Co-Investigator for Mozambique
Hilário Madiquida is the Director General of the Institute for Socio-Cultural Research (ARPAC) in Mozambique. He also serves as Assistant Professor of Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Eduardo Mondlane University.
Hilário’s academic work first began as a lecturer at the Department of History at Eduardo Mondlane University. He also worked on the management of an archaeological sites database and on the creation of an archaeological map for Mozambique in the Urban Origins in Eastern Africa project. In 2010, Hilário conceived the Archaeology course at the same University where he began to teach several subjects such as Introduction to Archaeology, Prehistory of Humanity, Geoarchaeology, Analysis of Archaeological Material and the Neolithic.
I am passionate about African Archaeology, mainly, the periods covering the Late Stone Age and Early Farming Communities and their cultural heritage (beliefs, myths, local superstitions and the rich African oral tradition) that were vectors in defining settlement patterns in the past. I consider this period to be the richest because there is the coexistence of two communities with completely different activities. The greatest human contribution to environmental change can be recorded due to fires, field clearing, agriculture, as well as intensive use of resources. Exchange networks appear as the embryo of long-distance trade and in the middle of the first millennium AD long-distance trade networks developed with cultural miscegenation. These factors make this period highly interesting for research.
In his free time, Hilário likes to travel and visit nature and parks and watch football.