ref: Before Farming 2010/1 article 5

In gratitude

I begin with an apology to the authors in this issue. Normally, as editor I would offer brief summaries of the papers or themes represented, a taster to entice the reader to have a look, but not this time. A colleague and mentor died recently, and I would like to say a few words of appreciation.

Hilary Deacon (1936–2010) will be familiar to Africanists and Palaeolithic archaeologists alike. Readers of Before Farming may also recall his thoughtful and typically provocative ‘Benefit of Foresight’ (2004). I plunder a choice passage from that work to end this piece.

I first met Hilary in 1983 at a conference in Swaziland where I was doing my PhD fieldwork. He and his archaeologist wife Janette kindly offered me a place to stay in their home in Stellenbosch if I wanted to examine local museum collections. I took them up on this offer post-conference. A fellow student led me to expect a gruff reception from Hilary, but this wasn’t the case. He and Janette proved helpful and sublimely patient in response to my questions framed in ignorance of the wider southern African record. Almost ten years later at what would be a turning point in my professional life Hilary steered me in a new direction.

From a grad student’s perspective at the time, Hilary was a mainstream processualist with his focus on subsistence behaviours and environmental change, but he was also firmly engaged with the ethnographic record, successfully marrying the two disciplines. The interplay of past and present in theory building became the hallmark of his career, especially as he pushed against conceptual blinkers of what constituted evidence for modernity and when it appeared in the archaeological record. His willingness to challenge the academic status quo was timely as the ‘Out of Africa’ debate heated up in the 1980s and he emerged as a flag bearer of a small but influential group of advocates for an earlier than widely accepted origin. His vision, or stubborn recklessness in some eyes, has left a lasting impression on me.

It was late in 1992, at a Royal Society meeting in London that I had a brief life changing chat with Hilary during a coffee break. The meeting was about advances in dating techniques, but I certainly wasn’t advancing in my career plans. Now post-PhD with no academic job in sight, delivering the mail to repay my student loans, and unable to raise funds to get back to Swaziland I was at a low ebb. Hilary said simply “look north” and explained that if I wanted to make a contribution to big debates then leave the relatively overcrowded southern African scene and find somewhere new to work. A more geographically balanced view of Africa’s past was needed that filled the large gaps between the Cape Coast and the Rift Valley. There’s more to this brief encounter, but I did end up working in south-central Africa, with no regrets and with much gratitude to Hilary.

I last saw him in 2006. We were travelling with a group of distinguished Middle Stone Age specialists, looking at sites in Kenya and Ethiopia with workshops between visits. On a trip to Olorgesailie, a group of Masai women were at the gate offering boldly patterned beaded jewellery. Hilary brought a striking bracelet of primary colours
and I wanted one just like it. Prophetically, they said his was the one and only – the same could be said of the man.

“Even if one’s goal in life is to unravel a particular sequence in some forgotten outpost, as one of those many wise Chinese philosophers said, there is no reason to sit with a bucket over your head when there is a whole world to explore.”

The Editor
Liverpool, October 2010

© Western Academic & Specialist Press Ltd 2010