research in the south of the country, the most notable being his excavations at Bosumpra rock shelter and at a midden mound at Dawu. Shaw left the Gold Coast in 1945, but his work subsequently led, during the 1950s, to both the creation of the Ghana National Museum and the establishment of a Department of Archaeology in the University of Ghana, which grew out of Achimota College.

From 1945 to 1963, Shaw held educational posts at Cambridge University and continued to publish on African archaeology. In 1959–1960, he was invited by the Nigerian Federal Department of Antiquities to excavate at Igbo-Ukwu in eastern Nigeria, and there he uncovered important evidence for the emergence of social complexity, the development of sophisticated metallurgical skills, and the growth of long-distance trade by the late first millennium a.d. This work, together with his previous publications, led to his being appointed in 1963 to a research professorship in archaeology at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, which he held until his retirement in 1974.

During his time at Ibadan he did further work at Igbo-Ukwu as well as excavating a rock shelter at Iwo Eleru in the Nigerian rain forest. From the latter site he recovered evidence of late–Stone Age occupation from about 10,000 b.c. to about 1500 b.c., including a human skeleton from the earliest deposits that was proto-negroid in character and the earliest such evidence in West Africa. At Ibadan, he built up a successful research team that supported not only his own work but also that of fellow archaeologists Graham Connah, Steve Daniels, and Adebisi Sowunmi. Shaw not only researched and published widely but founded and edited the West African Archaeological Newsletter and the West African Journal of Archaeology, which subsequently replaced it. His most important contribution to the future of African archaeology, however, was his creation in 1970 of a teaching Department of Archaeology in the University of Ibadan that could train some of the future generation of African archaeologists.

Following retirement, Shaw did further excavation in the Kaduna Valley of northern Nigeria and also continued to publish extensively. He lives quietly near Cambridge, England, having donated his library and papers to the Institute of Archaeology in the University of London.

There can be no doubt that Shaw’s contribution to West African archaeology, and indeed to African archaeology as a whole, was an important one. His career straddled the change from colonial to independent rule in black Africa, and his vision and hard work, in his search for West Africa’s past, contributed significantly to Africa’s rediscovery of itself.

Graham Connah

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 2, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 740–741.

Shell Midden Analysis

After stone artifact scatters, archaeological deposits dominated by shell are the most commonly encountered evidence of the past, yet the infrequency of published accounts of midden analyses in the current archaeological literature suggests that archaeological deposits of shell contribute little to our understanding of human history. In this brief history of midden analyses, I locate the source of this contradiction in shifting explanatory paradigms in archaeology in general.

A shell midden is any archaeological site with a visible quantity of mollusks, which indicates the human consumption of shellfish. Shell is durable, and the preservation of shell middens is high when compared to other faunal material. That fact, combined with the generally large number of shells in a midden site, makes them highly visible in the landscape and easily recognized. Shell deposits also provide a matrix in which other kinds of cultural material, both artifacts and bone, are preserved. In this article, the focus is on shell middens that come under the rubric of “hunter-gatherer sites,” that is, sites that reflect behavior associated with nonagricultural peoples for whom marine resources probably constituted a seasonal or year-round food source.

The modern analysis of midden sites owes much to the earliest systematic midden excavation