Archaeology of African Plant Use

Chris J Stevens, Sam Nixon, Mary Anne Murray, Dorian Q Fuller, Chris J Stevens, Sam Nixon, Mary Anne Murray, Dorian Q Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781611329759
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315433998
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Botany
• Index: Social Sciences

The first major synthesis of African archaeobotany in decades, this book focuses on Paleolithic archaeobotany and the relationship between agriculture and social complexity. It explores the effects that plant life has had on humans as they evolved from primates through the complex societies of Africa, including Egypt, the Buganda Kingdom, southern African polities, and other regions. With over 30 contributing scholars from 12 countries and extensive illustrations, this volume is an essential addition to our knowledge of humanity's relationship with plants.

1

African Archaeobotany Expanding

An Editorial

Dorian Q Fuller, Sam Nixon, Chris J. Stevens, and Mary Anne Murray

Africa is a large continent, some 30.34 million square kilometres, dwarfed only by Asia (Times Atlas 2011). It stretches from the subtropics of the southern hemisphere (>34°S) to the subtropics of the north (>36°N). The Mediterranean environments of North Africa have their ecological parallel in parts of the southern Cape flora. Bordering these zones are deserts, the vast Sahara in the north, and the Namib and Kalahari deserts of the south. Between these deserts are diverse tropical environments of sub-Saharan Africa; savannahs, dry tropical woodlands, and moist rainforests. Although these environments boast the longest history of human occupation, as the cradle of hominid evolution during the Pliocene and Pleistocene they have received far less attention in terms of the documentation of past human plant use and archaeobotanical research. There are some 50 countries in Africa in addition to nearby Madagascar and the Canary Islands of Spain; however, half of these countries can speak of no archaeobotanical evidence at all. In this book, some 11 countries are represented by specific studies, which in itself reflects the slow, yet uneven advance of archaeobotanical research in Africa.

This book emerges from a meeting of the International Workshop for African Archaeobotany (IWAA) held in London in July 2006. This meeting of the IWAA has been held every three years since 1994, and all the conferences have produced edited volumes. Taken together these publications can be seen as representative of the general progress in the accumulation of African archaeobotanical knowledge (Figure 1.1). Since the 1994 conference’s volume was published the following year, with a focus on the remains of Nabta Playa and some from Libya (Barakat 1995; Hather 1995; Mitka and Wasylikowa 1995; Wasylikowa et al. 1995; van der Veen 1995), the range of countries represented in the IWAA conferences has expanded, and correspondingly the number of studies has also expanded slightly for each country.

Nevertheless, there has been a marked dominance of studies on Egyptian sites. Although Egypt is unambiguously part of the African continent, for many archaeological specialists on Egypt (or Egyptologists) and for many Africanist archaeologists with a sub-Saharan focus, Egypt is regarded as a realm quite separate. Thus if we hold Egypt aside, we must admit that Africa remains a poorly studied continent by archaeobotanists. Although this lack of research is partly an inevitable result of political and logistical hurdles to working in many parts of Africa, there is still much scope for promoting the expansion of archaeobotany in Africa.

Figure 1.2 demonstrates just how many countries are untouched in archaeobotanical terms. For many countries where research has been conducted, the studies often cover just a few sites, and thus countries have been ranked in terms of whether they have been only minimally studied, slightly studied or, in the case of Egypt, well studied. Of those countries that have had some archaeobotanical work, just over half are represented in this volume. Geographically and chronologically expanding African archaeobotany and redressing the continuing bias toward Egypt should be priorities for the development of this field.

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Figure 1.1 Graph of cumulative published contributions arising from the International Workshop for African Archaeobotany, subdivided by country, based on the published conference volumes. 1. Acta Palaeobotanica 35 1995; 2. van der Veen 1999; 3. Neumann, Butler, and Kahlheber 2003; 4. Cappers 2007; 5. this volume; 6. Fahmy, Kahlheber, and D’Andrea 2011.

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Figure 1.2 Map of the general distribution of archaeobotanical studies in Africa. Countries are shaded on the basis of how well-studied they are in three grades. Numbers of published articles in IWAA conference volumes are indicated on countries, as are countries studied in the present volume.

TOWARD THE STUDY OF AFRICAN AGRICULTURAL ORIGINS

Plant domestication is always one of the main research topics in archaeobotany. The origins of agriculture were one of the watersheds in studies of human economic history, the evolution of human social systems, and human modification of the environment (Bellwood 2005; Diamond 1997; Fuller, Willcox, and Allaby 2011). Archaeobotanical evidence provides a direct window on plant domestication processes (Fuller 2007; Purugganan and Fuller 2011), which can be regarded as complementing genetic evidence (Purugganan and Fuller 2009; Fuller and Allaby 2009).

Africa was first put on the map in terms of agricultural origins by Vavilov (1950), who defined Ethiopia as one of his centres of origin of cultivated plants. Vavilov and his colleagues had studied only crops in Ethiopia, and although it has many indigenous crop species, Ethiopia is also a region that has fostered significant diversity in crops introduced from Southwest Asia, particularly cereals such as emmer wheat and barley, which have always attracted much attention in agricultural origins research. In 1959 Murdock developed a hypothesis of a specifically western African centre of domestication, from which many of the more widespread crops in Africa might have derived (Murdock 1959, pp. 64–77; see also the updated discussions of Harlan 1992; Harris 1976).

