ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PRECOLONIAL AFRICA: ARCHAEOLOGY, HISTORY, LANGUAGES, CULTURES, AND ENVIRONMENTS by Vogel, Joseph O.

ISBN: 9780761989028

AltaMira Press | 20 August 1997

Hardcover | 606 pages

A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book. Explore the dynamics of precolonial African life in this comprehensive encyclopedia. An authoritative text with state of the art summaries, the Encyclopedia of Precolonial Africa will prove to be a benchmark volume for the field. Moreover, a bibliography for each article guides readers with further research. With more than 100 articles written by leading scholars, extensive maps, photos, and figures, the Encyclopedia of Precolonial Africa is essential reading for all students, professionals, and avocational readers of African archaeology, history, linguistics, and culture.

About the Author
The editor, Joseph O. Vogel, was born in the South Bronx, in New York City, in 1936. He received his undergraduate training in anthropology at Hunter College in New York City. While still an undergraduate, he travelled first to southern Illinois to excavate at the Modoc rock shelter with the Illinois State Museum, and South Dakota, to dig at a number of prehistoric villages, with the Smithsonian Institution River Basin Survey. He pursued graduate studies at the University of California-Berkeley, while working as a preparator in the R.H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology and revisiting the Midwest to excavate a number of prehistoric sites for the Kansas State Historical Society. In 1961, he dug at the great Mississippian site of Cahokia and then spent the next three years revisiting Cahokia and analyzing the large collection of ceramics excavated there. Following his years at Cahokia, he spent a year and a half exploring the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. with the National Park Service, Canada. In 1964, he was appointed Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum, Livingstone, Zambia. Over the next decade, he, and his wife, explored regions around Lake Bangweulu in northeastern Zambia, traveled to eastern Zambia, and conducted excavations at Late Stone Age caves in the Mumbwa district of central Zambia, as well as extensive stratigraphic excavations in the Upper Zambezi Valley, buLozi, and the Victoria Falls region. The outcome of these later investigations was a comprehensive reconstruction of the settlement history of southwestern Zambia. He conducted an ethnographic survey of traditional African farming, which influenced his ideas on the history of farming in southeastern Africa, the development of small-scale polities, and their evolution into statelike formations. In 1974, he earned his doctorate from Balliol College, University of Oxford, for a dissertation synthesizing his many years of archaeological fieldwork in the Victoria Falls region.