2 - Correlating Linguistics and Archaeology in East-Central African History

Summary

The first step in recovering the developments of the long term of East-Central African history and revealing gendered aspects of social, cultural, and political history is to establish the historical and chronological framework. A dual approach is required. First, the succession of languages and their speakers who have occupied the historical landscape of East-Central Africa must be identified, and a linguistic periodization of this history established. That is the task of the first part of this chapter. Second, the archaeological sequences must be similarly mapped and periodized and compared with the linguistic history. That task occupies the second part of this chapter. The correlations between the two kinds of evidence for the past two thousand years of East-Central African history are striking, and the discovery of how well the two kinds of evidence match up bodes well for future work of this kind elsewhere in Africa.

Peoples and Languages of East-Central African History

Speakers of languages of the Eastern Savanna branch of Bantu have been the principal actors in the history of East-Central Africa over most of the past two thousand. An alternative term, “Eastern Bantu,” has also been used for this division of the Bantu family. Four distinct, major sub-branches of Eastern Savanna Bantu provide the linguistic evidence for constructing the chronology of the history of East-Central Africa: the Central Savanna subbranch and, more particularly, its Luban subgroup; the Sabi; the Botatwe; and several subgroups of the Mashariki sub-branch.