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This chapter discusses the 4th millennium bce in Nubia, which was characterized by a further advance in the process of socio-economic complexity already underway during the previous Neolithic phase, undoubtedly enhanced by interaction with Predynastic Egypt. This ultimately produced the emergence of the A-Group, an indigenous complex polity that appeared at the end of the millennium and reached its climax about the time of the Egyptian unification, ca. 3100 bce. The A-Group was characterized by a fluid economic pattern that included more than one subsistence activity, with herding retaining a distinctive social value within the society; and by organizational differences resulting from mobile and flexible politics, which gave rise to a regional polity based on trade and control over its logistics, social networking and alliance building, and a distinct form of distributed authority.

This article argues that the Acheulean is perhaps the longest lasting cultural–technological tradition in human history, dating from around 1.7 to 0.3 Mya and roughly corresponding to the time during which H. Erectus and H. Heidelbergensis lived in Africa. Unlike earlier Oldowan technology, Acheulean cores — handaxes, cleavers, and picks — were standardised, of predetermined shape and made on large cobbles and flakes. The extensive Acheulean archaeological record throughout Africa over 1.4 million years described is testimony to the success of this technology’s makers in different habitats, altitudes, and settings, but also to its apparent conservative cultural nature: a learned tradition passed on through thousands of generations of highly mobile hominin groups with small population sizes. Although there are differences between Early and Late Acheulean technology, the makers of these tools may have undergone more significant changes with respect to the use of other technologies, strategic land use, and social life.

This chapter examines the origins of the god Amun, of his name, his ram-headed form, and their connections to Nubia, which seem to have been overestimated. Amun appears to be the major deity worshipped in Nubia after the Egyptian conquest of the New Kingdom. Considered to be a national and universal god, he became the protector of Kushite kingship, spread through the religious conversion of the Kushite elite to Egyptian religious beliefs. Amun is a solarized deity figured as a man (occasionally ithyphallic) with a two-feather headdress primarily as the god of Karnak, and as a ram-headed deity as that of Jebel Barkal. He may also appear as a bull, a goose, and more questionably as a crocodile or a cobra. His main sacred cities were Napata, Pnubs, Kawa, Sanam, and Tara. He is occasionally accompanied by Mut, Khonsu, Satis, and Anukis.

Zooarchaeological comparisons of Roman and Islamic North Africa indicate changes in animal use largely resultant from shifting parameters of urban and economic expansion and development, presence and involvement of the military, cultural preferences, and restrictions in dietary resources. ‘Urbanized’ and ‘militarized’ zones, such as Carthage, and the Egyptian delta and eastern desert, typically display increases in pork consumption during Roman times; others areas, such as Morocco and inland Tunisia and Libya, regions arguably less affected by, or exposed to, Roman dietary and cultural customs or demands, maintain greater temporal consistency. Islamic patterns display regional diversity, with sheep/goat pastoralism predominating, integrated husbandry schemes and animal breed manipulation generally diminishing, and cultural taboos against pork consumption registering in many areas.

Africanist archaeometallurgists have conveniently divided Africa into two sub-regions when discussing the continent’s metallurgical history: north of the Sahara Desert, including the Mediterranean littoral, the Lower Nile Valley, and the Red Sea coast; and south of the Sahara (sub-Saharan Africa), including West, East, Central, and southern Africa. This division reflects the fact that the metallurgical history of the two sub-regions differs. This article begins with a theoretical review of the origins of metallurgy as a background on which the sub-Saharan case is anchored. Its main body is further split in two: the appearance of metallurgy in the region and its subsequent development. The discussion suggests that studying the origins of other technologies, such as basketry, textiles, and pottery may also help shed light on those of metallurgy itself.

