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Importance of archaeology in the Southern African region

The past in the future: finding the elusive Southern African footprint

The practice of archaeology in Southern Africa has come out of the shadows of exclusion which it had to endure before the 1990s. The forced banishment that was part of a global anti-apartheid struggle affected South Africa and the entire Southern African region in many ways. South African archaeologists were precluded from the enjoyment of a world archaeological fraternity. Today, archaeology in Southern Africa enjoys the status of a discipline embraced from within Africa and globally.

A defining moment in the history of archaeology in South Africa was the hosting of the World Archaeological Congress 4 in Cape Town in 1999, when the global archaeological community trekked to the southernmost part of the continent. The event provided an opportunity for diverse interest groups such as archaeologists, indigenous communities, heritage practitioners and development activists to engage in discussions.  A newly independent South Africa was the ideal host of the congress, which provided a healing platform and a chance to chart new ways forward for research agendas and practice in Southern African archaeology.

Southern African archaeology had endured isolation on several fronts. The temporary disintegration of the then Association of Southern African Archaeologists in 1983 was echoed in Jos, Nigeria at the Pan African Association of Prehistory and Related Studies Congress (PAA). It was not until the mid-1990s that the efforts of researchers came to fruition with the meeting of African and Africanist archaeologists at the 10th Congress of the PAA in Harare.

What became apparent in Harare was the dire need to scale up and diversify capacity-building efforts in Southern African institutions dealing with heritage and archaeology. Efforts by international donors had already gone some way towards this, with Swedish support for capacity-building in East and Southern Africa through the Urban Origins and Human Responses to the Environment projects.

Further, the need to shift paradigms in the approach to public archaeology was acutely brought home by the South African educational curriculum revisions, where entire histories had to be unpacked and rewritten. This task has continued to engage archaeologists and heritage practitioners alike.

One of the lessons emerging from the engagement with the public is people’s desire to reconnect with their excluded pasts.

In the process, several issues which have posed challenges for archaeologists have emerged. These have forced many researchers to re-examine their practices from a lens of ethics and accountability – practices such as the use of the Zimbabwe culture to valorise the new nation state of Zimbabwe in the 1980s. South Africa followed suit in using rock art iconography to foster a new national identity for South Africans emerging from a fractured past. The recourse to the past to legitimise nationalist agendas and leaderships drew attention to the complexities involved in public archaeology for heritage practitioners and called for re-working of ideas about making the past accessible for wider publics.

Since 2000, one of the challenges which has faced the discipline in the region is how to balance the practice of archaeology, perceived as elitist and exclusive, with the need for a broadened platform of higher education. The challenge of poverty and inequality among communities of the region was such that the attempts to sell archaeology and heritage as of local, national or world significance was often met with more pressing questions of the needs of communities for basic human, economic and social rights issues such as shelter, clean water and employment.

Many archaeology practitioners found themselves having to juggle multiple roles of community engagement beyond the tools of the trade they had been taught. The interest of communities in heritage issues was often focused on the need to reconcile their prior exclusion from resources such as land and to address pressing needs such as border or boundary disputes.

Further, archaeological sites and heritage places provided an avenue to leverage claims and affirm identities in sometimes contested terrains. Challenges to the scientific approach to heritage practice and management by indigenous and traditional knowledge holders made archaeological approaches sometimes irrelevant or inconsequential to more persuasive arguments from communities eager to prove their claims. This often meant that archaeologists could no longer claim the sole platform of generating knowledge about the past.

The sometimes conflictual relations which emerged between communities and archaeologists meant heritage sites suffered, as was the case with Domboshava rock art site in Zimbabwe. Other cases which engage archaeologists today include World Heritage Sites such as the Tsodilo Hills in Botswana and the Matopos Hills in Zimbabwe.

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing the discipline of archaeology in the 21st century is the question of sustainability. The growth of tourism in the region has had an impact on archaeological heritage resources, particularly those in landscapes associated with international appeal.

With limited financial and human resources, archaeological heritage management agencies and museums are often ill-equipped to deal with the growing demand for site-seeing from local and international visitors. This challenge applies to the area of contemporary heritage too, where the conservation and preservation dimensions of eco-tourism are not always carefully thought through and provided for adequately.

It is therefore an urgent concern that human resource development strategies and sustainability programmes factor in the need to enhance archaeological conservation and protection. This applies to archaeological resources in the wilderness and in museums and other keeping places. The rapid pace of development and urbanisation in the region has resulted in more sites being placed at risk during development projects. More focused environmental and archaeological impact assessments are needed to avoid losing heritage resources.

Attention also needs to be drawn to the threats and opportunities facing intangible cultural heritage. Archaeologists in the region have long relied on oral traditions, histories and accounts to corroborate their research. However, the rapid attrition of intangible cultural heritage suggests that future generations may not be able to use such knowledge resources with the same confidence. It is therefore critical that archaeologists work more closely with other disciplines such as history and linguistics to ensure that local languages and knowledge resources are not obliterated by rapid urbanisation.

Further, HIV/AIDS has claimed the lives of many knowledgeable people, leaving high numbers of orphans in the region. Archaeologists and other human science researchers will need to respond in strategic ways to these challenges to ensure that the transfer of knowledge about the past and preservation of heritage places can continue.

Institutions of higher learning will also have to respond in more creative ways to ensure that archaeology education is more accessible beyond formal university learning programmes and can integrate more ways of knowing the past.

– Contributed by Alinah K. Segobye, University of Botswana

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