The Practice and Substance of Historical Archaeology in Sub-Saharan Africa

African-European Contacts in the Kongo Kingdom (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries): New Archaeological Insights from Ngongo Mbata (Lower Congo, DRC)

“…In actual fact, given its early contacts with Europe and the wealth of historical testimonies this yielded, the Kongo represents an excellent test case for historical archaeology. In other regions of sub-Saharan Africa, similar interactions between Africans and Europeans gave a boost to the development of this specific subdiscipline of African archaeology (Connah 2007;Kelly and Norman 2007;Monroe Monroe and Ogundiran 2012;Posnansky and De Corse 1986;Reid and Lane 2004;Swanepoel 2009;Thiauw and Richard 2013). Mitchell (2002, p. 380) characterizes historical archaeology within the Southern African context as having "an emphasis on tracking European colonial expansion and the associated processes of the growth of capitalism and a modern way of life, using archaeology to understand this from the standpoints of colonisers and colonized alike" (with reference to Orser 1996).…”