Indigenous Hermeneutics and the Contribution of Africa to Skyscape Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since the discoveries of the astronomical orientation of Stonehenge in the 1960s, several scholarships have employed skyscape archaeology to answer questions about state formation and consolidation of complex societies. The majority of these works have focused outside Africa, particularly on cultures in Latin America, China, Australia, and several Bronze Age cultures in Europe. Aside from North Africa, not much from the rest of Africa has contributed to skyscape archaeology scholarships. This is mainly because it requires an indigenous epistemological approach to explore questions of how ancient sub-Saharan African ancient civilizations used their observations of the sky to design their landscapes and organize their polities. This presentation explores some of the recent archaeological works in the Yoruba region of the Bight of Benin and proposes some indigenous hermeneutical approaches for doing skyscape archaeology that can be replicated in other parts of Africa. It presents archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic evidence for the intentionality of astronomical practices by ancient Yoruba cultures, and shows that it requires an indigenous hermeneutic approach to interpret these shreds of evidence. This will allow Africanist archaeologists to use case studies from Africa to contribute to global debates for conducting skyscape archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36037.0