Book Review
LAWRENCE BARHAM & PETER MITCHELL. The first Africans: African archaeology from the earliest toolmakers to most recent foragers. xviii+602 pages, 117 illustrations, 5 tables. 2008. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-0-521-84796-4 hardback £50 & $99; 978-0-521-61265-4 paperback £18.99 & $36.99.
Review by Graham Connah
School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
(Email: graham.connah@effect.net.au)
Syntheses of African archaeology were relatively uncommon at one time but in recent years there have been increasing attempts to escape the particularism that formerly characterised the subject and to present the data in a continental or semi-continental context. Peter Mitchell has been one of those who have made such contributions and in this new book he has collaborated with Lawrence Barham to produce a study of African hunter-gatherers from the earliest times up to the present. This is a mighty task indeed, tackled in eleven chapters packed with information. Barham appears to have been mainly responsible for Chapters 3-6 (up to about 70 000 years ago) and Mitchell for Chapters 7-10 (since about 70 000 years ago), with Chapters 1-2 and 11 written jointly. The two main parts of the book have different approaches: Chapters 3-6 deal with the evolution of human attributes such as tool-use, bipedalism, meat-eating, the use of fire, symbolic thought, and so on; while Chapters 7-10 survey the detailed archaeological data for later hunter-gatherers, together with issues of continental relevance.
The varied information on which the book is based, the history of relevant research in Africa, the problems of chronological frameworks, and the book's themes and structure are introduced in Chapter 1, while Chapter 2 discusses geographical, ecological, and chronological matters. Thereafter, we contact the first tool-users and tool-makers (Chapter 3), early Pleistocene technologies and societies (Chapter 4), mid-Pleistocene foragers (Chapter 5) and their successors (Chapter 6 reviews the period from c. 430 000 to c. 70 000 years ago). Chapter 7 takes us to the end of the Pleistocene, and Chapter 8 examines the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. Mid-Holocene intensification is the subject of Chapter 9, leading to Chapter 10 which discusses the relationships between foragers and farmers over the last few thousand years. Hunter-gatherers and their descendants in the present, as well as archaeologists' responsibilities to them is the concern of the final chapter (11); it also summarises the main themes of the book and concludes by suggesting objectives for future research. The 461 pages of text are then followed by 12 pages of Notes, (referred to in the text by superscript numbers), a 4-page Glossary, 107 pages of References, and 15 pages of Index. Harvard referencing is used throughout the text and is very detailed. The book is well produced with very few typographical errors, although its maps are over-reduced, making some of them difficult to use, and some photographs are of poor quality. The text is also disrupted by the inclusion of 'insets', similar to the 'boxes' now so common in student texts but in this case identified only by a narrow enclosing line and in some cases running over more than one page. Occasionally these insets appear so close together in the text that they confuse rather than enlighten the reader.
It is apparent that this book represents an impressive scholarly achievement. A particularly important part of that achievement is the way in which the authors have drawn on a wide variety of data that includes primate studies, genetics, palaeoanthropology, linguistics, isotopic studies of both palaeoclimate and human diet, sociobiology, ethnography, and other sources, as well as the results of diverse archaeological analyses. The outcome is a book that is clearly intended for academics and their students, in archaeology as well as in related disciplines, combining the functions of text-book and work of reference. Nevertheless, it is apparent that the authors intended that it should also be read in its entirety, because it addresses themes and issues rather than data alone; but this will take a determined reader.
Without doubt this is an important book. It reaches out to a new African archaeology that will develop in future years. This new approach uses Marine Isotope Stages as its main chronological framework and Clark's modal terminology for its lithic technology, rejects progressivist approaches, questions the utility of the forager/farmer dichotomy, and embraces a staggering variety of evidence. In the process the book rejects the epochalistic model of Africa's past and questions the naming of archaeological assemblages. Yet the authors are still constrained by the chains of past literature: they repeatedly lapse into terminology like 'Middle Stone Age', 'Iron Age', or even 'Pastoral Neolithic', and retain conventional nomenclature for many stone industries. It seems that we have not yet arrived at a new African archaeology but this book has taken a significant step in that direction.
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