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Bantu Expansion (African Studies)

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  1. Introduction
  2. The Bantu languages, a closely-knit family of 440 to 680 languages (depending on how one distinguishes between a language and a dialect), are spoken across the southern third of the African continent, from the boundary between modern day Nigeria and Cameroon in the west, to southern Somali in the east, and as far south as the Cape. Today, some 300 million people—about a third of the continent’s population—speak a Bantu language. In terms of the number of languages, the number of speakers of those languages, and the extent of the territory throughout which the languages are spoken, Bantu is by far the largest branch to develop out of the Niger-Congo family, itself the largest language phylum in Africa. Though the dates are debated, the ancestral proto-language of all extant Bantu languages probably diverged from its Niger-Congo ancestors some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. At the heart of the Bantu Expansion is the question of how so many Bantu languages came to be spoken by so many people across such a broad territory in such a very short span of time by the standards of language history. Scholars have debated the origins of the Bantu languages and their expansion since the 19th century, though the similarities among Bantu languages were recognized far earlier. Though scholars now reject the conflation of language, culture, and race that characterized early Bantu studies, many of the questions that inspired early research remain unanswered. Scholars are still debating the relationships among Bantu languages, with implications for their historical development as well as the social history of their speakers. Indeed, the Bantu Expansion is an important chapter in precolonial African history, and historical linguistic evidence remains critical for the reconstruction of such early histories in Bantu-speaking Africa. The interdisciplinary character of scholarship on the Bantu Expansion led to many understandings of “Bantu,” from a linguistic category to a racial, ethnic, or genetic population, and even a material cultural tradition; but the uncritical conflation of linguistic, archaeological, and biological evidence in some research led certain scholars to reject the idea of the Bantu Expansion altogether, and research on the topic floundered in the late 20th century. Today, new computational methodologies for the classification of languages as well as the emergence of molecular anthropology for reconstructing demographic histories are reinvigorating research on the Bantu Expansion by bringing new evidence to bear on well-established questions and paradigms.
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  4. General Overviews
  5. There are very few overviews of scholarship on the Bantu Expansion that are written for non-specialists, and many focus on situating that scholarship in the context of broader intellectual trends. Textbooks and reference works are often a better starting point. Vansina 1979 is certainly the best-known general overview, but it is very detailed, often technical, and not as accessible to non-specialists. The short, accessible excerpt in Klieman 2003 places the development of scholarship on the Bantu Expansion in the context of developments in academic thinking more generally. Dubow 1995 traces the impact of 19th century racial thinking on how scholars have studied the history of Bantu languages, peoples, and material cultures and has been a source of debate about the value of research on the Bantu Expansion (see also Critiques of Interdisciplinary Research). Schoenbrun 2001 similarly explains the legacy of the 19th century context of scholarship on the Bantu Expansion, but proposes a way to write such histories without falling into the intellectual traps of 19th century methodologies. Nurse 1997 and Eggert 1981, written by a linguist and an archaeologist, respectively, offer alternative perspectives on the development of scholarship on the spread of Bantu languages, their speakers, and their material cultures. Eggert 1981 captures the unease of the 1980s, as the first critiques were leveled at interdisciplinary Bantu Expansion research. Nurse 1997 reflects an emerging consensus on the value of regional historical studies and the difficultly of reconstructing a universal Bantu Expansion narrative. Doke 1945 and Doke and Cole 1961 are overviews from earlier points in time in the development of this field of scholarship. While a useful overview of research to date, Doke and Cole 1961 is also a representation of the state of the field as African history was emerging as a legitimate field of academic scholarship.
  6.  
  7. Doke, Clement M. Bantu: Modern Grammatical, Phonetical, and Lexisographical Studies since 1860. London: International African Institute, 1945.
  8.  
  9. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  10.  
  11. This is a short but broad overview of 80 years of Bantu linguistics research by a leading Bantuist of the early to mid-20th century.
  12.  
  13. Find this resource:
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  15.  
  16. Doke, Clement M., and D. T. Cole. Contributions to the History of Bantu Linguistics. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1961.
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  19.  
  20. This snapshot of Bantu linguistic research at mid-century includes valuable information on very early grammars and wordlists as well as classic examples of how the historical implications of Bantu linguistics were transformed into narratives about the history of early Bantu speakers and their migration into the southern half of the continent.
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  24.  
  25. Dubow, Saul. Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
  26.  
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  28.  
  29. Though Dubow is concerned primarily with South African history, he traces how 19th century ideas about race, culture, and language shaped scholarship on the histories of Bantu languages and their associated populations and material cultures long after the racial paradigm was rejected; much of this scholarship connects to the Bantu Expansion. See especially chapter 3.
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  33.  
  34. Eggert, Manfred K. H. “Historical Linguistics and Prehistoric Archaeology: Trend and Pattern in Early Iron Age Research of Sub-Saharan Africa.” Beiträge zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Archäologie 3 (1981): 277–324.
