François Richard 

26105. Ancient African Societies. (=AFAM 2xxxx) This course explores Africa's rich archaeological past, tracing broad historical trends from the beginning of the Holocene 10,000 years ago up to the time of European voyages. This long period was marked by sweeping transformations across the continent: changes in subsistence and lifestyles; development of trading networks, metallurgy, and craft specialization; and the rise of complex societies. One of our goals will be to examine these processes, their local expressions, and the complex matrices of peoples, objects, and ideas in which they were rooted. This exploration will be paired with a critical assessment of the social contexts that frame our understanding of ancient African societies. What we know of Africa's past has been colored by factors that have little to do with the continent's prehistory, including intellectual currents, scientific debates, over prejudice, muted racism, colonial ideologies, and global political economy. In picturing Africa as a place of timeless chaos and utter otherness, contemporary discourses have done much to sever Africans from their own histories and thwart the growth of perspectives sensitive to the continent's dynamic cultural past. By tacking back and forth between past and present, we will try to paint a more nuanced portrayal of ancient Africa, one of distinct cultural worlds sharing ever widening spaces of historical experience.

46710. Archaeology of African Global Encounters. In this course, we will explore different dimensions of the African experience as it unfolded roughly over the past 500 years. Combining archaeology, anthropology, and history, and drawing from multiple repertoires of sources ( artifacts, texts, images, oral traditions), we will investigate Africa's intensifying encounters with global political economy, from the Atlantic era to the 'age of globalization'. On one level, this involves analyzing historical contexts, processes, and effects across the continent - perhaps following the threads of what Jane Guyer has called the 'turbulence and loss' of Africa's historical past. In parallel fashion, we must also reflect on global encounters as spaces for the production of new historical imaginations that have profoundly shaped anthropological projects. Rather than following a historical or geographical narrative, we will examine different moments, locales, and historicities through a suite of topical lenses: landscapes, states and power, 'identities' and ethnicity, entanglements and embodiment, political economic mosaics, colonialism, modernities, politics, and the postcolony.