East African foragers were probably the first who colonized most of the world before the invention of agriculture—their first biologically successful migration out of Africa can be inferred from the mtDNA phylogeny and dated to ~ 65,000 years ago. They were also involved in other migrations within the African continent during Late Pleistocene, as shown from a high-resolution characterization of several other African mtDNA haplogroups. Contemporary African hunter-gatherers differ from their neighbours in many aspects. They all show signs of demographic contraction that might be due to interrupted gene flow among their sub-populations caused by recent establishments of sedentary farming communities. In fact, they are not independent and maintain both cultural exchanges and marital relationships with neighbouring farmers. However, in spite of recent admixtures, their gene pool still contains a high number of both maternal and paternal lineages that coalesce to the deepest clades of modern human phylogeny.

The Horn of Africa is one of the Africa’s most culturally varied regions and the world’s most physiographically diverse areas, possessing an extensive range of climates, topographies, vegetation, and soils, often found vertically stratified over short horizontal distances. In consequence of its diverse climate, physiography human landscapes and dynamic food-producing systems, the Horn has long been recognised as a major world centre of plant domesticates, possesses diversity in cattle and goat breeds, and provides some of the densest and most varied concentrations of ancient pastoral rock art in Africa. This article examines the middle to late Holocene transition and the first appearance of food production in the Horn; the archaeological evidence for domesticated animals and plants in the Horn; and frameworks for the origins of food production.

Africa’s engagement with the post-AD 1500 Atlantic World has captivated archaeological attention over the past twenty years. Focusing on West Africa, this article gives a sense of the themes and questions that have driven archaeological work on Atlantic processes, reviews some of the trends and insights generated by this research, and explores future directions in this field. The discussion begins by situating historical archaeology in the historiography of the African Atlantic and then considering archaeological contributions to broader debates about the emergence, dynamics, impacts, and long-term consequences of the Atlantic economy on African societies. It then examines five domains of archaeological research on social transformations: political landscapes, cultural life between the coast and interior, urban dynamics, cultural economies, and technological change.

The origins of archaeology were in Europe, so that its development in the African continent was initially shaped by European perceptions, subsequently modified by American influences. Only during the last half century have indigenous Africans had a voice in the archaeologies of their own countries, which have nevertheless often retained approaches adopted from overseas. This article notes that much of African archaeology has been characterised by particularism; syntheses, especially at a continental level, have been relatively rare. Even studies dealing with large parts of the continent are not that common, although areas of lesser size have received more attention. Problems that plague much of African archaeological thought become particularly apparent. The Eurocentric nineteenth-century Three Age System and the associated concept of prehistory continue to characterise much analytical and interpretive writing. In spite of attempts to see the African past in different way, these outmoded ideas remain current in many places.

Archaeological research on the African continent developed hand in hand with European colonization. Although many countries became independent over sixty years ago, archaeological practice today can bear negative traces of colonial legacies. Often these legacies can be identified in the ways in which archaeologists have tended to interact—or indeed not interact—with local communities. A number of archaeological teams have therefore been developing “community engagement” strategies as a step towards decolonizing their practice. This chapter presents an overview of some of the community engagements currently being carried out in Sudan, and includes case studies from archaeological projects at Meroe and El-Kurru.

This article examines the Bantu languages and their classification and provides archaeological background of the Bantu migration on Western and Central Africa and Great Lakes Africa. Encompassing a series of changes and movements that took place during several millennia over one of the largest continental masses on earth, the Bantu phenomenon cannot be accounted for by a single and simplistic paradigm. It is connected with complex population movements starting north of Central Africa and led to the progressive colonisation of a vast area further south. The discussion concludes that the Bantu phenomenon is best understood as a colonisation, migration, expansion, dispersal, or diffusion.

This article focuses on efforts to promote formal teaching of archaeology, especially at primary and secondary levels. It stresses that an integrated strategy towards archaeology and education, that exploits different opportunities, develops resources and methods appropriate to different learning ages, constituencies and contexts, and which deploys the different elements so as to complement each other, is likely to be the most successful. The discussion on educational archaeology examines developments in South Africa. It suggests that archaeology departments and divisions at African universities need to include educational archaeologists on their staff so as to better link the two disciplines, provide a critical approach to the way in which archaeology is taught at university level, and determine how it is being implemented at school level.

