Hum Core | Spring 2011 | Unit 2

Societies in Conflict

Humans, the Natural World and the Shifting Boundaries Between Them

Lecture 11. Reading Colonial Landscapes

Key vocabulary terms underlined

Goals

Changes in the practice of Western/Colonial science

Interrogate the boundary between people and nature

Archaeology (as science) in the Western Cape:

evidence of people and culture embedded in the natural world

Compare different ways of using and interpreting rock art as evidence

Posing humanities research questions

Colonial Science: questions of research collaborators and research subjects

Bleek & Lloyd’s work

Linguistics and ethnography overlap/transition

Scientists’ research notes become historian’s archive
||Kabbo’s collaboration

Khoisan as research subjects: Kolb

Khoisan and other Africans as subordinated research facilitators: Sparrman

San individuals as active participants in the research process: Bleek & Lloyd

Science replicates social hierarchy and privilege

Significance of Bleek & Lloyd co-authoring

||Kabbo is not a listed co-author

Colonial Science: observations of nature & observations of people

Kolb

Le Vaillant, Barrow

Sparrman

Bleek & Lloyd

South African Museum; 19^th C. phrenology, physiology

Archaeology (as science) in the Western Cape

Archaeological methods

Archaeological signatures of hunters/foragers, herders, farmers

Comparing rock art and material culture as archaeological evidence

What can Parkington, Manhire & Yates conclude from the art?

What do other scholars say about the art?

What can a historian say about archaeological evidence or conclusions?

Reading Colonial Landscapes

Western observers seeing what they want to see

Observation is conditioned by expectations

Landscapes with or without people?

If people, which people?