On the evening of Thursday 8 February, the Ertegun community was thrilled to welcome Professor Shadreck Chirikure, Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science at Oxford. Professor Chirikure is an accomplished archaeologist and prolific scholar whose work is fascinating and informative to read, serving as an inspiration and example of drawing many adjacent disciplines into productive conversations with each other. In so doing, he has highlighted how archaeology is a field in which numerous scientific methods of artefact analysis, conservation, and experimentation can provide unique and valuable insight into the humanities and social sciences.
His lecture was a cogent demonstration of this approach, addressing how this combination helps us make sense of globalization by posing several key questions: how old or new is the phenomenon really? Can it even be considered a single force, or rather is it something which has taken root in various contexts during a range of periods? What are the inherent dynamics of power at play, who (if anyone) directs its growth, and what determines who benefits or suffers in the process? Another point of emphasis, inherently coupled with the others, is how our views of the past in many places has been undeservedly clouded and misrepresented by legacies of imperialism and outdated models of relegating swathes of the world to a “periphery,” where, at best, they are seen as recipients of globalization, which was imposed from areas where progress was really being made. An example of how fruitful it can be to overturn these perspectives is evident in Professor Chirikure’s work on Southern Africa, and Great Zimbabwe in particular.
Professor Chirikure’s research on gold production and distribution in Great Zimbabwe represents a large body of thorough archaeological work, which is also employed to counter prevalent models of globalization that underemphasize individual localities. If the latter may be characterized by looking at such places as constituent parts of a “global” framework, Chirikure works to “…assess the nature and impact of global interactions from the inside looking out to learn more about how local agency in shaping global histories” (gold in Great Zimbabwe). Through analyzing gold samples and the remains of ceramic hardware necessary for working the metal found throughout the site, he shows that Great Zimbabwe was more than a site where gold was exported into a wider Indian Ocean commercial system. It was a location which was integral to local and intra-African networks of commodity exchange, in which gold’s role was intertwined with that of grain, cattle, ivory, and other metals. The development of techniques and technologies for goldsmithing were not exclusively spurred by contact with the wider Indian Ocean world but were first developed to suit local needs and use of the metal, while drawing upon pre-existing ceramic and metallurgical expertise. Professor Chirikure’s work shows that globalization did not strictly “consign the local to passivity,” but rather that local innovation, organization, and experimentation by the inhabitants of Great Zimbabwe were responsible for their favourable place in both regional and intercontinental networks of exchange.
As a scholar in the humanities, and in particular a historian, I believe it is critical to understand that although the written record is central to our studies, the work of Professor Chirikure and his colleagues is essential in understanding not only past ways of life and processes such as globalization, but also provide new modes of understanding them as they affect our lives today.
Samuel Johnson
