An archaeology of resistance. Materiality and time in an African borderland

Abstract

An Archaeology of Resistance: Materiality and Time in an African Borderland studies the tactics of resistance deployed by a variety of indigenous communities in the borderland between Sudan and Ethiopia. The Horn of Africa is an early area of state formation and at the same time the home of many egalitarian, small scale societies, which have lived in the buffer zone between states for the last three thousand years. For this reason, resistance is not something added to their sociopolitical structures: it is an inherent part of those structures—a mode of being. The main objective of the work is to understand the diverse forms of resistance that characterizes the borderland groups, with an emphasis on two essentially archaeological themes, materiality and time, by combining archaeological, political and social theory, ethnographic methods and historical data to examine different processes of resistance in the long term.