Projects

HisTech

History from Things and Techniques: Crossing the Present and the Past in Central Africa
By combining the anthropology of techniques, archaeology and history, the HisTech project approaches the history of Central Africa through the study of ceramic and metallurgical techniques. While many sources are available to reconstruct the history of recent periods in Central Africa - written documents, objects, photographs, oral history - only material culture makes it possible to document older periods and to investigate socio-historical dynamics over time. Pottery, ubiquitous as an element of daily life, and copper and iron objects, metals whose socio-political and economic importance has long been emphasised, are the main elements present in the archaeological assemblages in and around the Congo Basin and are the core of the project. HisTech seeks to identify technical traditions through the comparison and mapping of current or recent metal and pottery production (late 19th-20th century) based on interviews with artisans, archival documents and museum collections. Technical traditions allow us to explore the way in which craftsmen interact with each other, but they can also reveal deeper links with different types of social identities. Secondly, the identification of technical traditions on the basis of archaeological data, the interpretation of which benefits from the technical referential constituted by recent data, makes it possible to detect continuities and breaks in their spatial distribution over time. Thanks to this diachronic approach, it is possible to identify long-term changes in material culture and to explore the more global socio-historical transformations in Central Africa.

Principal investigators:

Dates:

2021

External collaborators:

Gosselain Olivier