The Archaeology and Ethnography of Central Africa

The Archaeology and Ethnography of Central Africa provides the first detailed description of the prehistory of the Loango coast of west-central Africa over the course of more than 3000 years. The archaeological data presented in this volume comes from a pivotal area through which, as linguistic and historical reconstructions have long indicated, Bantu-speaking peoples expanded before reaching eastern and southern Africa. Despite its historical importance, the prehistory of the Atlantic coastal regions of west-central Africa has until now remained almost unknown. James Denbow offers an imaginative approach to this subject, integrating the scientific side of fieldwork with the interplay of history, ethnography, politics, economics, and personalities. The resulting 'anthropology of archaeology' highlights the connections between past and present, change and modernity, in one of the most inaccessible and poorly known regions of west-central and southern Africa.

1. Behind the scenes of research; 2. Pride and prejudice: big oil, eucalyptus, and the people without history; 3. Natural and cultural environment; 4. Preservation: heritage and reconnaissance; 5. Ceramic later Stone Age excavations; 6. The early Iron Age; 7. Later Iron Age sites and the historic period; 8. Opening Pandora's box: from Loango to the Okavango; 9. Summation.

James Denbow is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Texas, Austin. In the 1980s he was Senior Curator and Head of the Archaeology Department at the National Museum of Botswana, where he established and ran the Antiquities Program for the Government of Botswana. Between 1987 and 1993 he worked extensively in what is now the Republic of the Congo in Central Africa. His research has been funded by many agencies, including Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, USAID, and the Swedish International Development Authority. He is the author of two books, Cultures and Customs of Botswana and Uncovering Botswana's Past, and has published more than 40 scientific articles in journals, including Science, Current Anthropology, the Journal of Archaeological Science, the Journal of African History, History in Africa, the Journal of American Folklore, the Journal of African Archaeology, the African Archaeological Review, the South African Journal of Science, the South African Archaeological Bulletin, and others. His current research focuses on processes of state formation centered around the prehistoric site of Bosutswe on the eastern fringe of the Kalahari Desert.