Professor Peter Mitchell’s latest book African Islands: A Comparative Archaeology, has been awarded the Society of Africanist Archaeologists 2023 book prize in recognition of it making a major advance in our knowledge of the African past. The book, published by Routledge in 2022, is the first extensive study of the archaeology of Africa’s islands and breaks new ground in arguing for the importance of comparing islands and archipelagos on different sides of the African continent, i.e. in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It also introduces African case-studies of island colonisation and transformation in both precolonial and colonial times into the broader field of island archaeology, a discipline that has traditionally been dominated by work in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean.
Peter was previously awarded the SAfA book prize in 2014 for The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology, which he co-edited with Paul Lane (Cambridge) and is the only person to have been awarded it twice. he can be heard discussing aspects of African Islands on Youtube in a lecture given online for Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research in 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXAjDA_szoY