South African Archaeological Society

Editorial: A Pan-African JournalAuthor(s): Benjamin SmithSource: The South African Archaeological Bulletin, Vol. 63, No. 188 (Dec., 2008), pp. 93-94Published by: South African Archaeological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20475003 .

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South African Archaeological Bulletin 63 (188): 93-94, 2008 93

South African Archaeological Bulletin

<< archaeologists

Volume 63 * Number 188 * December 2008

Editorial A Pan-African Journal

2008 will be remembered as a good year for African archaeology. In March, the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists (ASAPA) held the best attended conference in its history, in Cape Town, South Africa. The meeting stood out for its exceptional number of first-time presenters and its wide repre sentation from across the SADC region. The general meeting of the Association was remarkable in its level of professional and social engagement, with lively discussion on a range of topics relating to professional practice and standards for archaeologists. The meeting will probably be best remembered, and rightly so, for its strong statement of approval for ASAPA's Transformation Charter for South African archaeology. This charter will be the subject of a series of discussion pieces that will be published in the June 2009 Bulletin. But, the meeting also made a landmark decision to hold the next ASAPA conference in Maputo. This is the first time that the Association will hold a conference in

Mozambique. The decision gives rightful recognition to the great strides made by the Mozambiquan government in building up the discipline of archaeology in partnership with well-focused Swedish and Norwegian assistance. In an exceptional move, ASAPA decided not to hold its next conference in 2010, but to delay it by one year until 2011. This decision was made to avoid competition with the 13th Congress of the PanAfrican Associa tion for Prehistory and Related Studies (PAA) that will be held in Dakar, Senegal, in 2010.

In September the gathering of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists (SAfA) in Frankfurt, Germany, was equally spectacular. It too was the largest gathering in the history of that society. The overarching impression left by these two conferences is of a thriving African archaeological discipline, producing major research advances in all geographical areas and all time periods. At both conferences the academic programme was full to capac ity, even with parallel sessions. SAfA followed ASAPA in making the historic decision not to compete with the congress of the PAA in 2010. SAfA will partner the PAA and encourage its members to attend the congress in Dakar. The next stand-alone SAfA confer ence will therefore be in 2012, in North America. This is both a wise and a practical decision. It has, if all our conferences can hold to schedule, placed us on a calendrical cycle in which Africanist archaeologists will less often have to find funding to attend two African archaeology conferences in one year. The major regional African archaeology conferences (such as ASAPA and the WAAA) will now take place in odd-numbered years. SAfA and the PAA will cycle in even-numbered years, moving from North America to Europe to Africa, creating an overall six-year rotation. This should provide a significant boost to our conference organizers who will no longer have to compete with one another for funding in a single year. It will also allow our students and researchers to plan conference attendance more systematically and to plan the presentation of research findings so as to avoid repetition. I feel sure that the best way to deal with our current problem of overly-full conference schedules is to become less tolerant of rep etition; it must be a concern that broadly similar papers get re peated at a succession of conferences.

The bold timetable decisions of ASAPA and SAfA set the stage for a truly landmark PAA Congress. The dates have now been fixed. To avoid a clash with the soccer World Cup in South Africa, and to benefit from low season accommodation prices in Senegal, the conference has been fixed for early November 2010 and the first call for papers has already been released (e-mail: panaf2010@ucad.sn). The PAA Congress has a special place in the African archaeological calendar as the first continent-wide archaeological conference series. Over the years it has ebbed and flowed in rhythm with the study of African archaeology and the politics of the continent.

The first PAA Congress was organized by Louis Leakey in January 1947 in Nairobi Kenya. Of the 55 official delegates only 30 were archaeologists. The other official delegates comprised 15 geologists, five anatomists and five palaeontologists. The March 1947 issue of the Bulletin contained an apology from the editor for its "somewhat reduced size" because of the "absence of almost all South African prehistorians" who had gone off to the PAA Con gress in Nairobi. The Bulletin at that time was just two years old.

