Resources by Region
Below are just some selections of resources on pre-colonial Africa by region to show the kinds of materials available in our collections.
Consult this list of African kingdoms (Wikipedia) and use names and keywords to search for additional kingdoms or states.
East Africa
Swahili Urbanisation, Trade and Food Production by
This monograph examines Swahili plant subsistence and food production patterns through the analysis of macrobotanical remains from four archaeological sites on Pemba Island, Tanzania, dating to A.D. 700-1600. Specifically towns and villages are compared before and during the emergence of stonetowns, settlements characterized by stone/coral household and ritual architecture, which have been described as urban, based on their roles as economic, political, and religious centers along the eastern African coast. Swahili stonetowns are hypothesized to have exerted political control over the immediate hinterland for the purposes of obtaining trade items and staple goods, including plant products. Based on ethnohistoric reports, a wide variety of collected and cultivated plants have been previously proposed as being central to Swahili consumption and production economies including trees in mangrove habitats, coconut, sorghum, pearl millet, and Asian rice. Moreover, it has often been assumed that stonetowns obtained plant products, including staple grains, from the countryside and were not themselves primary food producers. These assumptions are tested directly against the archaeological record in this first comprehensive study of ancient Swahili plant foods.
ISBN: 1407314165Publication Date: 2015-08-30
East African Archaeology by
The goal of this volume is to impart an appreciation of the many facets of East Africa's cultural and archaeological diversity over the last 2,000 years. It brings together chapters on East African archaeology, many by Africa-born archaeologists who review what is known, present new research, and pinpoint issues of debate and anomaly in the relatively poorly known prehistory of East Africa.
ISBN: 1931707618Publication Date: 2003-09-24
North Africa
Timbuktu - Mali
The Hidden Treasures of Timbuktu by
For centuries, trading caravans made epic journeys across the Saharan sands to reach the markets of the legendary city of Timbuktu, where they traded salt, gold, slaves, textiles--and books. By the mid-fifteenth century, Timbuktu had become a major center of Islamic literary culture and scholarship. The city's libraries were repositories of all the world's learning, housing not only works by Arab and Islamic writers but also volumes from the classical Greek and Roman worlds and studies by contemporary scholars.The astonishing manuscripts of Timbuktu form the lavish visual heart of this book. Beautifully graphic, occasionally decorated, these exquisite artifacts reveal great craftsmanship as well as learning. All were written in the Arabic script, but not all are in Arabic, for they also feature a range of local African languages.Aside from scholarly works, the surviving manuscripts include a wealth of correspondence between rulers, advisers, and merchants on subjects as various as taxation, commerce, marriage, divorce, adoption, breastfeeding, and prostitution, providing a vivid insight into the ordinary life and values of the day.
ISBN: 9780500514214Publication Date: 2008-11-17
The Meanings of Timbuktu by
Contradicting the popular notion that African history survived only through the oral tradition, this collection of essays examines the rich legacy of written history on the continent, specifically in Timbuktu. It brings together articles written by a number of leading international scholars from Europe, the United States, and several African countries, covering a wide range of areas in the study of Timbuktu, from archaeology and literature to the intellectual life, libraries, and private collections in Timbuktu and West Africa.
ISBN: 9780796922045Publication Date: 2008-09-05
Northeast Africa
Ancient African Civilizations by
Stanley Burstein has researched, compiled, and translated with commentary the most significant Greek and Roman sources concerning black Africa. The result is this work about the people of the southern part of the Nile Valley, the gold mines of Nubia, the Hellenistic city of Meroe, capital of the Ethiopian Empire of Kush with its own highly developed culture (300 BC to 300 AD). Burstein opens the volume with a brief survey of the two kingdoms of Kush and Axum. With introductions and notes he then presents the ancient literary and epigraphical testimony for this region.
ISBN: 9781558761476Publication Date: 1997-03-01
Aksum by ISBN: 9780748601066Publication Date: 1991-06-01
Changing Settlement Patterns in the Aksum-Yeha Region of Ethiopia by
Joseph W Michels takes a regional perspective to examine Aksumite sites (the Horn of Africa) from 700 BC to 850 AD in their spatial and behavioural contexts. The fieldwork introduced a regional approach to archaeological survey in Ethiopia that was unique in its methodological thoroughness and analytical rigour. The models of change and development in political organization from Pre-Aksumite through Post Aksumite times provide valuable hypothetical models.
ISBN: 1841718823Publication Date: 2005-12-15
The A to Z of Ancient and Medieval Nubia by
The A to Z of Ancient and Medieval Nubia covers the period from the Paleolithic, all the periods of ancient Nubia (Predynastic, Kerma, Dynasty XXV, Napatan, Meroitic, Post-Meroitic) and to the end of medieval Christianity in Nubia (Sudan). This resource focuses on Nubian history through a Nubian perspective, rather than on the more common Egypto-centrism perspective, and the coverage is based on the latest and best archaeological and epigraphic evidence. Newly created maps of the general area and its specific regions and place names and a photospread showing important related features of the region are included. A detailed chronology provides a timeline of historical events, and an introductory narrative shapes the overall history and leads to the main body of the work in the form of a cross-referenced dictionary. The descriptive entries cover the main features of the region in the various periods that are key not only to Nubian events, but also to the important interactions they had with Egypt to the north. Nine appendixes and an extensive bibliography conclude this work. Lobban has been teaching Nubian studies in undergraduate classrooms for 30 years, and this book is a product of his hands-on experiences as well as extensive anthropological fieldwork and travel in Sudanese and Egyptian Nubia.
