Materializing Poverty: Archaeological Reflections from the Postcolony

Doing Archaeology in a Turbulent Time

“…The archaeology of social complexity typically focuses on the grandeur of monuments, state formation, long-distance trade, hierarchies, technology, production, lavish consumption, and elaborate material life. Only a few studies have explored poverty and marginalization as a lived experience of complexity and modern capitalism (e.g., Orser, 2011 ; Richard, 2011 ). It is important to pay more attention to the roles that social inequality and discontentment (beyond poverty) might have played in the past as a source of instability for different scales of social complexity.…”

Comparing Craft and Culinary Practice in Africa: Themes and Perspectives

“…Meanwhile, ethnoarchaeological research on foodways has looked mainly at the "Stone Age" subsistence strategies of historic foragers (e.g., Kusimba 2003;O'Connell et al 1988;Wiessner 1982), including pathways to domestication (e.g., D'Andrea and Wadge 2011 ;Hildebrand 2003;Lyons and D'Andrea 2003). As ethnoarchaeology has come of age alongside other "contemporary" archaeologies over the past decade, scholars have become less concerned with addressing archaeological problems and more interested in exploring recent social institutions and subjectivities through the lens of material culture (e.g., González-Ruibal 2006;Lyons 2007;Richard 2011). Regardless of theoretical or methodological orientation, several ethnoarchaeological studies across Africa have underlined the profound connection between crafts and foodways as people employ ceramic, metal, and lithic tools to produce, store, prepare, and serve food (Arthur 2006;David 1998;Hamon and Le Gall 2013;Lyons 2007;Lyons and D'Andrea 2003) or deploy embodied culinary techniques to make the aforementioned tools (Arthur 2010;Gosselain 2010).…”