  35.  
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  37.  
  38. Written after the Bantu Expansion conference of 1977 in Viviers, France, Eggert reviews and critiques the methods by which linguistic and archaeological research on the Bantu Expansion are connected.
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  40. Find this resource:
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  42.  
  43. Klieman, Kairn. “The Pygmies Were Our Compass”: Bantu and Batwa in West Central Africa, Early Times to c. 1900 C.E. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.
  44.  
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  46.  
  47. This selection from Klieman’s book on early the early history of Bantu speaking communities in West Central Africa provides a very concise overview of the scholarship on the history of the Bantu languages and the related problem of the Bantu Expansion. See pp. 20–26.
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  51.  
  52. Nurse, Derek. “The Contributions of Linguistics to the Study of History in Africa.” Journal of African History 38 (1997): 359–391.
  53.  
  54. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853797007044Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  55.  
  56. Nurse provides a clear overview of the comparative historical linguistic method, including matters of debate in Bantu Expansion scholarship as they relate to debates about Bantu language classifications. This article is also helpful for understanding how and why historians use language evidence to write regional precolonial histories.
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  59.  
  60.  
  61. Schoenbrun, David Lee. “Representing the Bantu Expansions: What’s at Stake?” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34.1 (2001): 1–4.
  62.  
  63. DOI: 10.2307/3097284Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  64.  
  65. Among many problems of representation, Schoenbrun asks how historians can write about the histories of speakers of ancestral forms of Bantu languages (forms that are, arguably, academic heuristics) without falling into the trap developed by the 19th century thinkers, who invented the comparative historical linguistic method and equated language, race, and culture.
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  67. Find this resource:
  68.  
  69.  
  70. Vansina, Jan. “Bantu in the Crystal Ball.” History in Africa 6 (1979): 287–333.
  71.  
  72. DOI: 10.2307/3171750Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  73.  
  74. This two-part article details a history of studies of the Bantu Expansion from the 19th century through the late 20th century (1970s) across several disciplines (the first part focuses on linguistics while the second draws in archaeology). This piece is valuable for its survey of research in European languages. Article continues in History in Africa 7 (1980): 293–325.
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  78.  
  79. Reference Works
  80. There are no encyclopedias or other references works about the Bantu Expansion specifically; however, there are many works that include reference to it. Appiah and Gates 2010 provides a short entry and useful bibliography. Middleton and Miller 2008 and Page and Hunt 2005 can be more difficult to use because the organization of these encyclopedias by region and time period does not fit with the geographical and temporal scale of the Bantu Expansion. There are multiple relevant entries in Vogel 1997, because Bantu language history and the Bantu Expansion are treated separately. McEvedy 1996 offers a cartographical representation of the expansion. De Maret 2013 is a useful recent introduction to the topic in an archaeological reference work.
  81.  
  82. Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. Encyclopedia of Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
  83.  
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  85.  
  86. Available in both an online and paper version, this resource includes a short bibliography.
  87.  
  88. Find this resource:
  89.  
  90.  
  91. de Maret, Pierre. “Archaeologies of the Bantu Expansion.” In The Oxford Handbook to African Archaeology. Edited by Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane, 627–643. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  92.  
  93. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199569885.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  94.  
  95. An introduction to the Bantu Expansion by a noted archaeologist of central Africa. De Maret briefly summarizes the scholarship and debates and uses archaeological evidence from central Africa and the Great Lakes region to identify points of agreement and disagreement with data from linguistics.
  96.  
  97. Find this resource:
  98.  
  99.  
  100. McEvedy, Colin. The Penguin Atlas of African History. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 1996.
  101.  
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  103.  
  104. This atlas uses a series of maps to trace the divergence and spread of the Bantu language family.
  105.  
  106. Find this resource:
  107.  
  108.  
  109. Middleton, John, and Joseph C. Miller, eds. New Encyclopedia of Africa. Detroit: Thomson and Gale, 2008.
  110.  
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  112.  
  113. An overview of the Bantu Expansion organized by region (eastern, southern, and western) from 1000 BCE to 1500 CE. Central Africa is covered, though not considered as a “region” in this treatment.
  114.  
  115. Find this resource:
  116.  
  117.  
  118. Page, Willie, and R. Hunt Davis, eds. Encyclopedia of African History and Culture. 3 vols. New York: Facts on File, 2005.
  119.  
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  121.  
  122. A readable account of the Bantu “migration.” The organization of the encyclopedia into periods that break at 500 CE and 1500 CE complicate the narrative of a process that spans these breaks.
  123.  
  124. Find this resource:
  125.  
  126.  
  127. Vogel, Joseph O., ed. Encyclopedia of Precolonial Africa: Archaeology, History, Languages, Cultures, and Environments. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1997.
  128.  
  129. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  130.  
