One of the first things that has struck me about Vansina's
piece and Robertson's reply is the startling fact that we
seem to be talking about a confrontation between
archaeologists and historians using oral tradition as the
primary source.  Yet the fact is that the majority of
pre-colonial African history is written from documents and
not from oral tradition.  With a few exceptions, mostly in
the interior parts of central Africa, oral tradition has
served more as a supplement to the documentary history than
as the most important source in use.  If one looks at most
historical writing and studies the footnotes on this issue
it is quickly clear that the main story we tell is based on
careful study of those documents.  Of course, there is a
special epistomology of using documents, but it is different
from that of the oral traditionist.

In fact, it is in confronting documentary history that the
archaeologist is likely to make the biggest impact, rather
than confirming, denying or dating oral
traditions--especially the traditions of origin or
migration.  This is most clearly revealed, I think, in the
discussions of the Middle Niger system, with both parties
commenting on work done on that region by the MacIntoshes,
by Devisse, Hunwick, Dierick Lange, and others.  Indeed, one
can say that the impasse on the study of the great empires
of the Western Sudan has been broken by archaeology.  Recall
that J. D. Cooley writing in the mid-nineteenth century
addressed many of the same issues that Levtzion did a
century and a bit later, and that our documentary basis for
the study of the region was all by completely set with the
publication of the Tarikhs in the early years of this
century.  The recent debates between Lange and Hunwick as
well as discussions of the meaning of archaeologically
unearthed documents (tombstones from Gao) have allowed us to
say new things about ancient Ghana, and each source has
indeed enriched the other.

The same, thing, I think, can also be said about work in
Zimbabwe, where, I would argue, Innocent Pikirayi's study of
the Mwenemutapa state from an archaeological and documentary
point of view shows the way forward for the creative
collaboration between the documentary and archaeological
approach.  The fact is, archaeology can provide information
on social history that is hinted at in documents and can be
fleshed out in field work.  The possibility of real
question-driven archaeology is raised higher by the
possiblity of having verbal attestation of forms found in
the archaeological record.

In 1983, I made an argument about the rise and fall of the
Kingdom of Kongo that was based on a thorough study of
documents of population concentration and dispersal of
Mbanza Kongo and Mbanza Soyo.  Thanks to baptismal records I
was able to develop quantified models of population
concentration and dispersion that are not usually possible
for this time depth.  But it is clearly a model that can be
filled out by archaeology, since the study of settlement
patterns over time depth, and studies of interactions
between settlements is one of the mainstays of New
Archaeology.  It could be applied to the historical periods
in Kongo and then used to help interpret earlier sites, back
perhaps to the origins of the state system of the area.
Alas, warfare in the key areas of Angola has prevented the
elaboration of an archaeological exploration of the model I
proposed, but I think that some of Denbow's work in Congo
(especially the Madingo Kayes site) suggests the antiquity
of this model, and were the intervening space between his
early Common Era site and later ones in central Africa be
filled with detailed study of settlement distributions, we
might be able to say quite a bit about states and society in
west central Africa.

This brings me to a final point.  The biggest problem for
archaeology is the limited amount of it that has been done
and its uneven distribution, rather more than philosophical
problems raised so far.  It's true that historians are quick
to mine archaeological work for dates, and that the tendency
to pop off on the implications of limited work is strong.
But these problems become less as work is done more
comprehensively.  Dates become firmer, and other questions
are better answered in time with more research.  But all of
us are acutely aware of external factors that impact on
this.  Anyone working on west central Africa knows that the
complex politics of the Angolan civil war, the collapse of
Congo-Kinshasa, and the civil war in Congo-Brazzaville are
going to leave little time and space for archaeology,
whatever our desires.

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS