Introduction^{Footnote 1}

At the turn of the millennium I wrote a paper in this journal that both explored the relationships between the disciplines of history and archaeology in the African context and served as a rebuttal of some of the characterizations of archaeology put forward by Jan Vansina in an earlier article.^{Footnote 2} Thus, in preparing to discuss Vansina’s legacy at the African Studies Association conference, it was no surprise that I was drawn to thinking about Vansina’s use of archaeology in his historiography. I decided to investigate some of his more recent work from this perspective since, mea culpa, I had read none of this previously. Therefore, I read parts of two of Jan’s more recent books, How Societies Are Born and Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, hoping to get some ideas.^{Footnote 3} The books are impressive, of course; masterly compilations and analyses of respectively primarily historical linguistics and oral traditions. In my reading I focused on what Jan said about archaeology and how he used archaeological data. In the book on Rwanda Vansina wove the limited archaeological data from Rwanda and adjacent countries into his historical narrative but offered no reflections on the merits or demerits of archaeology as a discipline for the study of the African past. He had more to say about archaeology in How Societies Are Born, rightly bemoaning the lack of in-depth archaeological research in much of west central Africa.^{Footnote 4} Then, almost immediately thereafter, he homed in on the dearth of available radiocarbon dates, an observation that transported me back to 1966, when Roland Oliver basically said that all African archaeology was good for was “dates,”^{Footnote 5} Jan then went on to discuss archaeology’s importance as a means of establishing a chronological framework into which historical linguistics could be woven, given his rejection of glottochronology. Yet, thankfully, he didn’t stop there; his historical narrative made considerable use of the available archaeological evidence, not just the dating framework it provided for technological innovations.^{Footnote 6}

Politics and Ritual

Much of Jan Vansina’s work focused on the history of politics and governance. In How Societies Are Born, he gleefully quotes an unnamed Arab leader who stated that “the history of governance is the mother of all history!”^{Footnote 7} However, it seems that standing on Jan Vansina’s shoulders we’ve now broadened the scope of pre-colonial history enormously in the last decade or so, despite Richard Reid’s ringing and un-ringing of old alarm bells about the demise of precolonial history.^{Footnote 8} One thinks only of the recent book by my fellow Chicago panelist, Kate de Luna, to see how far we’ve progressed, though here I’d like to emphasize the connections between politics and ritual that have been the focus of much recent work in the Great Lakes region by, among others, the organizers of the Vansina sessions at the Chicago conference.^{Footnote 9} I am excited by this work because it seems to me to occupy a productive interdisciplinary space between the study of oral traditions, historical linguistics, historical ethnography, and archaeology.

Archaeology as a discipline has too often treated ritual and religion as marginal, as superstructure on the economic and political structures of society – consider how the study of African rock art was mostly deemed a field of amateur endeavor until Patricia Vinnicombe and David Lewis-Williams made us pay attention, but this is not how most African societies view these topics; there is and was no separation of church and state.^{Footnote 10} Archaeologists have always faced the challenge of identifying ritual in the archaeological record. The old joke states that when we don’t know what something – a building, a feature, an artifact – is, then its function must be ritual. Such a view is based on the flawed premise noted a moment ago, but archaeologists have generally struggled to engage with ritual – ancestors entranced British archaeologists not too long ago, thanks mostly to the fact that Mike Parker Pearson suggested that Malagasy concern with ancestors might be good for thinking about Stonehenge.^{Footnote 11} In Africa, however, we have a much richer historical and ethnographic record that permits far more nuanced interpretations, as with David Schoenbrun’s use of cognitive metaphors to address the meaning of the Luzira heads in Uganda or Tom Huffman’s exploration of rainmaking and state formation in southern Africa.^{Footnote 12} Perhaps the theoretical development that has opened up the study of ritual by archaeologists is the focus on ritual as practice by which ritual is contextualized within the broader realm of social activities.^{Footnote 13} The value of this approach is exemplified by Ann Stahl’s work on the intertwined practices of metallurgy and ritualization in ancient west central Ghana and more broadly by a recent edited volume.^{Footnote 14} Yet, I suspect that many interpretations involving ritual, metaphor, and the like are not amenable to empirical testing in ways that Jan Vansina would have approved, despite the fact that they might be seen as logical developments from his “words and things” methodology.^{Footnote 15}

