Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Previous approaches in historical archaeology privileging the agency and worldviews of Europeans have tended to marginalize the role of a plethora of African and Indigenous peoples and polities in shaping and responding to colonial conquest, expansion, and early modern globalization. Drawing from a range of archaeological, oral traditional, and archival material, archaeologists are increasingly collaborating with Black and Indigenous communities in disrupting these narratives. Novel approaches are revealing ways in which these historically subjugated groups interpreted, responded to, and influenced the global expansion and development of colonialism and globalization, as well as the historic and ongoing deleterious effects of exploitation, dispossession, and other forms of colonial violence upon many of these societies and their descendant communities. By revisiting histories of first contact, cultural continuity and transformation, and archaeological knowledge production, this session seeks to address these historic inequities while providing new understandings of the early modern world