carried with him a romanticized perception of the Polynesian people, imagining them to be the last living ‘natural men’. This perception was shattered during his expedition, and the disappointing contrast between the imagined reality and the lived reality led Heyerdahl to separate the contemporary Polynesian population from the Polynesian archaeological record. It is further argued that this separation between contemporary Polynesians and the Polynesian archaeological record would form the foundation for the dual migration wave hypothesis Heyerdahl later launched with his ‘Kon-Tiki theory’.     

泰山北斗 一代宗师——林志纯和中国世界古代史学科的建设与发展

2007年11月14日,史学大师林志纯先生在福州与世长辞,享年97岁。 林先生学究天人,贯通古今中外,是中国世界古代史学界的元老和泰斗,为建设中国世界古代史学科,创建中国世界古代史研究会和东北师范大学世界古典文明史研究所建立了卓著的功勋,获得了全国世界古代史学界同仁的尊敬和爱戴。在此,谨代表中国世界古代中世纪史研究会向林先生表示崇高的敬意和深切的怀念。     

“Where nothing was before”: (re)producing population and place in Ghana's Volta River Project

Significant infrastructural projects, and especially large hydroelectric dams, were envisioned and deployed by postcolonial governments to promote particular visions of industrialization, agriculture, democracy, and modernity. Newly independent states sought to annihilate formerly so-called backward and primitive landscapes and populations alike, promising to re-create both places and people as rational, economically productive entities. In this article, we re-examine such narratives as they related to Ghana's Volta River Project (VRP). Relying on archival and media sources between the 1950s and 1960s, we interrogate the Ghanaian state's pursuit of the VRP from a perspective rooted firmly in cultural geography and pay careful attention to the issues of population displacement/resettlement and landscape reconfiguration that permeated all dimensions of the project. We analyze the ways in which Ghanaian leaders used the VRP to translate a particular suite of cultural, economic, and political values into material reality, utilizing the techniques of displacement and population resettlement in efforts to enroll Ghana into a modern, global, industrial economic system. As such, this article augments the body of literature examining the modernist and state-building aspects of the VRP as well as studies critiquing the various processes of development that have unfolded in West Africa since the mid-twentieth century.     

Shopping with Karl: Commodity Fetishism and the Materiality of Marx’s London

Scholars have postulated that commodity fetishism represents Marx’s theory of capitalist materiality, but the content of that theory is contested. I offer an archaeology of Marx’s material world in order to understand the development of the concept. During his time in London, Marx wrote and published Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), in which he outlined the concept of commodity fetishism. I demonstrate that he formed his analysis of commodity fetishism from daily practices including shopping, and consuming tobacco, in combination with his research at the British Museum. I take an experiential approach to archaeology that foregrounds Marx living in a world of objects, and posit a relationship between his experiences and his understanding of commodities. In so doing, I show how Marx’s “everyday life” shaped his concept of commodity fetishism, and how this concept could be useful to historical archaeologists.