Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past: Materiality, History, and the Shaping of Cultural Identities (UCL Institute of Archaeology Publications) (Volume 65)

Authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in ancient Africa were made and unmade in their intersection with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. From invention to ambiguity : the persistence of ethnicity in Africa -- François G. Richard and Kevin C. MacDonald Shapen signs : pottery techniques, indexicality, and ethnic identity in the Saalum, Senegambia (c. 1700-1950) -- Cameron Gokee "The very embodiment of the black peasant?" : archaeology, history, and the making of the Seereer of Siin (senegal) -- François G. Richard "A chacun son Bambara," encore une fois : history, archaeology and Bamana origins -- Kevin C. MacDonald The uses of the past : indigenous ethnography, archaeology and ethnicity in Nigeria -- Roger Blench What was the Wandala State and who are the Wandala? -- Scott MacEachern Who's who? The case of the Luba -- Pierre de Maret and Alexandre Livingstone Smith Political and theoretical problems for the archaeological identification of pre-colonial Twa, Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda -- John Giblin Ethnicity, archaeological ceramics and changing paradigms in East African archaeology -- Paul J. Lane Ethnic ambiguity : a cultural evolutionary perspective -- Stephen J. Shennan. The collective inquiries in this volume address ethnicity in ancient Africa as social fact and political artifact along numerous dimensions. Is ethnicity a useful analytic? What can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions which scholars have asked of identities in Africa? Eleven authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade. They examine how these intersect with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning from prehistory to the colonial period.