The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History

Christopher Ehret, Merrick Posnansky

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520361003
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520314757
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title combines archaeology and linguistics to explore Africa's early history, especially where written records are scarce or absent. By pairing the physical evidence of past societies with insights from language evolution, the book reveals a fuller picture of Africa's cultural and historical development. Archaeology provides tangible data on material culture and timelines, while linguistics offers clues about past social structures, beliefs, and migrations through language relationships. Together, these fields offer complementary perspectives on Africa's past, allowing scholars to reconstruct societal links and movements across time and space. The book's contributors, experts in archaeology and linguistics, present case studies from four major regions: Nubia and northern Sudan, equatorial Africa, eastern Africa, and Ghana. Each section begins with a regional overview that synthesizes existing archaeological and linguistic findings, framing the case studies within broader historical patterns. For example, in Nubia, where evidence is relatively complete, the section discusses correlations that extend into northeastern Africa. In equatorial Africa, linguistic data is more robust, while archaeological evidence is still emerging, showing intriguing alignment with linguistic patterns. Eastern Africa focuses on the impacts of Bantu expansion and early agricultural practices, while the West African section, despite limited data, centers on recent insights from Ghana, illustrating both progress and research gaps. By presenting these regions, the book demonstrates the significant potential of combining archaeological and linguistic methods to uncover Africa's past. While some areas, such as West Africa, still require further exploration, the integration of these two disciplines reveals a complex, dynamic historical landscape and raises new questions for future research. The collection shows that archaeology and linguistics together provide a powerful framework for understanding Africa's early societies and lays a foundation for deeper investigations into the continent's history. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 1
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Coming of Nubian Speakers to the Nile Valley
• 3 Linguistic Aspects of Greater Nubian History
• Linguistic Inferences About Early Bantu History
• 4
• Linguistic Evidence for the Eastward Spread of Ubangian Peoples 5
• Prehistory and Historical Linguistics in Central Africa: Points of Contact 6
• Archaeology and Linguistic Reconstructions of History in East Africa 7
• The First Spread of Food Production to Southern Africa 8
• 9 Models of the Spread of the Early Iron Age
• Bantu Expansion into East Africa: Linguistic Evidence 10
• Bantu Expansion into Eastern Africa: Archaeological Evidence 11
• The Peopling of Southern Ghana: A Linguistic Viewpoint
• Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction in Ghana 13
• References
• References
• Index