• DOI:10.1080/0067270X.2012.708992
• Corpus ID: 161948711

Graham Connah: an archaeologist's life in Africa and in Australia

@article{Gronenborn2012GrahamCA,
  title={Graham Connah: an archaeologist's life in Africa and in Australia},
  author={Detlef Gronenborn and Scott MacEachern},
  journal={Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa},
  year={2012},
  volume={47},
  pages={249 - 255}
}

• D. Gronenborn, S. MacEachern
• Published 30 August 2012
• History
• Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa

This special issue of Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa contains papers written in honour of Graham Connah, one of the most widely known and widely respected of Africanist archaeologists and writers on the archaeology of African societies. The papers in this issue were first presented at a conference session held in Graham’s honour at the biennial meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists held in Frankfurt, Germany, in September 2008. The diversity of research interests and approaches evident in these papers is in itself a testament to Graham’s influence in Africanist archaeology, both in terms of his research in different parts of the continent and of his constant engagement with the data of archaeological research and with the different research approaches that may be required to best interpret those data. One of the elements that has always been evident in his work is the way in which data from various sources, archaeological, environmental and otherwise, are meticulously evaluated and deployed in the pursuit of regional reconstructions that were both reliable and as complete as possible. On a continent where the archaeological record is still very often fragmentary and incomplete * often almost unknown * this inclusive approach seems far more worthwhile than the narrow parochialism that is the norm in some other parts of the world. Graham Connah has, over the last five decades, been one of the most important archaeologists working on the Holocene prehistory of the African continent. The range of his interests can be seen in the range of his research sites: in both western and eastern Africa, of course, from Benin City to the Lake Chad Basin to Egyptian Nubia and to Uganda, and, just as importantly, in Australia. For the most part, this has involved investigations of sites attributable to food-producing populations, ranging in size from small-scale farming communities in the Lake Chad Basin, from well before the appearance of iron technologies, to communities enmeshed in the social and political complexities of African states, at Benin City and Kibiro for example, to the historical archaeology that he has done in Australia. His productivity in dealing with these topics can be gauged from the extraordinarily impressive bibliography of his work, which he has kindly provided to us, and that we have included in this issue (Connah 2012). This range of interests and involvements across Africa, combined with a strongly comparative research stance and an interest in and great facility for clear and precise