The 16th PanAfrican Archaeological Association Congress, Zanzibar, Tanzania
In August, Dr. Justine Wintjes and Dr. Ghilraen Laue, Human Sciences Department, KwaZulu-Natal Museum had the opportunity to attend the 16th PanAfrican Archaeological Association Congress in Zanzibar. The congress was attended by nearly 500 participants, both in-person and virtually. Participants came from all over the world, united by their common aim of understanding Africa’s past through archaeology. In total there were 28 sessions with 403 papers submitted for presentation. The setting of the conference in Zanzibar with its interesting history and expansive beaches was spectacular.
Ghilraen had two papers in the session Reflections into the Past, Insights into the Future: Understanding Africa’s Rich Rock Art Heritage. She presented a paper titled Regionality in San Rock Art: More than Simplistic Correlation of Material Culture and Cultural Identity. In this paper, she put forward a methodological and theoretical framework to give a solid foundation for the further exploration of regional difference in southern African rock art. The second paper ‘Not Merely Touching the Surface’: a Reinterpretation of Handprints in Rock Art was presented by Ghilraen’s co-author, Dr. L. Pinto. This paper investigated the problem of cultural essentialism in previous research into handprints and proposed new ways of looking at handprints beyond authorship questions.
Justine presented in a session Imagining Futures: Beyond Archives and Archiving. Her paper, Metsemegologolo: Visions for a Multimodal Landscape Archive of African Urbanisms in Southern Africa, reported on the development of a multimodal archive pertinent to urbanisms before colonialism in southern Africa. Metsemegologolo means ‘ancient towns’ in Setswana reflecting the current focus of the project on Tswana settlements c. 1600 into historical times across the area straddling the South Africa-Botswana border. The project seeks to subvert traditional hierarchies by using the creative potential of digital technologies to use place and landscape as dynamic structuring principles
