Table of Contents

1. Introducing the African record; 2. Frameworks in space and time; 3. First tool users and makers; 4. Early Pleistocene foragers; 5. Mid-Pleistocene foragers; 6. Transitions and origins; 7. The Big Dry: the archaeology of marine isotope 4-2; 8. Hunting, gathering, intensifying: the mid-Holocene record; 9. Foragers in a world of farmers; 10. The future of the first Africans' past.

Promotional Information

A synthesis of the record left by Africa's earliest inhabitants combining archaeology, genetics and palaeo-environmental science.

About the Author

Lawrence Barham is Professor in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. A scholar of the evolution of symbolic behaviours, he is the author of The Middle Stone Age of Zambia and co-author of Human Roots: Africa and Asia in the Middle Pleistocene. Barham serves on the Council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and is editor of the journal Before Farming: The Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers. Peter Mitchell is Professor of African Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Fellow in Archaeology at St Hugh's College, Oxford. He is the author of The Archaeology of Southern Africa and African Connections: Archaeological Perspectives on Africa and the Wider World, as well as co-editor of Researching Africa's Past. Mitchell is Honorary Secretary of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and a member of the editorial boards of several leading journals, including Antiquity, World Archaeology and the South African Archaeological Bulletin.

Reviews

"...probably the best available survey of prehistoric Africa. Recommended." --Choice

"It is apparent that this book represents an impressive scholarly achievement...Without a doubt this is an important book." --Graham Connah, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia