John D. Giblin

• Ph.D. Archaeology
• Keeper at National Museums Scotland

This book investigates the relationship between heritage and development from the global visions articulated by UNESCO and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to local activism, livelihood innovations and political strategies employed in diverse countries of the Global South. In recent years, as culturally informed approaches to internationa...

Museums were both produced by and producers of the ideals that drove the growth of European empires. As such, many of the collections made during and since the colonial era are unique and powerful reflections of this history. Despite this potential, with few exceptions, object-focused critical histories of empire in museums have typically either be...

This article outlines historical and ongoing uses of the past and academic heritage research into those activities within eastern Africa. The use of the past will be discussed as a deep historical practice in the area that is the EAC in the 21st century, demonstrating how political elites have constructed versions of the past to suit contemporary a...

Every year in Rwanda, a week of national mourning commemorates the Genocide of Tutsi, a brutal episode that began on April the 7th 1994 and resulted in the murder of up to one million people in 100 days. The genocide was returned to the global stage in 2014 when world leaders joined Rwandans in marking the twentieth anniversary of this event. In Ki...

Through a case study of the Musanze Caves, this paper describes the impact of Rwanda’s heritage tourism industry on archaeological resources. The paper outlines Rwanda’s tourism industry and describes how it privileges ‘natural heritage’ above ‘cultural heritage’, a situation which is negatively impacting upon archaeological sites such as the Musan...

South Africa has an established, vibrant and highly politicized contemporary art scene that is often in dialogue with the deep and recent past. South African Art explores this relationship between past and present, showing contemporary and historic art objects from the earliest human artistic tendencies three million years ago to 20th-century apart...

This chapter reflects on the ethics of archaeological interpretation regarding the post-genocide identification of violence associated with the precolonial past, specifically a c. 400 AD potentially violent burial, which could, it is speculated, contribute toward the persistence of structural violence in the present and the return to extensive phys...

This paper proposes an archaeology of recent conflict in western Great Lakes Africa as a means to give volume to subaltern voices marginalized within and since the conflicts, to produce alternative historical narratives and thus create a more nuanced understanding of war and its aftermath in this region. In addition, by drawing upon emerging theore...

As might be implied by Orwell’s (1949, p. 88) famous lines, heritage, broadly conceived as the use of the past in the present, is a locus of power, through the appropriation of which the dominant in society may attempt to control the future by creating historical justifications for contemporary goals. Indeed, this powerful cultural mechanism was ha...

Following the Foucauldian, post-colonial and archaeological post-processual critiques of knowledge construction and more recent calls for a political ethic in archaeology, this paper furthers this discussion by advocating the introduction of a ‘politicised interpretation publication ethic’ in African archaeology. This is a response to a survey of r...

This paper reviews Rwandan ceramic typologies and integrates these with recent regional ones through the consideration of four new ceramic assemblages dating to three distinct phases across the past 2,000 years. In addition to providing a synthesis of ceramic approaches as a research resource, it also suggests that ceramics previously termed type C...

This paper narrates in an autobiographical manner PhD research regarding pre-colonial Rwandan archaeology and its contemporary socio-political relevance. The paper reflects on the decolonial challenge that inspired the research and the ways in which, and reasons why, the research fell short of achieving its decolonial aims. In response to this comp...

Heritage is invoked for post-conflict development by international organisations, governments, and sub-national groups to provide emotional and cultural, including economic, healing for individuals and societies. However, academic critiques of healing-heritage typically cite the failure of heritage to heal, either because it cannot, or because it i...

This paper describes the technical activities of the contemporary makers of the royal pots of Buganda and the social context of this technology and its products, alongside the symbolic world of which these are a part. The ethnoarchaeological research presented here suggests that Ganda pottery was not only a technical and functional product, but was...

This article presents the results from a programme of bulk soil sampling and flotation of first and second millennium a.d. early farming, ‘Iron Age’, archaeological sites in Rwanda conducted in 2006–2007 alongside a new set of associated radiocarbon dates, which contribute toward the development of a chronology of plant use for the region. This res...

Drawing on a range of experiences as PhD researchers in Rwanda (JG, JH) and Rwandan heritage professionals (MM, AN), this paper reviews the current state of pre-colonial archaeological site management in Rwanda and identifies specific contemporary challenges related to current national priorities, demographic and subsistence pressures, and socio-ec...

The ‘Urewe culture’ dominates the archaeology of Great Lakes Africa from approximately 500 BC to AD 800. However, whilst much is known about the production and distribution of Urewe ceramics and iron metallurgy, social and symbolic information regarding Urewe users is scarce. Within this context the discovery of an Urewe burial preserving pathologi...

A particular version of Rwanda’s pre-colonial Iron Age past was constructed during colonial rule and influenced by a racial world-view. This ethnicised and racialised past was used by successive Rwandan rulers to divide the population along newcomer/latecomer lines and eventually became a central tenet of the propaganda that contributed to the geno...