One Hundred Years of Mozambican Archaeology: Past, Present, Future, and Challenges

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mozambique, as a country located in the East as well as Southern Africa, has a diversity of important archaeological remains uncovered in the last 100 years as a result of individual enthusiasm and systematic academic research. However, large parts of this past remain poorly explored and Mozambique's archaeological heritage is still largely explained in terms of better known sequences to the south, west, and north. This essay examines chronological and archaeological methods, heritage policy, and practice in Mozambique through time. Drawing on archival research and interviews with practitioners, the essay problematizes current conventions regarding efforts to understand and explain the large body of data on Mozambique's past. Efforts to date have been done in a fragmentary manner. We show that more cooperation/sharing of results between archaeologists working on Mozambican prehistory and history is needed in order to engage with theory, methods and practice of the discipline. Thus, we argue that major challenges to archaeological practice in Mozambique are subsidiary to academic discussions on the disciplinary boundaries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32129