ABSTRACT
A suggestive example of this recontextualisation can be found in the work of the Nigerian archaeologist Bassey Andah. Andah drew on the ecological processual archaeology of David Clarke, Lewis Binford and others, but deployed these influences in a distinctively African fashion. Andah’s view was that a characteristically imperialist archaeology made use of European norms as an implicit yardstick by which to measure the divergence of African customs and artefacts. Once these had been stigmatised as bizarre and exotic they could form the basis for classifications and typologies, and these in turn established ‘monstrous’ cultural entities that were far removed from indigenous experience (Andah 1995a: 98). This was an external view, which constructed African identities as essentially removed from a European sameness, and organised the African past into ethnic groupings in much the same way as colonial administrators reordered living populations. In opposition to such totalising frameworks, Andah sought to understand the particular ways in which specific communities made use of material culture in order to cope with contingent environmental conditions (ibid.: 104). Thus he was able to recruit ideas from what is generally considered to be a generalising approach to archaeology, and yet use them to challenge the blandly homogenising practice of culture-history (Andah 1995b). It is this way in which new dimensions of ideas may be ‘found in translation’ which may represent another means of overcoming the modernist conventions of the discipline. Without demanding that different regional and national traditions give up their distinctive character, an increased dialogue between archaeological communities would maximise the potential for putting ideas into unfamiliar contexts, revealing unexpected strengths and weaknesses.