John Goodwin used his editorial to inform readers that Field Marshall Smuts had issued an invitation to host the second PAA Congress in South Africa in 1951. The March 1948 issue con tained two pages devoted to discussion of preparations for the congress. This set out the organizing committees, with Smuts as the Honorary President. Just two months later, Smuts lost power to the Nationalist Party and the organizing committee faced immediate government hostility and a cessation of funding. The painful collapse of the congress played out graphically in Goodwin's editorials in the Bulletin:

"Now the Organising Committee appointed in 1948 and approved by the Department of Education has been officially advised that the holding of the Congress is inconvenient or inopportune" March 1950.

"There is no further news of the Second Pan-African Con gress on Prehistory, due to be held in 1951. Dr. L. S. B. Leakey's brilliant inspiration seems to have been well ahead of its times. Perhaps (at the pace of the ox) we shall have reached an adequate cultural level in 2051 A.D., to follow Kenya's brave lead. Both the Union, and now Southern Rhodesia, have missed this opportu nity in leadership. Presumably the future pattern of scientific congresses will include delegates nominated by the powers that be, discussing questions posed by those same powers." June 1950.

"The possibility of holding the Congress becomes more and more remote, and our Pan-African failure becomes more and more humiliating with the passing days. " September 1950.

In 1951 the organizing committee took emergency measures and approved the shifting of the Congress to Algiers. The PAA has since crisscrossed the length and breadth of the continent: 1st 1947 Nairobi, Kenya 2nd 1952 Algiers, Algeria 3rd 1955 Livingstone, Zambia 4th 1959 Kinshasa (then Leopoldville), DRC

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94 South African Archaeological Bulletin 63 (188): 93-94, 2008

Rank Date Article Viewed Percentage Printed Percentage

1 Jun. 1992 "The Archaeological Identity of Hunters and Herders at the Cape over the Last 2000 Years: A Critique"; C. Schrire; pp. 62-64 42 0.2% 2174 9.7%

2 Jun. 1987 "Stone Circles in the Cape Fria Area, Northern Namibia"; D. Noli; G. Avery; pp. 59-63 53 0.2% 1273 5.7%

3 Dec. 1991 "The Chronology of Great Zimbabwe"; TN. Huffman; J.C. Vogel; pp. 61-70 715 2.6% 249 1.1%

4 Dec. 2004 "Beyond Data: The Aim and Practice of Archaeology"; TN. Huffman; pp. 66-69 548 2.0% 280 1.3%

5 Dec. 1965 "Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Tool-Using and Tool-Making"; P.V Tobias; pp. 167-192 478 1.7% 219 1.0%

6 Dec. 2000 "The Earlier Stone Age of Southern Africa"; R.G. Klein; pp. 107-122 294 1.1% 199 0.9%

7 Dec. 1954 "The Druids and Stonehenge"; S. Piggott; pp. 138-140 349 1.3% 99 0.4%

8 Dec. 2004 "Postural Behaviour of Later Stone Age People in South Africa"; G. Dewar; S. Pfeiffer; pp. 52-58 94 0.3% 346 1.5%

9 Dec. 1953 "Theseus and the Minotaur of Knossos"; C. Seltman; pp. 98-99 308 1.1% 75 0.3%

10 Dec. 2003 "The Myth of the East African 'Bushmen"'; A.G. Morris; pp. 85-90 263 0.9% 108 0.5%

11 Jun. 2002 "Ochre in the Middle Stone Age of Southern Africa: Ritualised Display or Hide Preservative?"; I. Watts; pp. 1-14 165 0.6% 167 0.7%

12 Dec. 1995 "Modelling the Production and Consumption of Rock Art"; J.D. Lewis-Williams; pp. 143-154 219 0.8% 91 0.4%

13 Jun. 1997 "The Myth of Ritual Origins? Ethnography, Mythology and Interpretation of San Rock Art"; A. Solomon; pp. 3-13 167 0.6% 110 0.5%

14 Dec. 2002 "Therianthropes in San Rock Art"; P. Jolly; pp. 85-103 173 0.6% 102 0.5%

15 Apr. 1969 "Symbolism in Palaeolithic Cave Art"; J. Parkington; pp. 3-13 207 0.7% 60 0.3%

16 Jun. 1990 "Through the Veil: San Rock Paintings and the Rock Face"; J.D. Lewis-Williams; TA. Dowson; pp. 5-16 182 0.7% 81 0.4%

