Larry Barham

Larry Barham will begin his talk with a brief introduction to the ecology of miombo woodland before presenting new archaeological evidence for the working of trees by early humans. He will then address contemporary issues of the loss of material knowledge and intangible cultural knowledge linked to the region’s woodlands.

Indirect traces of wood-use appear early in the African archaeological record, but wood objects themselves rarely survive. As a result, we know almost nothing about the deep prehistory of human-woodland interaction. The recent discovery in Zambia of waterlogged evidence for the structural use of wood 500,000 years ago provides the earliest direct evidence for the working of trees. These artisans in wood pre-date Homo sapiens and had the cognitive capacity to shape their surroundings. They lived in the seasonally dry tropical woodlands, known as miombo, that are home today to ~100 million people, and which provide essential foods, fuel, tools and traditional medicines.

An example of the loss of both material and cultural knowledge is cloth made from the bark of miombo trees. This was once widespread, but the forms of knowledge associated with the tradition are rapidly disappearing. The recently concluded project “Last of the Bemba Bark Cloth Makers of Northern Zambia” (British Museum & Arcadia supported) archives this endangered knowledge.

Speaker Biography

Larry Barham - Professor of African Archaeology, University of Liverpool

Larry Barham is professor of African archaeology at the University of Liverpool, U.K. (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania). He has conducted research on technological change in the African ‘Stone Age’ in sub-Saharan Africa, primarily Zambia, but also in Ghana. The African archaeological record gives us a unique perspective with which to view human responses to long-term processes of environmental change. The period from 500,000 to 300,000 years ago is of particular interest to Barham as it predates the evolution of our species but sees the development of a conceptually new approach to making tools. The combining of two or more parts to work together as a whole tool marks a fundamental change in human technology, one which underpins all modern technologies (Barham, 2013). Recent research in Zambia, at the site of Kalambo Falls, provides the earliest evidence of this “combinatorial” concept in technology — and, unexpectedly, it is an artefact made of wood (Barham et al., 2023). The early humans living at Kalambo Falls 500,000 years ago used the resources of the local miombo woodlands to engineer a structure and did so at a time of habitat stability — it was not a development stimulated by environmental change. This discovery challenges our preconceptions about the cognitive capacities of pre-Homo sapiens and of the drivers of technological change.

Recommended Readings

Ribeiro, N. S., Silva de Miranda, P. L., & Timberlake, J. (2020). Biogeography and ecology of miombo woodlands. Miombo woodlands in a changing environment: securing the resilience and sustainability of people and woodlands, 9-53.