58. African pasts for global futures: the contribution of archaeology to the decolonial challenge.

Africanist archaeology, like other sister disciplines, presents a contradiction within itself: it is both a product of colonialism and a fundamental tool for its epistemological dismantling. On the one hand, it is undeniable that the origins of archaeology in Africa are clearly colonial, as have been for a long time its methodologies, theoretical frameworks and categorizations. On the other hand, African archaeology has as its object of study the continent with the longest chronology of human occupation on the planet, a continent in which the written contribution to history is a phenomenon of recent generalization. In this context, archaeology is the only discipline that can offer a perspective with chronological depth, constituting the necessary antidote to the presentism that still saturates a large part of Africanist studies. Therefore, in this session we want to explore both the advances that have been made in recent decades in the decolonization of archaeology itself (and its limitations), as well as the multiple contributions that the study of the African past and the deconstruction of historical Eurocentrism can make to our understanding of the world today and its future prospects.