Editorial

Writing this editorial in a British-based journal just days after the United Kingdom’s removal from the European Union, we can still only guess at the impact that this decision will have on the future funding of archaeological research in Africa by British-based researchers or the possibilities that it may, or may not, foreclose for the kind of productive, pan-European collaborative investigations that have marked the last decade and more. Given the prevailing rhetoric, however, we must prepare for the worst, even as we hope for the best. Yet, all is not doom and gloom!

If there is one characteristic that marks the past year it is the extent to which several of our colleagues have seen their work acknowledged in a wide variety of ways and at the highest level. We thus extend our congratulations in the first instance to Shadreck Chirikure of the Universities of Cape Town and Oxford on his receipt of a Research Award by the Shanghai Archaeology Forum. This award was made for his work on the archaeology of urbanism at Great Zimbabwe, one of Africa’s most iconic archaeological sites, where Shadreck has challenged previous orthodoxies concerning the size of its population and the supposed monopolisation by local élites of the objects of power found there (Chirikure et al. 2017, 2018). At the same meeting, Babatunde Babalola (University of Cambridge) was also the recipient of an honour, in his case a Field Discovery Award for his work at Ile-Ife in southwestern Nigeria. Tunde’s investigations there of the first known centre of glass manufacture south of the Sahara have documented how glass was produced using a recipe quite distinct from that employed around the same time in the Middle East and have shown that the beads produced in this way then enjoyed a wide circulation through West Africa (Babalola et al. 2018).

These awards came hot on the heels of the news that François-Xavier Fauvelle- Aymar, who took the lead in organising the 2016 conference of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists (SAfA) in Toulouse, has been elected to the first ever chair in the history and archaeology of Africa at the Collège de France, France’s most prestigious research institution. This new post forms part of a growing recognition of the significance of African historical archaeology in the universities of the Global North (for example, the creation of the Jennifer Ward Oppenheimer Chair in the Deep History and Archaeology of Africa at Cambridge held by Paul Lane that we noted in last year’s editorial). However, lest anyone think that African prehistory has not received its due, we also congratulate Prof. Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg on her election as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Readers will recall her magisterial review of the southern African Middle Stone Age published five years ago in Azania (Wadley 2015) and we note here that not only was Lyn the only archaeologist to be given this honour last year, but that she is also the first African archaeologist ever to receive it.

Two further developments provide instances of hope for the future from within Africa itself. First is the news that the University of Botswana has been selected as the home for the new UNESCO Chair in African Heritage Studies (Mooko 2019). We hope that this post will be filled swiftly and that — with adequate resources and support — it will become a new focus of efforts to conserve, learn from and display the material remains of Africa’s past.

For our second example we turn to Sudan, where students and academics played a prominent role in last April’s uprising that brought an end to the decades-long dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir and, following further protests, helped inaugurate a transitional government committed to returning the country to a democratic form of governance. In particular, we congratulate our colleague Prof. Intisar el-Zein Soughayrhoun, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Khartoum, on becoming Sudan’s new Minister of Research and Higher Education. Among other things, we hope that this will encourage the new government to strengthen its efforts to secure and protect Sudan’s rich cultural heritage, not least given the risks posed here by plans to continue building dams along the Nile and its tributaries.

The importance of cultural heritage and the contribution that it can make to sustainable development will be one of the themes discussed at this year’s SAfA conference, which takes place in Oxford from 20–24 September, the twenty-fifth such meeting and the sixth time that the society will meet in Europe. Other themes will include exploration of the long-term relationships between Africa’s inhabitants and the environments and climates in which they live, with a particular focus on the ecological resilience of African societies and the links between archaeological research and global climate change, as well as the increasingly important role of archaeologists in building long-term histories of the pre-colonial period. To discuss this and much more, we look forward to seeing you in Oxford later this year.