Events

11th May 2011: THE THIRD R.R. INSKEEP MEMORIAL LECTURE IN AFRICAN ARCHAEOLOGY

Professor Nicholas David (University of Calgary): The Archaeology of the Intangible: recent developments and monumentality in Cameroon

Abstract
"In the first decade of the 21st century the Intangible caught the world's attention. According to UNESCO's convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Intangible consists of "practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills" and of objects and spaces that are their physical manifestations. If so, the Intangible cultural heritage would be better termed Embodied. The nature of the embodiment of knowledge and skills is a subject on which there has been much recent interdisciplinary research and thought. The topic is of the greatest interest to archaeologists who, equipped with sharpened theoretical tools, are professionally committed to reveal the intangible, the meanings, embedded in the artifact.

But just how do archaeologists get at meaning? As any student knows, it is far from clear how application of the theory and methods first introduced in Archaeology 101 can generate the areal syntheses of prehistory studied in later years. Exposition obscures process. To bridge this gap, I will chart the search for meaning in a unique set of Cameroonian monuments, the DGB sites of the Mandara mountains. I will describe the messy (and hermeneutic) process of inquiry that, starting with field survey and excavation, leads through insights and inferences derived from, inter alia, typology, landscape archaeology, ethnoarchaeology and the natural sciences, to synthetic statements regarding the monuments' use and influence on their builders (their performative affordances and agency)."

Professor David's research interests are in ethnoarchaeology, archaeological theory, African later prehistory and culture history, and in the European Upper Palaeolithic. He has directed the Mandara Archaeological Project in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Ghana, since 1984, and has also worked in the southern Sudan and the Central African Republic. He served for four years as head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, before moving to Calgary in 1980. From 1980 to 1985 he was founding editor of the African Archaeological Review. Since retiring in December 2001 he has been heavily involved in fieldwork in northern Cameroon, once again doing dirt archaeology and investigating what were formerly thought to be stone-built strongholds but now seem more likely to be watch and water towers.

The lecture will be the third in a series of biennial presentations devoted to the memory of Dr Raymond Inskeep and supported by a benefaction from his wife, Adi Inskeep. Ray Inskeep was a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge in the late 1950s and a member of St John’s College. He went on to a distinguished career in the archaeology of southern Africa.

(5.00pm, Mill Lane Lecture Room 3, Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1RX, followed by a wine reception at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3ER) See Map of location Enquiries: Liz Farmar, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Email: eaf22@cam.ac.uk. Tel: 01223-339327.
McDonald Map(.pdf)