ABSTRACT
Some parts of Africa have had contact with the outside world for a long time: in North Africa, in the north-east of the continent, and along much of the Indian Ocean coast. However, this was not the case for the western and southern coasts and most of the interior, where substantial external contacts only began to develop a little over 500 years ago, as Europeans ventured further and further from their own shores. In the centuries that followed, this European expansion was to have profound consequences for the lives of African peoples: fundamentally changing many aspects of their cultures. European commercial enterprise sought raw materials, cheap labour, new markets, and even land, culminating eventually in the colonial domination of almost the whole continent, a situation from which Africa has only emerged in relatively recent times. For this long series of developments there are copious documentary and oral records and a very large amount of historical writing based upon them. The material record has been given far less attention and the archaeology of recent times in Africa, historical archaeology as it is often called, is still a fairly new area of research. Nevertheless, its great potential is already apparent, providing not only an opportunity to improve our understanding of the European impact on Africa but also enabling us to see how Africans reacted to that impact.
