Dear Colleagues, The following may be of interest to you. Please address any queries to the conference organisers.
Best wishes
Julie
A session on apiculture in African contexts will be held at the Society of Africanist Archaeologists (SAfA) in Faro, Portugal (21st to 26th July 2025). Should you be interested in delivering a paper on evidence of apicultural practices in Africa in antiquity, attached please find the information poster. The session abstract also follows below. If interested please select the session ‘Archaeological Insights to Apiculture in Africa’ on the abstract submission website [https://safa2025.icarehb.com/].
Abstracts can be submitted between now and January 31, 2025.
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SAfA Faro 2025 Session Abstract for ‘Archaeological Insights to Apiculture in Africa’ The global history of human engagement with bees and apicultural products arguably has the longest documented antiquity in Africa, with early evidence including cave paintings dating to ca. 8000 BCE in what is today Zimbabwe and depictions in 3rd millennium BCE Pharaonic Egyptian funerary scenes. ‘The Archaeology of Beekeeping’ advanced by Eva Crane over forty years ago now notes that Africa preserves the richest diversity of evidence of hive types utilised. In the intervening decades, broader archaeological syntheses around the antiquity of apiculture, the keeping of bees, and the use of bee products have expanded widely, particularly in circum-Mediterranean regions. Yet, African contexts, by contrast, remain an area of great potential for further development from which comparatively less engagement around the archaeology of apiculture has been addressed to date. This session seeks to gain insights from research related to archaeological evidence of beekeeping practices in Africa, from artefactual materials of such, to graphical depictions, textual accounts, and documentary sources of product use and trade, as well as molecular and palynological approaches to bee product utilisation, and insights from ethnoarchaeological and ethnographic research. By adopting a broad scope, it is hoped that a diversity of perspectives and thus a deeper archaeological discourse can be developed around addressing questions of apicultural practices in ancient and premodern African contexts.
Submission Website: https://safa2025.icarehb.com