Migrations

Jan Vansina also spent a considerable time thinking and writing about migrations, particularly, of course, those of Bantu-speaking peoples. In Antecedents to Modern Rwanda he virulently rejected claims of massive migrations in Great Lakes history, while also taking aim at Desmedt’s inference of a past migration based on changes in ceramic decoration.^{Footnote 16} The identification of migrations in the archaeological record and the role of migration in the spread of Bantu languages have been entangled thorny problems for many decades. However, developments in genetics, especially recent advances in the recovery of DNA from ancient human skeletons, have not only made journals like Cell sources for historians and archaeologists but have also made it impossible to deny the existence of some ancient migrations in Africa. For example, it is now clear that humans migrated to the Cape with livestock, probably from as far away as eastern Africa.^{Footnote 17} However, we should remember that, despite the authoritative, declarative tone in which biology papers are written, their conclusions are often founded on very small sample sizes and have occasionally been characterized by remarkably naïve correlations between genes and ethnicities.^{Footnote 18} Most of the sampling problems will diminish with time, though it will probably be several years before we have a decent data set from ancient skeletons.

The problem of correlations is a harder one. In How Societies Are Born Vansina noted that, “archaeological sites do not disclose which language was spoken by those who lived there” and that “while the equation language = culture = society is a fatal if all too common error – still language is not wholly disconnected from culture but forms a part of it.”^{Footnote 19} It would be an exaggeration to claim that there are impenetrable black boxes between language, archaeological culture, ethnicity, and biology but navigating correlations between these concepts is a challenge, for which the best way forward may be through a combination of disciplines. However, that is easier said than done because the different disciplines (archaeology, linguistics, genetics, history, and perhaps ethnography) tend to operate at different scales, both spatial and temporal. Archaeology, for example, has the advantages of temporal precision and an ability to investigate at a small scale, that of settlements or even individual homesteads, but its larger building blocks (cultures/traditions/phases/etc.) are artificial constructs of sometimes dubious integrity that may not, as Vansina noted, equate in any straightforward manner with groups of people who share a language or a culture.^{Footnote 20}

While genetics has already been a game-changer in the identification of migrations, the causes of those migrations and the processes by which they occurred are more intractable problems.^{Footnote 21} Nevertheless, the identification and mapping of various haplotypes of mtDNA, inherited only in the female line, and of the Y chromosome have already provided insights into gender biases in the migrations of Bantu speakers and in gene flow between forager and farmer populations; for example, far more female than male hunter-gatherers were assimilated into Bantu-speaking farming communities, an observation that seems predictable given the importance of the payment of bridewealth in livestock in Bantu-speaking communities.^{Footnote 22} The fact that genetics can offer more information than simply arrows on a map showing the origins, directions, and endpoints of migrations encourages us to look again at what other disciplines might tell us about these migrations.

The potential of genetic data is enhanced by the testing of models of the expansion of Bantu languages that correlates the genetics with historical linguistics. The results of this work favor the model of a late split (about 2,000 years ago) between Western and Eastern branches of Bantu languages that occurred south of the rainforest.^{Footnote 23} However, as the authors themselves admit, “the sparse sampling of Bantu populations in general (…) precludes any definitive conclusions about the nature of the Bantu migrations.”^{Footnote 24} With their use of distance measures, tree diagrams, and correlations of large datasets, genetics and historical linguistics make obvious bed-fellows; archaeology fits much less comfortably into this picture, both in general terms and when one compares de Filippo et al.’s results with our admittedly scanty archaeological knowledge.^{Footnote 25}

Archaeology, with its ceramic analyses and radiocarbon dates, might be considered as providing the opportunity for independent testing of models derived from genetics and linguistics. However, in reality such testing commonly resulted in post hoc accommodative arguments that shoehorned data from the different disciplines into the interpretation de jour, foundering on a lack of adequate understanding of other disciplinary methods.^{Footnote 26} Archaeology certainly allows the construction of far more robust chronologies; indeed, Vansina himself made considerable use of archaeological evidence of settlement history in Botswana to show that “these data do not support the conventional migration scenario of ‘Bantu expansion.’”^{Footnote 27} However, archaeological research contributes far more than better chronological control, as is exemplified by Vansina’s chapter on early village societies in How Societies Are Born, where he employs the detailed archaeological evidence from Divuyu in Botswana as the starting point for an examination of numerous aspects of village life in the late first millennium, weaving together archaeological, paleoenvironmental, linguistic, and ethnographic data.^{Footnote 28} This culminates with Vansina proferring an explanation of the invention and spread of the corporate matrilineage, which he links with the development of farming or herding.^{Footnote 29}

Positivism and Empiricism

Reading How Societies Are Born and Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, I was also reminded how much Vansina was a positivist and empiricist, and also naively optimistic perhaps when he wrote, for example, that “[i]t is up to Rwandan historians to elaborate as impartial an history as possible on the basis of data that are uncontested and acceptable to all, a history that could then serve as a common foundation for everyone in thinking about the future.”^{Footnote 30} In this era of fake news, this seems absurdly, but touchingly hopeful. Vansina’s positivism is on display in How Societies Are Born when he writes that the book, “proposes a set of interpretations that can be proved or disproved by future archaeological and linguistic research.”^{Footnote 31} This seems at odds with his earlier warnings about the fallacy of thinking of archaeology as a purely scientific discipline, though those caveats seem to have been emotionally tied to his disappointment with what he perceived as archaeology’s obsession with neo-evolutionary theory.^{Footnote 32}

Yet, it is also clear that Jan Vansina retreated, if that is the appropriate word, from positivism and empiricism in his later years: “[T]oday I realize that research results are usually far less unambiguous and more intricate than adding new bits to that ever-changing storehouse of my positivist youth.”^{Footnote 33} However, even this characterization of Vansina as stepping back from positivism and empiricism with age is too simplistic. On the one hand, his methodology based on “words and things,” the voluminous linguistic appendices to his later works, and his admission that much of his early conclusions about Kuba history were simply wrong underscore his continuing commitment to empirical approaches.^{Footnote 34} On the other hand, de Luna discusses Vansina’s “unique narrative form: well-informed but necessarily imagined historical reconstructions of what ‘would have’ happened in intimate negotiations among individuals and between groups,”^{Footnote 35} This use of well-reasoned historical imagination to tell compelling stories about the African past is a hallmark of Vansina’s work that might be seen as being at odds with modern scientific archaeology, as discussed below, but Vansina’s storytelling is an accepted approach to the presentation of historical archaeology in North America that is ripe for export to Africa.^{Footnote 36}

His historical imagination notwithstanding, Vansina was a champion of rational historical scholarship for most of his career.^{Footnote 37} At the end of the Rwandan book, following his call for Rwandan historians to write impartial history, Vansina remarks that “one can evaluate different reflections about the past in a spirit of positive skepticism,”^{Footnote 38} On the next page, he goes even further, asking “How then should one start to think about the past?” which he immediately answers, “By conceiving it as a laboratory of human experience from which conclusions can be drawn.”^{Footnote 39} While this may be an appealing prospect to some geneticists and others of a very hard science persuasion, at first blush it seems doubtful that this will resonate well with Africans, if we draw an analogy with the unhappy collision of New Archaeology and Native American history wherein Native Americans were, in Bruce Trigger’s formulation, viewed as “objects” rather than “subjects” of research.^{Footnote 40}

