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Forgotten Africa: An Introduction to its Archaeology, African Connections: An Archaeological Perspective on Africa and the Wider World, African Archaeology, African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction

Peter Mitchell, introducing the most enterprising of these four books, exhorts us to turn the globe till Africa becomes central, and then to imagine the course of world history. For the evolution of hominids and humanity such Africentrism has been the prevailing wisdom ever since Louis Leakey’s fossil finds at Olduvai Gorge; the ‘Out of Africa II’ hypothesis, developed to explain the emergence and eventual worldwide spread of ‘anatomically modern’ Homo sapiens during the last quarter million years, now provides an extra fillip. Appropriately, that relatively recent process is acclaimed as ‘Africa’s gift to the world’ in one of the twenty-nine very short thematic chapters comprising Graham Connah’s book, and it is judiciously accommodated by David Phillipson in the latest revision of his comprehensive textbook (first published twenty years previously) – albeit handling the related debate on the origin of modern human behaviour as if it were a novel intellectual annoyance. It means, too, that Phillipson’s masterly conspectus of the preceding Acheulian with Homo erectus/ergaster (etc?), spanning a million-odd years in the African savannas – and billed as ‘the consolidation of basic human culture’ – is, for all the care taken in the updating, eclipsed in current excitement value. As it happens, it is Mitchell who dwells least on this issue, since his real concern here – contrasting with his reputation for interpreting Stone Age materials in southern Africa – is with the last few millennia and how to view them free of (Eurocentic) convention and notions of subSaharan Africa as backward or peripheral. Like the other authors, he displays a mildly Afriphile commitment (admitting a ‘degree of hyperbole’ to make the occasional point), but his purpose is not to subject readers to another continental survey (either Phillipsonstyle, or as in Connah’s earlier African Civilizations, 1987 and 2001) or simply to claim a list of medals for (what Connah still calls) ‘forgotten’ Africa. The Antiquaries Journal, 86, 2006, pp 402–7