ISBN: 9780810875647Publication Date: 2010-02-18
Ancient Nubia by
For most of the modern world, ancient Nubia seems an unknown and enigmatic land. Only a handful of archaeologists have studied its history or unearthed the Nubian cities, temples, and cemeteries that once dotted the landscape of southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Nubia's remote setting in themidst of an inhospitable desert, with access by river blocked by impassable rapids, has lent it not only an air of mystery, but also isolated it from exploration. Over the past century, particularly during this last generation, scholars have begun to focus more attention on the fascinating culturesof ancient Nubia, ironically prompted by the construction of large dams that have flooded vast tracts of the ancient land.This book attempts to document some of what has recently been discovered about ancient Nubia, with its remarkable history, architecture, and culture, and thereby to give us a picture of this rich, but unfamiliar, African legacy.
ISBN: 9774164784Publication Date: 2012-09-06
Medieval Nubia by
Among the few surviving archaeological sites from the medieval Christian kingdom of Nubia - located in present day Sudan - Qasr Ibrim is unique in a number of ways. It is the only site in Lower Nubia that remained above water after the completion of the Aswan high dam. In addition, thanks tothe aridity of the climate in the area the site is marked by extraordinary preservation of organic material, especially textual material written on papyrus, leather, and paper. Particularly rich is the textual material from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE, written in Old Nubian, the region'sindigenous language. As a result, Qasr Ibrim is probably the best documented ancient and medieval site in Africa outside of Egypt and North Africa.Medieval Nubia will be the first book to make available this remarkable material, much of which is still unpublished. The evidence discovered reveals a more complicated picture of this community than originally thought. Previously, scholars had thought medieval Nubia had existed in relativeisolation from the rest of the world and had a primitive economy. Legal documents, accounts, and letters, however, reveal a complex, monetized economy with exchange rates connected to those of the wider world. Furthermore, they reveal public festive practices, in which lavish feasting and food giftsreinforced the social prestige of the participants. These documents show medieval Nubia to have been a society combining legal elements inherited from the Greco-Roman world with indigenous African social practices. In reconstructing the social and economic life of medieval Nubia based on the OldNubian sources from the site, as well as other previously examined materials, Giovanni R. Ruffini will correct previous assumptions and produce a new picture of Nubia, one that connects it to the wider Mediterranean economy and society of its time.
ISBN: 9780199891634Publication Date: 2012-09-18
Southern Africa
The Zimbabwe Culture by
Offering a unique and original perspective on the rise and fall of indigenous states of southern Zambezia, The Zimbabwe Culture analyzes the long contentious history of the remains of the remarkable cyclopean masonry, ranging from mighty capitals of traditional kings to humble farmsteads. Forming a cornerstone of the geographical lore of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, debate on the origins, development, and collapse of the Zimbabwe culture has never ceased, and with increasing archaeological research over the twentieth century, has become more complex. Thoroughly examining the growth and decline of pre-colonial states on the entire Zimbabwean Plateau and southern Zambezia, Dr. Pikirayi has contributed tremendously towards the archaeological understanding of this extraordinary culture. The Zimbabwe Culture is essential reading for all students and avocationalists of African archaeology, history, and culture.
ISBN: 0759100918Publication Date: 2001-03-07
A political history of Munhumutapa c 1400-1902 by
Monomotapa Empire -- History
Zimbabwe -- History
Africa -- Monomotapa Empire
Zimbabwe
Location: DT965.Z5 M94 1988ISBN: 9780949932303Publication Date: 1988
West Africa
- A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760) by
This is the first complete English translation of Ludewig Ferdinand Romer's sensitive account of Gold Coast (modern Ghana) in the mid 1700s. A vital resource on the history of West Africa, Romer's work offers rich descriptions of African societies, trading practices with Europe, and religion.
ISBN: 019726218XPublication Date: 2001-01-18
State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante by
Scholarship on the West African kingdom of Asante is at the leading edge of Africanist research. In this book, T. C. McCaskie gives a detailed and richly nuanced historical portrait of pre-colonial Asante. His delineation of state and society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is centred on an extended analysis of the crucial ritual of the annual Kumase odwira festival. It is at once a profound historical reconstruction of an African polity, and a deeply informed meditation on key Asante concepts and ideas. Throughout the book, the Asante experience is consistently discussed in relation to a broad range of historiography and critical theory.
ISBN: 0521410096Publication Date: 1995-02-23
Head, African Studies Library
Beth Restrick
Contact:
African Studies Library
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Subjects: African Studies