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Physical Anthropology and the Reconstruction of Recent Precolonial History in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Peter Rosa
Peter Rosa*
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
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Extract

In the 1960s, when the use of non-documentary sources of evidence to reconstruct history in Africa first achieved prominence, physical anthropology was thought to offer some potential. Of particular interest to African historians was the new genetic approach, with its emphasis on comparative studies of blood group distributions. This resulted in several papers in books and journals of African history, where the promise of these new physical anthropological techniques was pointed out to historians. The influence of these early articles has waned, however, and recent books on historical method in Africa give physical anthropology little prominence.

References to physical anthropology in the book by Thomas Spear, for instance, a book that introduces “historical method” in Africa, are relegated to the chapter on “the archaeological record” and are perfunctory. In particular there is a failure to appreciate the implications of the fundamental difference between the analysis of excavated human biological remains--a branch of physical anthropology which has much in common with archeology--and the deduction of more recent evolutionary and non-evolutionary history from the comparative analysis of the biological characteristics of living peoples--a branch of physical anthropology that is much more similar to linguistics than to archeology.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 12 , 1985 , pp. 281 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1985

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References

NOTES

* I am indebted to Robin Law for prodding me into action and for his support throughout the writing of this paper.

1. Although this potential was as yet “untapped.” Gabel, C. and Bennett, N.R., eds., Reconstructing African Culture History, (Boston, 1967), viiGoogle Scholar; see also McCall, D.F., Africa in Time-Perspective (Oxford, 1969), 101ff.Google Scholar

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9. In particular Hiernaux, “Bantu expansion” and idem., The People of Africa. This latter is a book of considerable potential interest to historians in other disciplines, but appears to have escaped much attention.

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