Until, the 1970’s, there were Western historians who emphatically wrote off Africa of the period before the arrival of the Europeans as a “Dark Continent” devoid of any worthy traces of history and culture. In 1965, Oxford University’s Regins Professor of History wrote of events of pre-colonial Africa as “the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe”.

As recently as 1974, another scholar, William Ochieng, summed up his disappointment about Africa’s past before the European advent in the crushing words – “Utter stagnation.” It is clear that these scholars and their kind conceived of history solely in terms of the written word – a narrow approach to history and historiography.

These days, there is a new history in the making in the African intellectual world. It is being demonstrated daily that this ‘new history’ can only be appreciated through the eclectic approach – the application of techniques in African linguistics, ethnography, or historic archaeology etc. From the archaeologist’s point of view, the ‘new history’ entails, among other things, the decoding of the ‘messages’ of clay pots and other ceramics which are among the commonest oldest surviving cultural artifacts.

In Ghana, pottery has been found in ancient sites scientifically aged to around 4,000-3,000 B.C. The pioneers of Ghanaian farming and village life of the period 2000 B.C. to 500 B.C. were authors of decorated clay pots, houses constructed from a combination of clay and wood as well as the earliest known clay art works portraying domestic cattle, sheep, goats and dogs.

Around AD100-500, the earliest Ghanaians who pioneered infrastructural traditional iron technology constructed furnaces of clay to facilitate the chemical reduction of iron oxides to iron blooms for making cutlasses, axes, hoes and hunting arrowheads.

The first Ghanaian cotton textile manufacturers of the 16th century used clay spindles for their spinning process. The pioneers of gold industry and trade employed decorated well-shaped clay discs as early gold-weights in the 16th century. Clay crucibles for melting metal are among the vital tools found in the ruins of ancient Ghanaian copper and brass workshops of the 17th century. Old habitation sites provide evidence of clay pots used in the tapping process of the palm wine industry. Old cemeteries preserve remains of clay sculptures which represent portraits of deceased persons and their clansmen.