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Ann B. Stahl
Africa in the World: (Re)centering African History through Archaeology In the early post-colonial decades, scholars of Africa’s pasts turned inward, endeavoring to demonstrate the independence of Africa from the world. Archaeological research in particular was directed toward demonstrating Africa’s original and independent trajectories of technological, social and political innovation, with little attention paid to Africa’s interrelations with areas outside the continent. Much has changed in recent years as scholars increasingly recognize that Africa has long been ‘in and of the world’, to paraphrase David William Cohen, prominent historian of Africa. This paper explores how recent archaeological scholarship centered on the last two millennia in sub-Saharan Africa is transforming our understanding of the sub-continent’s relationship with other world regions, at the same time as providing insight into the centrality of those relationships to the historical trajectories of regions outside Africa. How is archaeological evidence contributing to our understanding of Africa’s entanglements with the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds? What were the transformative effects of trade in gold, ivory and humans, and how does archaeological evidence encourage us to recenter understandings of modernity and its variable expressions in Africa & elsewhere?
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