News from SAfA Toulouse (26 June - 2
July 2016)
The Toulouse conference was a big
success! Many thanks to the Organizing Committee, led by
François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar. The conference program
and abstracts are permanently archived on the SAfA webpage - click
the tab "About SAfA" and scroll down to the list of biennial
meetings to find the link.
The next SAfA meeting, in 2018, will
take place at Stony Brook University, New York (dates TBA)
Business Meeting
highlights:
SAfA members approved a
new Editorial Policy for Nyame
Akuma. See the link under the "Nyame Akuma
Bulletin" tab above. Please adhere to the instructions
for contributors; non-conforming submissions will be returned!
SAfA members approved a
new Sexual Harassment Policy as item 9 of the
amended SAfA Code of Ethics. Both are available as Quicklinks
at the bottom right on this page.
Election Results -The
new Executive Committee:
President: Eric Huysecom,
University of Geneva
Organizing Secretary: Elisabeth
Hildebrand, Stony Brook University
Recording Secretary: John
Arthur, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg
Treasurer: Brian Clark (Rice
University)
Member at Large (Africa):
Hélène Timpoko Kienon-Kaboré, (Université Félix
Houphouet-Boigny, Côte d'Ivoire)
Member-at-large (Africa): Kolewole Adekola
Member-at-large (Europe): Ralf
Vogelsang (University of Cologne)
Member-at-large (North America): Carla Klehm (Washington University in St.
Louis)
Student representative for North
America (non-voting): Peter Coutros (Yale University)
Student representative
Nyame Akuma editors (non-voting):
Dores Cruz (University of Denver) and Els Cornelissen (Royal Museum
for Central Africa, Tervuren)
SAfA Webmaster (non-voting): Susan
McIntosh (Rice University) and Cornelia Kleinitz (Humboldt
University, Berlin)
2016 SAfA Book
Prize:
Alfredo González Ruibal, 2014,
An Archaeology of Resistance: Materiality and Time in an
African Borderland. Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers.
This work studies the tactics of
resistance deployed by a variety of indigenous communities in the
borderland between Sudan and Ethiopia. The Horn of Africa is an
early area of state formation and at the same time the home of many
egalitarian, small scale societies, which have lived in the buffer
zone between states for the last three thousand years. For this
reason, resistance is not something added to their sociopolitical
structures: it is an inherent part of those structures-a mode of
being. The main objective of the work is to understand the diverse
forms of resistance that characterizes the borderland groups, with
an emphasis on two essentially archaeological themes, materiality
and time, by combining archaeological, political and social theory,
ethnographic methods and historical data to examine different
processes of resistance in the long term (text from amazon.com).
2016 Prize for Outstanding
Student Presentation:
Mareike Brenner, Artifact
distributions and intra-site spatial analysis of the Sibudan layers
at the MSA site of Sibudu, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa