Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T01:28:36.141Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The African aqualithic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

J. E. G. Sutton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

During the early post-Pleistocene there flourished right across the middle belt of the African continent a highly distinctive way of life intimately associated with the great rivers, lakes and marshes. This belt–or arc, to be more precise, corresponding roughly with the drought zone of the early 1970s–comprises the southern Sahara and the Sahel from the Atlantic to the Nile and there bends up-river to the East African rift valleys and the equator. Traceable as early as the eighth millennium BC, the zenith of this ‘aquatic civilization’ was achieved in the seventh millennium, being a time when higher rainfall made rivers longer and more permanent and caused lakes to swell and burst their basins (Butzer et al., 1972; Zinderen Bakker, 1972). Around 7000 BC, for instance, fish populations as well as hippos and crocodiles reached the central Saharan highlands, while, to their south, Lake Chad expanded enormously till it overflowed via the Benue and Lower Niger into the Atlantic. In East Africa at the same time the small lakes in the Kenya rift valley rose to combine or to create riverain links over the normal watersheds, while to their north Lake Rudolf reached a height sufficient to help feed the White Nile system.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 51 , Issue 201 , March 1977 , pp. 25 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1977 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

In a recent number of the Journal of African History(1974), Dr Sutton described what he called ‘The aquatic civilization of Middle Africa’ (using the term ‘civilization’ in a culture-historical sense rather than in the more restricted meaning of most anglophone archaeologists). That article was addressed to Africanists and historians. The present article concentrates on the implications of this African experience during the last 10,000 years for general archaeological thinking, on ‘neolithic’ and alternative ways of living. Readers who require more detailed references for the African archaeological and ethnographic background should consult the former article. Dr Sutton has recently been appointed to the Chair of Archaeology at the University of Ghana.

References

Arkell, A. J, 1949, Early Khartoum (Oxford).Google Scholar
Butzer, K. W., Isaac, G. L. Richardson, J. L. and Washbourn-Kamau, C. 1972. Radiocarbon dating of East Atrican lake levels, Science, CLXXV (No. 4027), 1069–76.Google Scholar
Camps-Fabrer, H. 1966. Matière et art mobilier dans la préhistoire nord-Africaine et Saharienne (Mém. C.R.A.P.E., V,Paris).Google Scholar
Clark, J. D. (compiler). 1967. Atlas of African prehistory (Chicago).Google Scholar
Cole, S. 1963. The prehistory of East Africa (rev. ed., New York; London, 1964).Google Scholar
Coles, J. 1973. Archaeology by experiment (London).Google Scholar
Greenberg, J. H. 1963. Languages of Africa (Indiana and The Hague).Google Scholar
Hays, T. R. 1975. An examination of the Sudanese Neolithic, in (eds.), Berlianou Abebe, J, Chavaillon and J. E. G. Sutton, Proceedings of the Seventh Pan Ajncan Congress on Prehistory (Addis Ababa).Google Scholar
Heinzelin, J. de. 1962. Ishango, Scientific American, CCVI (No. 6), 105–16.Google Scholar
Huard, p. and Massip, J.-M. 1964. Harpons en os et céramique à décore en vague [wavy line] au Sahara Tchadien, BSPF, LXI, 105–23.Google Scholar
Leakey, L. S. B. 1931. The Stone Age cultures of Kenya Colony(Cambridge).Google Scholar
Monod, T. and Mauny, R. 1957. Découverte de nouveaux instruments en os dans l’Ouest Africain, in (eds.), J. D. Clark and S. Cole, Third Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, Livingstone, 1955, 242–7.Google Scholar
Sutton, J. E. G. 1973. The archaeology of the Western Highlands of Kenya (Memoir 3 of British Institute in Eastern Africa, Nairobi and London).Google Scholar
Sutton, J. E. G. 1974. The aquatic civilization of Middle Africa, J. Afr. Hist., XV, 527–46.Google Scholar
Zinderen Bakker, E. M.V. 1972. Late Quaternary lacus-rine phases in the southern Sahara and East Africa, Palaeoecology of Africa (Cape Town), VI, 15–27.Google Scholar