17 Jun. 1953 "The Flood"; L. Woolley; pp. 52-54 200 0.7% 60 0.3%

18 Sep. 1957 "The Medieval Empire of Ghana"; A.J.H. Goodwin; pp. 108-112 200 0.7% 56 0.3%

19 Dec. 1978 "Fertility Symbolism and Birth Rock-Paintings from the Southern Cape Province"; G. Townley Johnson; pp. 168-172 208 0.7% 42 0.2%

20 Jun. 1992 "Ethnographic Evidence Relating to 'Trance' and 'Shamans' among Northern and Southern Bushmen"; J.D. Lewis-Williams; pp. 56-60 149 0.5% 85 0.4%

21 Dec. 2004 "Cranial Injuries to Later Stone Age Children from the Modder River Mouth, Western Cape Province, South Africa"; S. Pfeiffer; N.J. van der Merwe; pp. 59-65 150 0.5% 83 0.4%

22 Dec. 1993 "Three Decades of Iron Age Research in South Africa: Some Personal Reflections"; T Maggs; pp. 70-76 157 0.6% 65 0.3%

23 Jun. 1991 "Shamanism and Rock Paintings: Aspects of the Use of Rock Art in the South-Western Cape, South Africa"; R. Yates; A. Manhire; pp. 3-11 123 0.4% 98 0.4%

24 Dec. 1995 "Recent Developments in Human Biological and Cultural Evolution"; J.D. Clark; pp. 168-174 141 0.5% 78 0.3%

25 Jun. 2003 'A Cross-Cultural Motif in San, Khoekhoe and Northern Sotho Rock Paintings of the Central Limpopo Basin, Southern Africa"; E.B. Eastwood; pp. 14-26 156 0.6% 62 0.3%

5th 1963 Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands 6th 1967 Dakar, Senegal 7th 1971 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 8th 1977 Nairobi, Kenya 9th 1983 Jos, Nigeria 10th 1995 Harare, Zimbabwe 11th 2001 Bamako, Mali 12th 2005 Gaborone, Botswana 13th 2010 Dakar, Senegal

The Bulletin has followed the PAA closely, publishing summa ries of many of the meetings, listing resolutions taken, as well as commissioning formal reviews of the published conference proceedings. We look forward to continuing our close association with the PAA and plan for a strong Bulletin presence at the Congress in Dakar in 2010.

** * * We are delighted to announce that 60 years of Bulletin and Goodwin Series back issues (1945-2005) have now been made available online thanks to a partnership agreement with JSTOR (www.jstor.org), the world's largest not-for-profit online public journal provider. Every article, note, report, review and edito rial can now be downloaded as a PDF file at the click of a button. All of the Goodwin editorials detailing the collapse of the Second PAA Congress in South Africa are therefore now available online. Those keen to follow further the history of the PAA will find interest in Berry Malan's report on the Fourth Congress published in our March 1960 issue and Phillip Tobias' report on the Eighth Congress that was published in our June 1978 issue. Our full back catalogue is now searchable by subject, author and even by individual words contained within

articles. Readers are encouraged to make use of this wonderful new resource.

Most universities and museums already subscribe to this platform, but JSTOR has generously offered to provide free access to all individuals who subscribe to the Bulletin through the South African Archaeological Society or The Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists. Subscribers should contact the secretary of the appropriate organization for access instructions.

Within our JSTOR package we can monitor the most accessed back issues and articles from the Bulletin. In 2008, traffic to our back issues made up just over 1% of all traffic to African Studies and African Archaeology journals on JSTOR. This is not bad for our first year on the platform, but we hope to increase this over time. In 2008, for all back issues up until 2004, the most viewed and printed Bulletin articles on JSTOR are listed in the ta ble above. It is heartening to see the wide range of chronological periods and geographic areas represented in this list and it con firms the wisdom of continuing the Bulletin's longstanding Pan-African focus.

** * * The following two references were mistakenly omitted from our June 2008 editorial: Jenkins, E. 2007. Falling into Place: the Story of Modern South African Place Names. Cape Town: David Philip.

Raper, P 2004. New Dictionary of South African Place Names. Johannes burg: Jonathan Ball.

Benjamin Smith Research Article Editor

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