Another strand of historical archaeology in Africa encompasses the issues of ‘colonialism’. This has mostly been approached from the perspective of European expansion, especially in South Africa. This is partly due to the greater numbers of trained archaeologists there, who tend to be better resourced than many of their counterparts elsewhere on the continent (outside of North Africa), and the longer established tradition of contract archaeology which, especially in urban areas, provided an important stimulus to the growth of historical archaeology. It is also because compared with other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa has a much longer history of European colonialism, commencing with the establishment of a staging-post in Table Bay by the VOC (Dutch East India Company) under Commander Jan van Riebeeck in 1652. Consequently, not only have more traces of colonialism survived, but also there has been a much longer history of transformation of relations between colonial powers and indigenous inhabitants. Since at least the 1970s, the archaeological traces of Dutch, British, and Afrikaaner colonialism have been the subject of increasingly intensive study from a variety of perspectives. The body of material on the historical archaeology of South Africa and the broader region, consequently, is significantly larger than for elsewhere. Subthemes that have been addressed within the region include the archaeology of impact, the creation of distinctive colonial architectural styles, Christian missions, military encounters, industrialization, and class distinctions. Whereas much early work focused on documenting the archaeological remains of the colonizing powers, more recently, attention has been given to documenting the archaeology of the colonized, and the various ways in which African societies resisted or tried to lessen the impacts of colonial rule.
Excavations at Oudepost I, a small VOC outpost situated c. 120 km north of Cape Town on the edge of
Saldanha Bay in the Western Cape, for instance, were explicitly designed to measure the degree of impact on local societies on the frontier of the Dutch colony and the variable nature of interaction between colonized and colonizer. The site was occupied from 1669 to 1723, and structural remains comprised a small, irregularly shaped stone fort, a two-roomed rectangular building that probably served as the main dwelling for the fort’s garrison, and a small rectangular structure of indeterminate function, all built of stone. The excavated remains provide insights into the conditions in such outposts, and the diets and material possessions of the soldiers. The composition of the artifact and faunal assemblages and their spatial patterning also raised issues concerning the nature of the interactions between the occupants of the fort and local indigenous populations, and the identity of those indigenes. The high percentage of wild fauna represented in the assemblage, despite the availability of livestock from colonial centers further south, for instance, led the excavators to challenge the archival evidence and suggest that over time the occupants of Oudepost would have had a significant impact on the wild food base of the surrounding indigenous Khoikhoi population. Although Khoikhoi were principally pastoralists, the material culture recovered from the site was more similar to that found on pre-contact Late Stone Age hunter-gatherer sites in the region. To the excavators, this further suggested that the colonial presence ultimately undermined the subsistence strategies of local stock-keeping communities, who had always relied on hunting to supplement their diet especially during droughts and other periods of climatic stress, forcing them to abandon herding and into bondage on white settlements and farms.
Comparable studies have demonstrated that the impacts of colonialism were sometimes more muted and that new forms of practice often emerged within African societies that helped to subvert colonial ideologies. There is also evidence to suggest that older material practices often proved more resistant than is implied by the available documentary sources. A good example of the latter is provided by recent work on the nineteenth century Tswana towns of Phalatswe and Ntsweng in Botswana. Specifically, despite the existence of documentary and pictorial sources which would seem to imply widespread changes in daily practice as a consequence of Protestant evangelism, it is evident from the material remains of houses, pots, metal tools, and other items, that at least in these contexts members of the local Tswana polities retained a degree of control over their material world, and were able to accommodate the new religion and direct it toward achieving their own political goals.
World History
