About the project
ACREATE aims to provide a synthesis of two African regions: a millennium in central Africa (AD 500-1500) and a century in southern Africa (AD 1700-1830). Although distant, the regions are historically related through migrations.
The project is driven by a deep discomfort with archaeology’s grand narratives of migration, particularly of the expansions of Bantu-speaking groups from central and southern Africa since the first millennium BC.
By its focus on skilled craft networks dominated by women, the project provides a critical ground-up corrective to traditional top-down grand narratives that trace the movements and interactions of (male) elites.
ARCREATE strives for symmetric collaboration with local African stakeholder communities. It challenges preconceived modernist notions about mobility, migration, creativity, and transmission of knowledge in African societies.
The project employs a new long-term approach to technological and social change. ARCREATE combines archaeological, archaeometallurgical, historical and linguistic evidence in order to understand the role of the mineral world in various landscapes. To achieve this, the team has developed a new cross-disciplinary fieldwork methodology that allows the project to identify and interpret changes in creative knowledge in contexts of mobility and turbulence.
Objectives
The aim of ARCREATE is to provide a synthesis of the creative knowledge of Bantu-speaking craftspeople in two regions of central and southern Africa in close, meaningful collaboration with stakeholder communities. To meet this main objective, the project establishes three research objectives:
- To identify the geographic and temporal distribution of the main craft-learning networks in the two study regions, and to develop a synthesis that distinguishes key socio-political, technological and mineralogical factors for the learning networks’ formation, continuation and eventual demise.
- To identify the main technological and geo-chemical signatures of the regional interaction of craftspeople in the two case studies, and on this basis perform an inter-regional comparative analysis of creative craft milieus’ local and regional connections.
- To develop a regional synthesis of changes to learning networks and local engagement with the mineral world for each of the two study regions.
Visit the project website (arcreateproject.com).
