If you are talking about departments IN Africa which include archaeologists
and teach it, you need to look at the colonial national model followed, as
well as indigenous African attitudes toward archaeological practice.  In
former British colonies, the traditional separation of archaeology from
both social anthropology and the natural sciences in UK has led in some
places (e.g. Nigeria) to establishment of Departments of Archaeology.  Since
anthropology is still a very unpopular discipline among independent African
states, and since the link between social anthropology, biological anthropology,
and prehistoric archaeology has never been strong in UK (until Hodder & Co.
discovered "culture"), archaeologists in smaller-scale settings (the
case in most of Africa, where the first 2-3 PhD.'s in archaeology are
immediately impressed into service as Directors of Antiquities Departments,
heads of museum departments of archaeology, etc.) tend to track into
history departments.  In my opinion, this is because the first wave of
indigenous archaeologists were interested in Iron Age and other relatively
recent periods, in which links with ethnohistory, linguistics, and history
were strong.
 
Africans practicing archaeology see themselves as documenting
history, as so such Latin American archaeologists as Jose Lorenzo, whose
now-venerable article in World Archaeology drew the disciplinary and political
distinction between archaeology north and south of the Rio Grande:
1981  Archaeology south of the Rio Grande. World Archaeology 13: 190-208.
 
Only slowly is a more anthropological emphasis developing, in part because
of the training of so many archaeologists in the U.S.  It remains to be
seen how the South African institutions, which have combined some social
anthropology with their archaeology, will influence indigenous practices
in other areas.
 
Perhaps persons more familiar with the French and Belgian traditions in
Africanist archaeology can comment on practices in francophone Africa.
 
 
Diane Gifford-Gonzalez
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Anthropology
U. of California Santa Cruz