African Archaeologies in Transition: Hybrid Knowledge of Colonial Pasts

Abstract

This commentary chapter raises a series of reflections on archaeological epistemologies in the wake of calls to decolonize disciplinary writings about the past. It draws attention to the development of complex, hybrid knowledges, and their implications for archaeological research on the continent—both with regard to the ethics of practice and the production of narratives that foreground the broad relevance of Africa’s singularities and histories. By focusing on materializing and materiality, the volume advances a materialist perspective that 1) attends to both emergence and existence, to flows and connections as much as things; 2) disaggregates totalizing temporalities; and 3) deterritorializes modes of historical writing, away from preexisting entities like colonizer and colonized, subject and object, Europe and Africa, and contact and resistance. These perspectives are more specifically articulated through three key themes: 1) Artifactual agencies; 2) Conflicting times, histories, and memories; and 3) how explicitly African theories of the political might spark a rethinking for models of sovereignty in the social sciences.