Is there really a place for impartial history and positive skepticism? Well, “impartial history” seems like an oxymoron but “positive skepticism” has much to recommend it, particularly if we are to avoid the trap of extreme relativism. Jan Vansina’s own positions on Africa as “a laboratory of human experience” and “impartial history” seems to have undergone a sea change in later life because in his reflective essay of 2016, he states, “the imposition of a foreign interpretation of history usually induces a disastrous lack of self-confidence and a depreciation of one’s self in those who are the so-called objects of such a history.”^{Footnote 41} He also notes how postmodernism had contributed to the weakening of “any hegemonic or ‘scientific’ view of history,”^{Footnote 42} Instead, he argues that Africans want “a history that is meaningful to them” and he decries “the existing authoritative historiography” disseminated by Western scholars, “whose points of view have become increasingly global and hegemonic.”^{Footnote 43} It is in this context that we should perhaps view Vansina’s Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, that is to say as a redress to the royalist story of Tuutsi domination and an empirically grounded account that he hoped would be valuable to a younger generation of Anglophone Rwandans in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide.^{Footnote 44} Thus, it would appear that rather than advocating the treatment of indigenous peoples as mere “objects” of study in post-genocidal times, Vansina’s Rwandan book was an attempt to provide an unimpeachable scholarly history that might serve the people of Rwanda in their search for a better future.

African Archaeology Today

African archaeology has been suffering through some of the same growing pains. Indeed, we cannot discuss African archaeology as if it is a unitary phenomenon, even if we set aside the obvious problems of trying to view an archaeological record that stretches across about three million years through a single lens and instead focus only on, say, the period since the end of the last Ice Age. Archaeologists of this more recent past pursue a wide variety of research agendas, a sign perhaps of the health of the discipline. Perhaps at one end of the spectrum of these research agendas lie those archaeologists who have embraced the ever-expanding panoply of scientific tools to recover data from both old and new archaeological collections. These tools, such as the analysis of ancient DNA, the measuring of stable isotopes, accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating, portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF), and lab-based chemical compositional analyses mostly require equipment that costs far more than most African university and museum budgets can handle. This situation tends to perpetuate a Western hegemony of research agendas, with African collaborators cast in supporting roles to ease the logistical and linguistic challenges of fieldwork. The results of this research are primarily published in Western journals, such as PNAS, PLoS ONE, Science, and Nature that boast the high “impact factor” scores needed for both the advancement of academic careers in the West and the credibility required to pursue successful grant applications from major funding bodies such as the US National Science Foundation and the European Research Council. Such funding inequities between African and Western researchers are nothing new, though the currency in earlier days was library resources and Land Rovers.

At the other end of the spectrum, archaeologists are increasingly embracing community-based approaches which encourage local African communities to participate in the setting of research agendas and the interpretation of the evidence gathered.^{Footnote 45} These endeavors would appear to answer Vansina’s call for the writing of history that is “meaningful” to Africans.^{Footnote 46} This kind of research may not be impartial, though it can be multivocal. Most frequently, it is concerned with the local rather than the global as African communities fear the loss of their local historical identities and thus lobby for the preservation and investigation of archaeological sites that help them to reclaim their history and underscore its legitimacy.^{Footnote 47}

In theory there is no reason why community-based archaeology could not embrace the methods of hard science, but the reality is that science is often very expensive. Granting agencies tend to provide the required funds to projects that address big questions, such as the origins and dispersal of farming or the development of world systems, the very global and hegemonic concerns that much community-based archaeology rejects. Nevertheless, as scientific technology improves, it also tends to become cheaper, so it is conceivable that small community-based projects will be able to harness new technologies to improve the quality of their research and reinforce their academic credibility.

While Jan Vansina would almost certainly have championed community-based archaeology, it seems obvious that his intellectual curiosity would have been stimulated by science-based approaches to questions like that of the expansion of Bantu languages. Given his avowed aversion to neo-evolutionism, he would have found much to cheer in the diversity of recent African historical archaeology.^{Footnote 48} One relatively new research direction seems to hold the promise of integrating global climatic, ecological, and environmental concerns regarding sustainability with local community-based archaeology and desires for “useable” African pasts.^{Footnote 49}

In summary, Jan Vansina would probably have approved of the varied questions being asked of the archaeology of Africa’s precolonial past and in the approaches and methods adopted to tackling these questions. Africanist archaeologists’ growing recognition of the need to involve local communities in their research, together with increased awareness of ethical and political concerns, also resonates with Jan’s later views on the role of African history.^{Footnote 50}