Although Murdock’s deduction came in the context of reviewing ethnographic evidence for geographical patterns in various cultural behaviours, the 1960s also saw a significant development of botanical studies, especially by Harlan and colleagues, of modern landraces and wild populations of African crops, with particular studies focused on the three major African cereals—sorghum, pearl millet, and finger millet (Brunken, De Wet, and Harlan 1977; Harlan, De Wet, and Stemler 1976; Hilu and De Wet 1976; Hilu, De Wet, and Harlan 1979). Parallel botanical research from the French tradition included the early explorations of Chevalier (1932), especially of Saharan plants, and Porteres (1976) in western Africa. Such research encouraged the beginnings of the collection of archaeobotanical evidence in Africa, although flotation and the development of archaeobotanical laboratories with an African interest would develop only over subsequent decades. The foundation of what was known was drawn together in an edited volume on African plant domestication (Harlan, De Wet, and Stemler 1976). This baseline was expanded on by the proceedings of the IWAA conference published in the 1990s and the 21st century.

AFRICAN ARCHAEOBOTANY AND THE IWAA

The first IWAA conference held in 1994 in Krakow attempted to define some African archaeobotanical research problems. It was very much developed from the point of view of specialists on European archaeobotany, who were confronted with the rather different range of taxa encountered in African sites. Even though these were sites in the north, mainly Egypt, the early Holocene material, notably that of Nabta Playa, was dominated by tropical savannah grasses and could be discussed in relation to sorghum domestication (Wasylikowa et al. 1995).

This first small conference provided a focused breakaway meeting from the International Work Group for Palaeoethnobotany (IWGP), which had for more than two decades been a European-focused gathering for archaeobotanists. The IWAA was more than just a conference of presentations; it offered a chance for researchers to bring material with them and compare it at the microscope during a laboratory session. This model of a conference with open laboratory time remains a powerful platform for the advance of archaeobotanical research.

The second conference followed three years later, 1997, and was held in Leicester (van der Veen 1999). While this meeting also included updated reports on Nabta Playa and other early Holocene sites of Egypt’s Western Desert, it had a wider geographical and chronological interest, including wood charcoal studies as well as West/Central African studies relating to such plant domesticates as pearl millet and rice, which were absent from Saharan Neolithic contexts such as Nabta Playa. Additionally, there were some papers on Roman-era long-distance trade in plants, inspired by the remarkably preserved material at Berenike on the Red Sea coast (Cappers 1999, 2003). This conference also saw the first African-focused discussions of crop-processing and the role of ethnoarchaeology in making sense of archaeological formation processes—and how these processes for African crops and cultural traditions might differ from those of the Mediterranean or European world (D’Andrea et al. 1999). One notable point of discussion in the conference was sorghum domestication, which raised issues about whether and why sorghum was such a ‘late domesticate’ in Africa—late compared to the early Holocene start of cultivation known from Southwest Asia or tropical America, and late compared to available finds in India. This critical discussion of sorghum problematised the finds of African crops outside Africa (Rowley-Conway, Deakin, and Shaw 1999), such as in India, and also raised questions about whether all crops were domesticated in the same way or whether crops such as sorghum were in some way different in their rate and pathway to domestication from better studied crops, such as wheat and barley (Haaland 1999).

The third conference, held in Frankfurt in 2000, continued to expand the geographical range covered in the proceedings as well as the methodological range (Neumann, Butler, and Kahlheber 2003). Noticeable for the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. African Archaeobotany Expanding: An Editorial
• Chapter 2. Primate Archaeobotany: The Potential for Revealing Nonhuman Primate Plant Use In the African Archaeological Record
• Chapter 3. Dietary Diversity: Our Species-Specific Dietary Adaptation
• Chapter 4. Seeds at Sibudu: A Glimpse of Middle Stone Age Vegetation at Sibudu Cave, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa
• Chapter 5. Understanding Late and Terminal Pleistocene Vegetation Change In the Western Cape, South Africa: The Wood Charcoal Evidence From Elands Bay Cave
• Chapter 6. Early Millet Farmers In the Lower Tilemsi Valley, Northeastern Mali
• Chapter 7. Holocene Vegetation Change and Land Use at Ounjougou, Mali
• CHAPTER 8. Early Agro-Pastoralism In The Middle Senegal Valley: The Botanical Remains From Walaldé
• Chapter 9. Humans And The Mangrove In Southern Nigeria Emuobosa Akpo Orijemie And M. Adebisi Sowunmi
• Chapter 10. Plant and Land Use In Southern Cameroon 400 B.C.E .-400 C.E.
• Chapter 11. Wild Trees In the Subsistence Economy Of Early Bantu Speech Communities: A Historical-Linguistic Approach
• Chapter 12. Archaeobotany of Two Middle Kingdom Cult Chambers At Northwest
• Chapter 13. Botanical Insights Into the Life Of An Ancient Egyptian Village: Excavation Results From Amarna
• Chapter 14. Agricultural Innovation And State Collapse In Meroitic Nubia: The Impact of the Savannah Package
• Chapter 15. Islands Of Agriculture On Victoria Nyanza
• Chapter 16. Archaeobotanical Investigations of The Iron Age Lundu State, Malawi
• Chapter 17. Prehistoric Plant Use On La Palma Island (Canary Islands, Spain): An Example of The Disappearance of Agriculture In An Isolated Environment
• Chapter 18. Patterns In The Archaeobotany of Africa: Developing A Database For North Africa, The Sahara, And The Sahel
• Chapter 19. The Archaeobotany of Farming Communities In South Africa: A Review
• Chapter 20. Linguistic Evidence and The Origins Of Food Production In Africa: Where Are We Now?
• Chapter 21. African Agricultural Tools: Implications Of Synchronic Ethnography For Agrarian History
• Chapter 22. Leaving A Lasting Impression: Arable Economies and Cereal Impressions In Africa and Europe
• Chapter 23. The Use of Plants In Iron Production: Insights From Smelting Remains From Buganda
• Index