PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICAThe archaeology of the outcast‘Outcasts of the earliest ages... eternally exiled by their vice, to live the life of
human beasts’, their souls and ‘Wner feelings inert and torpid through disuse’
(in Lilly 1993: 44). These were the words of the British explorer David
Livingstone (1813–73) referring to a couple of pigmies he had captured to
be measured for the beneWt of science. His words were not exceptional in the
context of nineteenth-century scholarship, as well as within popular culture,
for which sub-Saharan Africa was the paramount example of primitivism and
underdevelopment. This could be seen in other museums opened earlier in
the century, like the South African Museum, which operated in Cape Town
from 1825. The title of a book by its director from 1902 to 1942,Bushman,
Whale and Dinosaur(Rose 1961), emphasized the contents of the museum
(Davidson 1998: n. 1), where natives were represented in the museum side
by side with animals and fossils. Later in the nineteenth century the colonial
appropriation of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa led each of the powers to
organize bodies of experts to understand the terrain and the peoples living in
it. The stress, therefore, was given to mapping and naming both things and
peoples. The location of natives at the lower end of the evolutionary scale
meant that the study of ancient implements was not considered essential by
most European scholars. It was thought that the immediate present gave
direct clues to the past. The colonial rulers thought along similar lines and
this explains why in sub-Saharan Africa institutions were created only from
the 1930s, and in most cases after the Second World War (Ardouin 1997). The
exception to this was South Africa, where the consolidated white presence in
the area had resulted in earlier institutions, such as the museum cited above.
In it the primitivist portrayal of the black population remained throughout
the period under study. The display emphasized the contrast between the
blacks, especially the Bushmen people, and the white north European. The
simple life of the black represented the primitive otherness. This image
formed the base of a popular exhibit organized in the South African Museum
in 1912, when casts of thirteen /Xam women and men were commissioned
and the resulting models organized into several dioramas representing trad-
itional ways of life (Davidson 1998: n. 1; Skotnes 2001). This display would
remain, with minor changes, for many decades.
Despite oYcial disregard and generalized lack of institutionalization,
prehistoric archaeology still attracted the attention of some learned colonial
collectors. Their practice is an example of the eVect in the colonial milieu of
Archaeology of the Primitive 303