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‘They are all dead that I could ask’: Indigenous Innovation and the Micropolitics of the Field in Twentieth-century Southern Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2021

Rachel King Open the ORCID record for Rachel King [Opens in a new window] ,
Adelphine Bonneau  and
David Pearce
Rachel King
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology University College London 31–34 Gordon Square LondonWC1H 0PYUnited Kingdom & Rock Art Research Institute University of the Witwatersrand Private Bag X3 Wits 2050 JohannesburgSouth Africa Email: rachel-king@ucl.ac.uk
Adelphine Bonneau
Affiliation:
Rock Art Research Institute University of the Witwatersrand Private Bag X3 Wits 2050 JohannesburgSouth Africa & School of Archaeology University of Oxford 1 South Parks Road OxfordOX1 3TGUK & Université du Québec à Chicoutimi 555 Boulevard de l'UniversitéChicoutimiQCG7H 2B1Canada Email: adelphine.bonneau@gmail.com
David Pearce
Affiliation:
Rock Art Research Institute University of the Witwatersrand Private Bag X3 Wits 2050 JohannesburgSouth Africa Email: david.pearce@wits.ac.za
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Abstract

Recovering the agency, skill and innovation of archaeological field assistants from historical encounters is essential to interrogating processes of knowledge production, but is often hampered by access to appropriate archival sources and methods. We detail a field project from early twentieth-century Basutoland (modern-day Lesotho) that is unique both for its aim to salvage details of rock-art production as a dying craft and for its archive chronicling the project's intellectual journey from experiment to draft manuscripts to published work over more than three decades. We argue that critical historiographic attention to this archive offers a guide for examining the intimate dynamics of fieldwork and the effects of these micropolitics on the archaeological canon. We demonstrate how sustained attention to long processes of knowledge production can pinpoint multiple instances in which the usability of field assistants’ scientific knowledge is qualified, validated, or rejected, and in this case how an African assistant is transformed into an ethnographic interlocutor. For rock-art studies especially, this represents a need for interrogating the epistemic cultures—not just the content—of foundational historical data.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 137 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

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