Dating Ghana's Earliest Art

Bibliographic Data

ID9025529
AuthorsMerrick Posnansky (corresponding author)
Year1979
Volume13
Issue1
Pages52
Publication date1979-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Arts (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-9933 • E-ISSN: 1937-2108
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3335610
OpenAlexW1989521899
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited7

Traditional arts and crafts in can occasionally be dated by historical evidence or oral traditions, and a diachronic classification can be established on the basis of stylistic analyses of the objects themselves. There is nevertheless a definite difficulty in dating most categories of and in working out the cultural relationships between different artifacts for contexts predating the nineteenth century. It is with respect to dating that archaeology becomes essential if we are to work out the origins of Ghana's art, to elaborate the chronology of its development, and to indicate the cultural relationships of objects that cannot be dated by straightforward historical methods. Archaeology enables us to discover much more about the social, technological and economic milieus of the makers of the objects that we study. Divorced from their cultural context, Ghanaian objects are difficult to date, though the recent success of Willett and Fleming in obtaining thermoluminescence dates from the clay cores of Nigerian brass figures (1976:135-46) holds out hopes for dating hollow brass castings and terracottas as the method becomes more refined. Great strides have also been made in discovering the nature of the technologies responsible for the art. greatest contribution of archaeology, however, lies in the more indirect role of enabling one to infer how old objects are by dating the finds associated with them or by dating the sites at which they are found. Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems that archaeologists have had to face in dating Ghana's art, particularly items of high aesthetic quality such as those represented in The Arts of Ghana exhibition at UCLA in 1977, is that many objects have been wrested from their original contexts without any record of their exact provenance or artifactual association. Such items dug up without regard for their associations are normally smuggled out of the country. This situation particularly applies to terracottas and gold objects. actual sites are concealed by traders jealous of their stakes in a financially rewarding and rapidly expanding market. Archaeologists are thus left trying to relate to the objects they retrieve from the more mundane, though often more informative, occupation sites to those art objects presumed to have derived from funerary, palatial or religious settings. Over the last ten years, the rapid development of Ghanaian archaeology (Posnansky 1977:1-25), made possible in particular by entry into the professional field by Ghanaians trained at the University of Ghana, has led to many exciting new discoveries and an expansion of activity in many hitherto archaeologically virgin areas. impact of radiocarbon dating has enabled firm chronologies to be proposed. Only three radiocarbon determinations had been published for by 1965, whereas by 1977 there were over ninety datings (Posnansky 1976:60-3), with more than half of them being made available within the last five years and a greater number of them referring to contexts within the last millennium. Partly as a result of these new dates and an expanded geographical coverage (of part of southern at least), gaps in the chronological sequence are being filled in, and it is possible to suggest tentative ante or postquam dates for many items such as applied decoration on pots in the forest area, the advent of ironworking and brasscasting. Archaeologists have obtained particularly interesting insights into the period of early village development, which is represented by sites of the Kintampo industry. In the past ten years, excavations have been conducted at caves in the Kintampo area, at two village sites close to Begho, Mumute and Bonoase, and most recently at Boyasi. At two of these sites, clear evidence exists of domestic animals, and the radiocarbon determinations so far obtained indicate a date for the industry somewhere around the middle of the second millennium A.D. (Dombrowski 1976:64-71). most distinctive tool was a stone or terracotta object looking like a flattened corncob with crisscross striations. This artifact has been called a rasp but may have been used as an all-purpose tool for shaping, smoothing and decorating pottery (Anquandah 1965:26). most acceptable speculation about the origins of this tool, which is so far unique to Ghana, indicates a northern origin, as there are comparable but isolated pieces at the Sahelian site of Karkarichinkat (Smith 1973:217-18). Other elements, including lithic material, also have northern affinities. Palaeoclimatological studies, both in the Sahel and most recently at Lake Bosumtwe in Ghana, indicate far drier conditions in the third millennium and early second millennium B.C., which could have been responsible for the movements of small groups of pastoralists southward from the Sahel. It is interesting that, like the societies of the Sahelian zone, the Kintampo folk had a terracotta figurative art, which is undoubtedly the earliest we know of from Ghana. Most of the pieces are rather crude, and none has as yet been found in an unbroken condition. All the excavated sites have so far, however, produced examples. At Ntereso (Davies 1973:38; 1966:27-42),1 three pieces were found of which the most striking was the torso of some tailed creature called a lizard by the excavator, though it could almost

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Geography · African history and culture studies · Architecture, Art, Education · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · History

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