INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS A HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY FROM SOUTH AFRICA

摘要

On 12 October 2015, a round table gathering at the University of the Witwatersrand brought archaeologists and historians together for the first time to write a history of archaeology from South Africa. The meeting took place on the eve of the first rumblings of the student movement that would come to be called #FeesMustFall. In a way, it was the last conference to take place in South Africa without concern for possible disruption by students, and without concern for the question that such disruption poses to all scientific meetings in the country: how to decolonise the knowledge produced by the university? Everyone agrees that the issue of decolonisation is highly relevant to archaeology as a whole, and particularly on continents such as Africa or the Americas (Shepherd 2002a,b; Haber & Gnecco 2007; Tantaleán & Aguilar 2012; Haber 2014; Pikirayi 2015; Montón-Subías & Hernando 2017).