The Lists of Phalaborwa Rulers: A Comparison of Variant ‘Fixed’ Sources

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 209-224
Author(s):  
R.T.K. Scully
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Specific Detail ◽  
Cultural Complex ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lines Of Descent ◽  
Political Association ◽  
Diverse Groups

In this paper I discuss genealogical material documented in the past about the ruling families of Phalaborwa in the northeast Transvaal. Recent archeological research in Phalaborwa demonstrates a continuous Iron Age cultural complex in the area centered around Lolwe hill since the eighth century A.D. Subsequent investigations of Phalaborwa oral tradition clearly link the present BaPhalaborwa Sotho-speaking population with the Iron Age past, adding considerable specific detail for the historical reconstruction of this remarkable 1000-year old metalproducing and trading society.Noble and royal genealogies among the BaPhalaborwa focus on the main line of Malatji clan rulers and in all of the Malatji lines the genealogies merge at one or other ascending levels. There is consequently a single ultimate prestige genealogy for all noble and royal families in Phalaborwa which has become fixed by the efforts of various of the tribe literates since the 1930s. Inconsistencies in oral tradition from diverse groups, however, suggest that this genealogy was not rigid in the past, but flexible, allowing certain direct lines of descent to become obscured and the collateral and even unrelated lines which have found their way into political association with the ruling house of Phalaborwa by various means to be added.

Constructing a Precolonial Owan Chronology and Dating Framework

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 219-249
Author(s):  
Onaiwu W. Ogbomo
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
African History ◽  
Accurate Assessment ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relative Chronology ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Genealogical Data

Oral tradition has been recognized by historians as a vital source for historical reconstruction of non-literate societies. However, one of its “deficienc[ies] is an inability to establish and maintain an accurate assessment of the duration of the past [it] seeks to reconstruct.” As a result of its time-lessness it has been declared ahistorical. In the same vein R.A. Sargent argues that [c]hronology is the framework for the reconstruction of the past, and is vital to the correlation of evidence, assessment of data, and the analysis of historical sources. Any construction of history [which] fails to consider or employ dating and the matrix of time to examine the order and nature of events in human experience can probably be labelled ahistorical.Basically, the concern of critics of oral tradition is that, while they are veritable sources of history, the researcher “must work and rework them with an increasing sophistication and critical sense.” Because dating is very pivotal to the historian's craft, different techniques have been adopted alone or in combination to create a relative chronology. In precolonial African history, the most commonly used have been genealogical data which include dynastic generations, genealogical generations (father-to-son succession) and the age-set generation. Also systematically charted comets, solar eclipses, and droughts have been employed by historians in dating historical events, or in calculating the various generational lengths.A dynastic generation is determined by “the time elapsing between the accession of the first member of a given generation to hold office and the accession of the first representative of the next.”

Comment: African Art and African History

1962 ◽  
Vol 5 (02) ◽  
pp. 25-27
Author(s):  
Philip D. Curtin
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Mixed Data ◽  
Human Society ◽  
African History ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
African Art ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point

In discussing these three papers as they relate to history, it is an essential starting point to realize that the discipline of history is changing and has changed considerably in the last quarter century. History began as an account of the great deeds of our own ancestors, a record of the past that was essentially a backward extension of our own group personality. It long ago outgrew its concern with our tribal past and came to be concerned with the past of other peoples who share our Western culture. More recently, historians have become increasingly concerned with the past of other cultures as well. Some remnants of the older historical tradition are still around, but broadly speaking history now can be defined as the study of change in human society. With this shifting focus inside the discipline itself, some of the barriers that used to surround history have also begun to disappear. One of these barriers was a distinction between history and pre-history, made according to the kind of evidence that each used. Historians worked with documentary evidence, leaving the pre-historians to worry with the kind of problem that could be solved only through the combined use of archaeology, oral tradition, linguistic evidence, and the like. In African history no such distinction is possible, and it is now generally abandoned. Documentary evidence about the history of Africa south of the Sahara begins about the ninth century, but it has to be used alongside non-documentary evidence. Documentary evidence, used by itself, only begins to tell the whole story when we come to the twentieth century, and even here it overlaps with the oral evidence of people still alive. African history is thus dominantly a history based on mixed data. The old line between history and pre-history is no longer useful, and the Journal of African History recognized this fact when, for convenience, it set a new division between history and pre-history at the beginning of the Iron Age — a date which will, of course, be somewhat different for different parts of Africa.

