Potters’ Genealogies of Practice in the Congo Basin? Retracing Social Learning and Trans-Generational Training Networks through the past two-and-a-half Millennia

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• Dr Dirk Seidensticker, Ghent University
• Tuesday 11 February 2025, 13:00-14:00
• Garrod Seminar Room, MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

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Ceramics constitute the most prominent find category encountered by archaeologists in Central Africa and forms the basis of various regional chrono-historical frameworks. Until some decades ago, pottery was still produced widely within the equatorial rainforest. With archaeological reconstructions claiming a two-and-a-half millennia long tradition, the Congo Basin is a prime study area to investigate the transfer of knowledge among potters’ communities through time.

A recently concluded research project at the University of Ghent provides first insights into Trans-Generational Training Networks of potters’ in the region. Relying on existing ethnographic and archaeological collections and employing a multilayered analytical framework resulted in reconstructions of collective chaînes opératoires. Combining those with information about the local, intermediate or trans-local nature of vessels, by means of ceramic petrography and pXRF data, communities of practice could be inferred and their interrelationships through time mapped.

This research results point at previously not recognised changes in potters’ chaîne opératoires, but also patterns of regional strategies showing great persistence. Communities in the heart of the Congo Basin showed less shifts in potting strategies than those at the western or north-eastern parts. The novel results presented during this lecture offer a first glimpse into resilience and shifts in the social fabric of pottery producing communities living in the equatorial rainforest of the Congo Basin.

This talk is part of the African Archaeology Group Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• African Archaeology Group Seminar Series
• Garrod Seminar Room, MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

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