Perceiving variability in time and space: the evolutionary mapping of African societies

Abstract

Archaeologists of my generation have experienced dramatic shifts in the ideas that orient our field – as students in the early 1970s we cut our teeth on the New Archaeology, and many embraced the neo-evolutionary models that informed a processual understanding of human development. The musty culture history of our instructors' elders seemed uninteresting, and our imaginations were fired by questions of origins and transitions: the origins of food production and the transition to sedentary village life; the origins of complex societies and the growth of cities. We were concerned with modeling, with cross-cultural comparison, and ultimately with processual questions of evolutionary change. During the 1980s we weathered another sea-change in theoretical currents with the upwelling of critical stances loosely grouped under the rubric of post-processual archaeology. Although this belies the diverse perspectives of archaeologists so-labeled – some marxist, some feminist, some post-structuralist (Kohl 1993) – they share a disdain for the evolutionary models that played a prominent role in processual archaeology. They criticize evolutionary models as universalizing, winnowing diversity by forcing an array of societies into rigid types; as hierarchical, ranking societies along dimensions of complexity and heterogeneity; as reductionist, implying a correlation between particular economic and social forms; and, as distancing simple societies in time by treating them as relics of earlier stages (Andah 1995; Shennan 1993; Thomas 1989; Upham 1990a, 1990b;Yoffee 1993). Others have examined the relationship of evolutionary ideas with imperialism, ethnocentrism, and inequalities of power (Bowler 1992; Fabian 1983; Gamble 1992a, 1992b; Rowlands 1989b, 1994; Schmidt and Patterson 1995; Stocking 1987; Thomas 1994; Trigger 1989). Thus progressive evolutionary schemes map societies in ways that are ideologically charged.

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