Tom Huffman (1944–2022)

Thomas (Tom) Niel Huffman was born and educated in the United States. In 1966 he graduated with a BA Honours degree in anthropology and later obtained his MA (1968) and PhD (1974) in anthropology from the University of Illinois. In 1967 he accompanied Brian Fagan, then a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois, to Zambia where they excavated two sites on the northern edge of the Zambezi escarpment. Shortly thereafter he moved to Bulawayo to work on his doctoral project. He spent two months there at the National Museum studying collections and then excavated at the site of Leopards Kopje. In doing so he was able to ‘clarify inconsistencies’ in the Leopards Kopje sequence, set the limits of the ‘culture’ and describe affinities with other ‘Later Iron Age cultures’ to understand its place within larger migration patterns (Huffman 1974). His PhD set the methodological foundation for much of Tom’s later work, but also foreshadowed the scope and scale of the contribution that he would make over the next 50 years.

Tom’s professional career started in Zimbawbwe, then Rhodesia, in the early 1970s with his appointment at the Queen Victoria Museum, Salisbury, as Chief Scientific Officer, National Museums and Monuments. He served as Inspector of Monuments for the Historical Monuments Commission from 1970 to 1972 with duties that included monitoring the site of Great Zimbabwe. In 1971, while inspecting the site, its curator pointed to daga structures that had been exposed during construction in the area below the museum. Tom obtained permission to carry out salvage excavations, which he executed over the next five years. These excavations revealed ‘élite’ and ‘commoner’ areas and provided the material building blocks for Tom’s detailed structuralist interpretation of Great Zimbabwe and the site of Mapungubwe that followed.

While excavating at Great Zimbabwe, Tom continued the tradition of Ranche House Schools started by Roger Summers and Peter Garlake. These field schools attracted people from both Rhodesia and South Africa and fostered a deep interest in archaeology in those who participated, with some becoming professionals in their own right. Tom had an innate talent for entertaining and mesmerised legions of scholars, students and members of the public as he conjured up images of bygone societies.

In 1977 Tom left the Queen Victoria Museum to take up the position of Professor and Head of Archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand (‘Wits’) in South Africa. There, for the next three decades, he was the head of a vibrant and productive department. Following his retirement in 2009 he was awarded the title Emeritus Professor.

Tom was provocative and his ideas stimulated debate; it is thus not surprising that the newly appointed Wits professor immediately muddied ‘Iron Age’ waters when he prescribed a new method for ceramic analysis and offered new ideas about culture historical reconstruction and Iron Age population movements. Not one to standstill, he published a ‘three stream’ migration model (Huffman 1979, 1982), which he later revised after finding common ground between himself and David Phillipson (Huffman 1989) and Tim Maggs (Huffman 2007). Tom’s provocations sometimes took the form of heated argument, acrimonious rebuttal or simple disagreement, but he continued to grapple with ideas long after the moment. It was not uncommon for him to seek the opinion or council of colleagues, drawing on a very broad social and academic network that included anthropologists, linguists, historians, biologists and philosophers. More often than not these animated discussions would take place around Tom’s dinner table. He was the quintessential host and his house was home to visiting scholars, struggling students and anyone who needed a roof or a meal.

In the early 1980s the structuralist anthropology of Adam Kuper caught Tom’s attention and he was deeply influenced by the idea that African homesteads had an underlying regularity in spatial organisation derived from and reflective of the group’s belief systems and by the socio-economic importance of cattle to these societies (Kuper 1982). This appealed to Tom’s penchant for structures and patterns and from this he developed the Central Cattle Pattern (CCP), an ahistoric template that could be applied to identify the presence of Iron Age Eastern Bantu-speaking people in the archaeological record (Huffman 1986a, 1986b, 1990, 2001). He later applied a similar ethnographically derived approach to the spatial layout of Mapungubwe and to explaining the emergence of the Zimbabwe culture pattern (Huffman 1996, 2000, 2009a).

Tom was tenacious and the CCP and the Zimbabwe Pattern dominated archaeological discourse in southern African Iron Age research throughout the 1980s and 1990s. However, as criticism mounted against the deterministic and recursive nature of structuralism, and the problematic nature of the ethnographic record (particularly in South Africa), Tom’s models attracted intense and robust criticism. Nevertheless, while often refining and elaborating in detail, Tom never wavered from the underlying principles of his models and seldom hesitated to respond to criticism. He regretted not replying to David Beach’s (1998) critique in Current Anthropology before Beach passed away the following year. A few years before his retirement in 2009 Tom combined what was by then a formidable body of work on ceramic classification and settlement layout to publish the Handbook to the Iron Age (Huffman 2007). This remains an essential reference point for studies of pre-colonial farming communities in southern Africa.

Tom loved working with data, often exploring new and innovative techniques in order to date material (Neukirch et al. 2012) or detect among other things the presence in the archaeological record of cattle (Huffman 1993), maize (Huffman 2006) and evidence of climate change (Huffman 2008, 2009b, 2010). His curiosity and creativity were contagious and he attracted and supported postgraduate students from a wide range of sub-disciplines. Tom had a real passion for fieldwork and his field schools and field trips were legendary, with many young archaeologists learning their trade working alongside him on a salvage or research project. After South Africa’s national heritage legislation changed in 1999 to include a requirement for environmental impact assessments, Tom set up a contract unit at Wits to cross-subsidise research projects, students and conferences. He personally led many of these surveys or salvage excavations, weaving the material into his interpretative framework. It was also at this time that South Africa began to rewrite its school history curriculum and Tom provided funding and space for the development of an educational archaeology unit. He also produced educational materials on Mapungubwe (Huffman 2005) and, much later, co-authored a book called Palaces in Stone that he was hoping would be recognised for use in the classroom by the Department of Education (Main and Huffman 2021).

After his retirement Tom continued to work in the field and published extensively on a wide range of material, but around 2010 he began to spend part of each year in the United States. He had become reacquainted with Frank Lee Earley, a childhood and university friend from Denver. After visiting sites on which they had worked together as undergraduates, he and Earley began a long-term project on the Middle Ceramic period in southeast Colorado. True to form, Tom introduced an ethnoarchaeological approach to re-interpret old empirical data. Tom and Frank published a series of articles (Huffman and Earley 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021), as well as what turned out to be Tom’s penultimate book, Paradigms in Conflict: Cognitive Archaeology on the High Plains (Huffman and Earley 2022).

Tom died on 30 March 2022 in Johannesburg, South Africa.