'Route Work' through Alternative Archives: Reflections on Cross-Disciplinary Practice

The Five Hundred Year Initiative stresses the value of cross-disciplinary perspectives in investigating the antecedents of contemporary southern African societies, with archaeological sources playing a prominent role in its associated projects. To produce effective histories, these projects require analytical attention to both the processes that gave rise to contemporary societies and those that shape history making in the present. In this article, I build on Paul Gilroy's notion of 'route work' (by comparison to 'root work') to explore the value and methodological challenges of constructing historical understandings that simultaneously attend to the dynamics of past cultural practice and the processes through which our understandings of those practices are produced. Drawing on examples from Ghana, I argue that a methodological engagement with the negotiated quality of historical understanding - an approach that brings into view our processes of 'coming to know' - lays the groundwork for an ethically engaged and responsive, at the same time as empirically grounded, understanding of past socio-historical processes.