Writing, writers, and Iron Age Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphne Nash Briggs
Keyword(s):  
Long Range ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

This chapter has two parts. The first describes the origins, types, and uses of alphabetic and semi-syllabic writing systems in Iron Age Europe from the eighth century BC to c.AD 1000, and their spread through three main networks of long-range contact and exchange. It illustrates the typical progression from short labels naming craftsmen, owners, and the dead, to practical records of contracts and law codes, then canonical versions of elite oral tradition, and the ultimate generalized literacy of the urban civilizations. Inscribed coinage provides well-dated evidence in many otherwise non-literate places. The second part reviews first-hand accounts by travellers, historians, and geographers, from Hecataeus (c.550–476 BC) to Ahmad Ibn Fadlan and Adam of Bremen (tenth to eleventh centuries AD), tracking incremental changes over time in the range of what was known, and in motives for writing about foreign peoples.

Evoking Issues of Race and Ethnicity in Research on Physiology and Interpersonal Communication

2020 ◽  
pp. 260-287
Author(s):  
Shardé M. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Interpersonal Interactions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Diverse Groups ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Area Of Study

Investigating the role of physiology in communication research is a burgeoning area of study that has gained considerable attention by relational scholars in the past decade. Unfortunately, very few published studies on this topic have evoked important questions about the role of race and ethnicity. Exploring issues of ethnicity and race provides a more holistic and inclusive view of interpersonal communication across diverse groups and communities. This chapter addresses the gap in literature by considering the ways in which race and ethnicity matter in work on physiology and interpersonal interactions. More specifically, this chapter will first discuss the conceptual underpinnings of race, ethnicity, and other relevant concepts and then review extant research within and beyond the field of communication on race, ethnicity, interpersonal interactions, and physiology. These discussions set the foundation for this chapter to propose new lines of research that pointedly connect these four concepts and advance key principles that scholars should consider in future work.

Fyodor Fyodorovich Martens (1845–1909) a humanist of modern times

1996 ◽  
Vol 36 (312) ◽  
pp. 300-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Pustogarov
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Record ◽  
Peace And War ◽  
The Ideal

In the history of humankind, no matter how far back we look into the past, peaceful relations between people and nations have always been the ideal, and yet this history abounds in wars and bloodshed. The documentary evidence, oral tradition and the mute testimony of archaeological sites tell an incontrovertible tale of man's cruelty and violence against his fellow man. Nevertheless, manifestations of compassion, mercy and mutual aid have a no less ancient record. Peace and war, goodneighbourly attitudes and aggression, brutality and humanity exist side by side in the contemporary world as well.

Archaeology at the University of Ghana, Legon

1968 ◽  
Vol 11 (03) ◽  
pp. 314-315
Author(s):  
Merrick Posnansky
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The Past ◽  
Volta Basin ◽  
Senior Research ◽  
Extensive Program ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Ghana ◽  
Source Of Information