The archaeology of Africa is littered with migration narratives. Migration events from Africa have shaped global history, from the hominin dispersal ‘Out of Africa’ to more recent forced exodus. Despite this prominence and seeming ubiquity, African archaeology has often had a complicated and contested relationship with migration and it remains a potentially divisive issue. Introducing some of the key trends in archaeological approaches to migration, this article outlines some of the past archaeological uses of migration paradigms, and explores theoretical and methodological issues associated with its application to African archaeological contexts. Global archaeology is slowly re-engaging with migration as an explanatory device. Migration is clearly a central dynamic within African society. Researchers need to develop new theoretical approaches to migration, making it much clearer what is meant by the term, as well as reviewing how it is identified archaeologically.

Metalworking encompasses both the reductive smelting of ores to produce metal and its refining and forging to create usable objects. The advent of this process is one of the most significant technological progressions in human history. The origin of metallurgy debate still rages without any solution or middle ground in sight. More importantly, numerous insightful studies have focused on the sociological and physico-chemical aspects of past metalworking activities, with modern research tending increasingly to consider these together while integrating fieldwork-based studies and laboratory investigations within the same continuum of research. Ethnographies still have an important role in interpretation, alongside the techniques of the physical sciences and their ability to provide information on what was happening inside furnaces and forges. With more data, researchers will be better placed to resolve highly contentious issues surrounding the origins and innovations in the African metallurgical record.

This article discusses the different archaeological approaches to African urbanism, historical contributions of historians and social scientists on knowledge about urbanism, and the operational concept of urbanism. It surveys the variety of African urban experience in the Nile Valley, the Maghreb, the Guinean zone, the Sahel, the Ethiopian highlands, the Great Lakes region and the Central African interior, the East African coast and western Indian Ocean, and southern Africa. Developments in archaeological field survey, excavation, and analysis and the integration of documentary and oral evidence continue to transform the image of African urbanity. Some key themes are apparent, among them the need for inter- and intra-site analyses and an integrated view of socio-environmental interactions including energy regime, economy, politics, and ideological organising principles, all treated diachronically.

Both agricultural intensification and the study of the processes that prompt intensification have a long history in Africa. There are multiple reasons why a community might choose to increase its inputs of labour to establish, maintain, or expand an agricultural system. This article illustrates this point through reference to societies throughout sub-Saharan Africa that have undergone periods of intensification and dis-intensification over the last 500 years or so and through a summary of the far older processes of agricultural change undertaken in north and northeastern Africa. It suggests that the range of trajectories displayed in the archaeological and historical record points to the significance of political, economic, and environmental contingencies, all of which are subject to changes through time.

This article explores some examples of the archaeology of broadly ‘kin-based’ societies and the potential that such archaeology holds for understanding human action through time. It emphasises some of the ways in which the African archaeological record has been neglected. Complexity in terms of specialisation and stratification among African clan- and lineage-based societies seems to have operated at the level of the ethnic group. Within such communities, overt personal accumulation and the attempt to wield overt personal authority were checked by decentralising tendencies, such that at the community level the society might be thought of as relatively egalitarian and governed by a variety of horizontally arranged social institutions. However, when viewed at the level of interacting communities and kin groups, social distinction of a sort may be seen in competition between groups, the interconnected specialisation of societies, and the relative ideologies and values attached to them.

This article examines a dynamic and rapidly growing field in African archaeology. It covers a complex period of colonial history from the end of the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese first sailed along the East African coast, to the 1960s, when East African countries finally gained independence. Squeezed between European periods of rule was that of the Omani sultanate, which ruled the coast and caravan routes with variable local powers from the seventeenth century until 1890 when Zanzibar became a British protectorate. These changing systems of rule interacted with local histories in which local African communities were increasingly engaged in the intensification of the caravan trade, especially enslaved persons and ivory, and the introduction of plantation agriculture. The discussion considers colonialism and power, settlement patterns, economic life and artefact studies, and enslavement and resistance.