Kathryn de Luna's versatile vision of the mid-first-millennium to mid-second millennium ambitions and achievements of the peoples living in what is now central Zambia and surrounding regions takes the Ehret-Schoenbrun style of linguistic history to provocative new levels of exquisite historical sensibility. The book is more than a methodological tour de force, mastering the rich archaeology of the region between the Limpopo valley and the equatorial forest. It draws on the recent wave of climatic and environmental insight that has washed over the classic search for the inventors and speakers of Bantu languages who moved out over nearly all of Africa south and east of Cameroon in a 3,000-year series of adaptations and innovations, and expands on original research in the ‘Botatwe’ languages of the region. These people lived in the historiographical hole in the middle of the doughnut of an early history of the region glazed with large political systems glossed as ‘kingdoms’. The seemingly timeless ‘stateless societies’ of these historically forgotten folks were once the beloved subjects of some of the best of the post-Second World War generation of British social anthropologists, which included Elizabeth Colson and Victor Turner. Numerous historians working in recent years in other parts of the continent have replaced that vacuously negative characterization with substantive insight into the dynamics of the changes flowing constantly through the flexible relationships of their families, neighborhoods, professional guilds, so-called ‘big men’ and their retinues, healing cults, and commercial associations. De Luna imbues these, and more, with an elegant empathy for meanings echoed in the modern words she tracks back to the feelings and experiences of the ancestors who conversed, shouted, and whispered them to one another. As revolutionary as have been her immediate predecessors in these parts of the continent – Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforest and How Societies Are Born and Kairn Klieman's The Pygmies Were Our Compass foremost among them – de Luna hears what ancient Botatwe-speakers meant, beyond how they may have said it, and sweeps her readers up in vibrant worlds of their affect and awareness all but unimaginable from the conventional perspective of modern instrumental rationality.

The book makes a no less surprising, and equally perceptive, argument for the significance of the woods in the lives of people almost always portrayed in the villages they inhabited and the fields they cultivated. It is not news that cultivators and herders everywhere routinely obtained significant components of their diets, among many other things, by harvesting in the wild, but Western scholarship, for reasons buried deep in its cultural history and insightfully assessed in de Luna's first chapter, backgrounds them as marginal or supplementary to seemingly more productive, and implicitly civilized, domesticated crops and animals. Half a century ago, Marshall Sahlins famously declared the world's hunters and gatherers the original ‘affluent society’ in a sense then current in cultural anthropology, but de Luna shows the centrality of collecting and the methods that Botatwe-language speakers used to adapt their richly socially meaningful practices of the bush to maintain them actively down to the very recent past through more than ten centuries of changing climates. Workers in the wild effectively united to diffuse authority, standing proudly apart from the hierarchical polities in the savanna ‘kingdoms’ surrounding them. From luxuriantly expressive linguistic innovations – lexical derivations, inventions, and borrowings – de Luna reconstructs multiple and changing meanings of bushcraft that converge on gaining prestige, winning the interest of prospective wives, earning the respect of elders, and bargaining for the attention of the ancestors: thus, the people, present and past, ‘cultivated’ in her artful title.

De Luna's ironically dramatic narrative moves with the alternating cooler-drier and warmer-wetter phases in the climate of this transitional latitude between the humid equatorial regions to the north and the arid deserts to the south. She extends the familiar concept of ‘expansion’ by showing how Bantu-speakers continued moving locally and regionally long after their ancestors had arrived. The early-to-mid first-millennium proto-Botatwe-speaking generations who settled into these savannas (they were not the first to live there), broken up by well-watered and wooded river valleys, lived by collecting and hunting, and succeeding generations used the diverse, flexible, time-tested yields of the forests to support their cautious, uneven, slow experiments with cultivated crops. Everyone contributed; all were accomplished in ways of the woods. Only later, when warmer, wetter conditions lessened the risks and increased the yields of agriculture, did later generations cautiously commit to crops, ‘rebalancing rather than replacing’. As ordinary people clustered in homesteads, the bush became a fascinating, feared cultural focus for them as they left the forests to skilled specialists whose exploits in the wild won them renown. Sedentarism also generated the ensuing paradox, as home-bound cultivators cultivated others who lived elsewhere and were more existentially remote from them by inventing socially extensive and inclusive exogamous matriclans and unilineally-defined categories of marriage partners and other associations that defined relationships and corresponding obligations over distances and across divides of language and custom. This process, in effect, powerfully scaled up inherited local intimacies of community to include strangers and convert them to Botatwe ways.

De Luna's eminently sensible historical accounting for familiar, but until now unexplained, fundamental aspects of life in these savannas continues on. Through these dispersed networks trade flourished, moving goods rather than people, a point they made by deriving their word for it from a verb meaning ‘to walk’. With settlement, the widely spoken languages of earlier eras dissolved into the more numerous and diversified descendant languages of today. Villagers then converted hunting from a solitary adventure to collective drives with fire and nets that drew entire neighborhoods together to produce, distribute, and consume food, creating community around commensality. A final chapter reviews the rich trove of archaeological evidence throughout the region to reconstruct local changes in prosperity with shifting production of ivory, copper, salt, and minerals distributed through networks linking the margins of the Kalahari Desert to the Indian Ocean from unexpectedly early times. This material also documents de Luna's discernment of a previously unrecognized southerly chain of trading connections. Only at the end of her story do the large, costly, and violent ‘kingdoms of the savannas’, as well as Portuguese along the Zambezi, loom on the horizons of an area that she endows with provocatively paradoxical analytical significance as a ‘central frontier’, a place in its own right, proudly independent of its surroundings, but also crucially connecting all their neighbors to one another. De Luna thus uses Botatwe phrasings to reveal the robust motivating logics of their inventors’ ancient actions, entirely independent of the ghostly projections of modern instrumentalities that otherwise haunt the history of early Africa. This is the epistemological gold standard of history in Africa in any era.

In this book, specialists will find numerous details in the ample modern ethnographies of the region accounted for as meaningful human creations, contextualized in time, with serial consequences to which others, including later generations, reacted. De Luna writes in graceful, multi-layered, almost sensual prose certain to engage even those readers not familiar with the names of the vanished people, obscure places, and technical practices detailed. With linguistics-based insight, confirmed in impressive detail by imaginative readings of the archaeological data and set in nuanced paleoclimatic and environmental contexts, de Luna has charted the historical composition of the elements of the historical accumulations that modern ethnographers describe as ‘culture’. This understanding of ethnography as historical creation, systematic preservation, and compilation opens the potent methodological prospect of reverse-engineering the method: deconstructing recent descriptions of modern practices and ideas and words to discern and sequence their creations as history.

Collecting Food, Cultivating People is an intellectual history of foraging with an intricacy and maturity of insight seldom seen in a first book. It exudes a whole range of important methodological and epistemological best practices. We can surely look forward to a distinguished career of a historian who knows how to allow her ancient subjects to speak for themselves, and then listens respectfully to them across the centuries, even millennia, in subtle, comprehending ways. De Luna's own perceptive phrasings are recurringly arresting, but as she concludes her introduction, the book is a ‘story best told in Botatwe-speakers’ own words’; she makes that true, in more ways than one.