The Archaeology and Materiality of Mission in Southern Africa: Introduction

Abstract

The period since the late 1980s has yielded a vast body of multidisciplinary literature on mission in southern Africa. Archaeology’s contribution to this scholarship, however, has been relatively muted. In introducing this special issue on the archaeology and materiality of mission, we seek to add archaeological voices to this conversation, illustrating where contributors offer novel sources, research themes, and ways of considering encounters with Christianity. Far from simply adding material to fill the gaps left in the historical record, we argue that archaeological perspectives are well-positioned to explore ruptures and continuities through time, the tensions between peoples’ imaginations and lived realities, and how Christianity may not always have been ‘believed’ but was always materialised. Our hope is to spur a more interdisciplinary dialogue that focuses on the intellectual trajectories that archaeologists of mission pursue as much as on the objects that they find.