Archaeology of Angola
During that time, several research institutions and museums were opened, and fieldwork was largely tied to mission trips into the country to document the cultures of native Angolans.
New governmental agencies, such as the Lisbon Geographic Society in 1875 and the Commissão de Cartographia in 1883, were formed to explore and map the interior regions of Angola and the rest of the Portuguese Empire by sending missions into previously-unexplored areas.
[2] Explorers Hermenegildo Capelo and Roberto Ivens led expeditions in Angola in 1877 and again in 1884–1885, and their findings were some of the earliest compiled on central African archaeology and ethnography.
[6] José Leite de Vasconcelos, the director of the National Museum of Archaeology, Lisbon, Portugal, published another article that included prehistoric Angolan stone tools in 1913.
Several new institutions, such as the Portuguese Academy of History, were established with this goal in mind; and others were restructured, as was the Commissão de Cartographia absorbed into the National Board for Geographical Missions and Colonial Research.
Several archaeologists, including Henri Breuil, John Desmond Clark, and Louis Leakey were drawn to the area to explore the Congo Basin's Stone Age history.
[6] However, contemporary studies followed a school of thought, solidified by Portuguese anthropologist António Mendes Correia, favouring physical anthropology over archaeology, as native populations were to be evaluated for work purposes.
Bruno Pastre Máximo wrote in 2020, "The major objective of these “scientific” incursions was to provide the Salazar with arguments which would justify the maintenance of the status quo and the empire, based essentially on the decadent concept of “inferior races” and on the contrast between “barbarian and civilized.”[12] The Anthrobiological Mission of Angola, led by António de Almeida, took place between 1948 and 1955 with the intention of documenting the ethnology, languages, and history of Angola.
[14] Miguel Fonseca Ramos, initially a student of geology, was chosen to lead new excavations in 1966 as part of the Mission of Archaeological Studies in Southwest Angola (MEASA).
Under the direction of the IICA, the University of Luanda's School of Arts and Humanities began teaching anthropology and archaeology classes in 1970, led by Joaquim Santos Júnior.
As part of Martin Pickford and Brigitte Senut's larger Southern African archaeological project, further excavations were carried out by the Angola Paleontology Expedition in 1989 in partnership with the Collège de France.
During colonial rule, Angolan cultural heritage objects and human remains were removed from the country and placed in museums, institutions, and private collections.
The foundation aims to repatriate works of art and artifacts back to the Chokwe people in Angola, many of which were looted from museums during the civil war.
[23] John Desmond Clark divided Angola's Stone Age sites into three geographic regions, which all meet at a central point near Huambo: the Southwest, containing the highlands and plateaus, as well as most of the Angola's Atlantic Coast; the Congo in the north, from the Congo Basin south to the Cuanza River; and Zambezi in the southeast, comprising the Zambezi, Cuando, and Cubango River watershed regions.
[28][29] The coastal area itself contains multiple sites dating back to the Miocene and Pleistocene and has yielded evidence that Acheuleans may have been scavenging beached whales up to 600,000 years Before Present (BP).