In October 1968, the University of Ghana commenced an extensive program in African archaeology. Graduate students from overseas are eligible to enroll for courses at the University, though no scholarships are presently available for non-Ghanaians. The Department of Archaeology of the University of Ghana was established in 1951 under the professorship of A. W. Lawrence. It presently has a senior teaching establishment of four together with a curator and two senior research fellows under the chairmanship of Professor Merrick Posnansky. The Department has a small specialist library, a museum, laboratory, dark room, workshops, and a team of trained technical staff. Most of the Department's research work is normally conducted in the dry season from November to May each year. In the past Professor Oliver Davies, author of the Quaternary of the Guinea Coast (1964) and West Africa before the Europeans (1967), conducted extensive fieldwork relating to the Stone Age and neolithic periods of Ghana's past and made large surface collections from all parts of Ghana which provide a rich topographical source of information on archaeology in Ghana. The Department has conducted extensive excavations in Ghana and its research fellows are presently engaged in writing up the results of the Volta Basin Research Project, in which more than thirty sites have been excavated since 1963 in advance of the formation of a large lake consequent upon the construction of the Volta Dam. The majority of the excavated sites have been of Iron Age date. In September 1968, Mr. C. Flight commenced a new season of excavations at “Neolithic” rock shelter sites at Kintampo, where occupations and burials dated to the middle of the second millennium B.C. were uncovered in 1967. Other excavations conducted during 1968 included work by Mr. D. Calvocoressi at the funerary terracotta site of Ahinsan and by Mr. Duncan Mathewson at the seventeenth-century A.D. Gonja site of Jakpasere. In 1969 a training excavation will be conducted at Elmina on the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century A.D. town in the vicinity of the Portuguese castle.

Regions, groups, and identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.L. Thurston
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Territorial Boundaries ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Archaeologists once viewed super-individual identity as primordial and tied to territorial boundaries, useful for describing an orderly past and creating national or ethnic genealogies. Current research ties identities not to regions, but to groups: complex cultural constructions, expressed in varied yet simultaneous manifestations of bonds with family, lineage, clan, or polity, each with multiple shifting markers. These can involve kinship, status, gender, age, occupation, shared experience, and social memory, in turn impacted by wider sociopolitical, religious, and economic concerns. Between Iron Age groups, cooperation, détente, and conflict were equally likely; trade, travel, and familiarity resulted in material and ideological co-mingling, while still preserving difference, and involved symbolic and practical novelty, as well as continuity with the past. Once, such complexities caused archaeologists to label identity research impossible or unnecessary, but its exclusion often leads to misinterpretation. Fortunately, thoughtful considerations of method, materiality, and scale have resulted in productive new approaches.

Material Culture and Making Visible: On the Portrayal of Philistine Gath in the Book of Samuel

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Daniel Pioske
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Book Of Samuel

Over the past twenty years our understanding of Philistine Gath's history (Tell es-Safl) has been transformed by what has been revealed through the site's early Iron Age remains. But what has received much less attention is the effect these ruins have on how we read references to the location within the Hebrew Bible. The intent of this study is to draw on the archaeological evidence produced from Tell es-Safl as an interpretive lens by which to consider the biblical portrayal of the site rendered in the book of Samuel, where the material traces of more amicable associations between Gath and highland populations invite us to reconsider the city's depiction in this ancient literary work.

scholarly journals Integrating Digital Datasets into Public Engagement through ArcGIS StoryMaps

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-360
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Howland ◽  
Brady Liss ◽  
Thomas E. Levy ◽  
Mohammad Najjar
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
First Century ◽  
Copper Production ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Archaeological Methods ◽  
Three Dimensional Models

AbstractArchaeologists have a responsibility to use their research to engage people and provide opportunities for the public to interact with cultural heritage and interpret it on their own terms. This can be done through hypermedia and deep mapping as approaches to public archaeology. In twenty-first-century archaeology, scholars can rely on vastly improved technologies to aid them in these efforts toward public engagement, including digital photography, geographic information systems, and three-dimensional models. These technologies, even when collected for analysis or documentation, can be valuable tools for educating and involving the public with archaeological methods and how these methods help archaeologists learn about the past. Ultimately, academic storytelling can benefit from making archaeological results and methods accessible and engaging for stakeholders and the general public. ArcGIS StoryMaps is an effective tool for integrating digital datasets into an accessible framework that is suitable for interactive public engagement. This article describes the benefits of using ArcGIS StoryMaps for hypermedia and deep mapping–based public engagement using the story of copper production in Iron Age Faynan, Jordan, as a case study.

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