AGE3012S - Global Diasporas & The Archaeology Of The Historical Past

Course Outline:

Over the last thousand years, southern Africa has been connected to the world in a number of ways. From the 16th century the European push to open trade routes to the east increasingly disrupted earlier interactions between the southern African interior and the wider Indian Ocean region that had been in place from the 1st millennium AD. The European diaspora into southern Africa created new orders of power, control and trade that had massive impacts on indigenous societies who were subjected to slavery, genocide and eventually apartheid. In this course we look at these interactions and transformations from both foreign and local viewpoints, in which the idea of frontier is a central theme. The focus is on archaeological evidence and the contribution it makes to understanding the texture of life on frontiers and the new identities that frontiers created. In doing this the relationship between archaeological evidence, written sources and oral history is critically addressed, particularly in the search for perspectives that address cultural change and continuity at the local scale.