1997/03/01 by J. E. G. Sutton · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #African Studies and Geopolitics #Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis #African history and culture analysis #Ethnography #Allusion #History #Radiocarbon dating #Genealogy #Scholarship #Geography #Ancient history #Ethnology #Demography #Archaeology #Sociology #Literature #Law #Art #Political science
paper · doi:10.1017/s000358150007520x
openalex publication_date 1997/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Where we are able to combine external sources of the ‘medieval’ period with local African ones – oral and linguistic, ethnographic and archaeological – we can begin to discern the place of Africa, or of parts of it, in world history. At the same time, we begin to gain chronological perceptions for regions where otherwise we are apt to fall back on synchronic notions of ‘traditional’ cultures and societies living as if in a permanent ethnographic present. The occasional allusion bearing a calendar date of universal applicability presses questions of correlation over broad distances, in a way that radiocarbon measurements (which we should hesitate to call ‘dates’) cannot do. Notwithstanding the importance of the latter technique for the study of the African Iron Age, the individual results are inherently imprecise (whether ‘calibrated’ or not) and, being run on specific samples, bear frequently an uncertain relationship to the historical event or episode in question.