  131. Includes several entries on the history of African languages, including Bantu languages in general and in specific regions of Africa by noted scholars of Bantu historical linguistics, including Christopher Ehret and Derek Nurse. The entry on the Bantu Expansion is written by an archaeologist.
  132.  
  133. Find this resource:
  134.  
  135.  
  136. Textbooks
  137. There are no textbooks on the topic of the Bantu Expansion. However, as a central research problem in precolonial African demographic and language history, many undergraduate textbooks in history and archaeology include a partial or entire chapter on the Bantu Expansions. Curtin, et al. 1994 is a representative, if dated, selection from a history textbook. Similarly, Ehret 2002 provides a very brief discussion of the Bantu Expansion aimed at an undergraduate audience, though the value of the text lies in its application of linguistic evidence, usually used to explore the Bantu Expansion, to elucidate the history of the continent more generally. Collins 1993, also an historian, approaches the Bantu Expansion as a matter of debate, providing a short commentary and excerpts from texts that were central to Bantu Expansion research in the mid-to-late 20th century. Connah 2004 and Eggert 2005 provide archaeologists’ perspectives on the Bantu Expansion and related problems in archaeology. Connah 2004 is shorter and aimed at an undergraduate audience seeking an introduction to the problem, while Eggert 2005 is more appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, because he explores the historical development of the scholarship and its implications for archaeological research in Bantu-speaking regions of Africa. There are few general textbooks on historical linguistics that use the Bantu Expansion as a case study. Two recent books stand out as exceptions and are useful introductions to the linguistic methodologies applied to scholarship on the Bantu Expansion. Dimmendaal 2011, written by a linguist, elaborates more on the different aspects of the comparative linguistic method, while Ehret 2011, written by an historian, explains the value of language evidence to the historian. Each draws on the historical development of Bantu languages to explain what linguistic evidence tells us about the history of languages and their speakers.
  138.  
  139. Collins, Robert O. Problems in African History: The Precolonial Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1993.
  140.  
  141. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  142.  
  143. This textbook contains an introduction to the Bantu Expansion as an historical event, though it suggests a greater degree of resolution than a specialist would concede. Excerpts from classic texts by key participants in the Bantu Expansion debate, including Johnston, Guthrie, and Greenberg, follow the introduction. The chapter concludes with a small bibliography. See especially chapter 2.
  144.  
  145. Find this resource:
  146.  
  147.  
  148. Connah, Graham. Forgotten Africa: An Introduction to its Archaeology. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
  149.  
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  151.  
  152. In this undergraduate textbook, chapter 22 explains the relationship between the Bantu Expansion and the means by which archaeologists have studied the spread of farming south of the equator by tracing the spread of pottery traditions associated with Bantu speakers.
  153.  
  154. Find this resource:
  155.  
  156.  
  157. Curtin, Philip, Stephen Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina. African History: From Earliest Times to Independence. 2d ed. London and New York: Longman, 1994.
  158.  
  159. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  160.  
  161. This somewhat dated introduction explains in simple terms the assumptions and methods used by linguists to trace where and when Bantu languages diverged and spread. Integrates the slow migration of Bantu speakers and adoption of Bantu languages by non-Bantu speakers with the histories of agriculture, metallurgy, and cross-linguistic interaction. Several maps. See especially chapter 1, pp. 15–20, 24–26.
  162.  
  163. Find this resource:
  164.  
  165.  
  166. Dimmendaal, Gerrit. Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011.
  167.  
  168. DOI: 10.1075/z.161Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  169.  
  170. A technical but readable explanation of how linguists trace the spread of language families, connect those phenomena to population movements, and use the words-and-things method to reconstruct the economies, social organization, environments, etc. of the speakers of ancestral languages within the language family. Lays out major debates within Bantuist scholarship. See especially chapter 15, pp. 337–340.
  171.  
  172. Find this resource:
  173.  
  174.  
  175. Eggert, Manfred K. H. “The Bantu Problem and African Archaeology.” In African Archaeology: a Critical Introduction. Edited by Ann Stahl, 301–326. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
  176.  
  177. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  178.  
  179. Eggert reviews the linguistic and archaeological study of the Bantu Expansion, critically describing major turning points and subjects of debate. The chapter ends with Eggert’s argument that both linguistic and archaeological studies require more evidence for regional context before the larger problem of the Bantu Expansion can be understood.
  180.  
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  182.  
  183.  
  184. Ehret, Christopher. Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.
  185.  
  186. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  187.  
  188. An introductory undergraduate textbook with a very concise explanation of the Bantu Expansion. Other sections deal with aspects of language change and spread that are part of the history of Bantu languages and their speakers, but without explicitly presenting those histories as a description of the Bantu Expansion.
  189.  
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  191.  
  192.  
  193. Ehret, Christopher. History and the Testimony of Language. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
  194.  
  195. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  196.  
  197. A founder of the linguistic approach to precolonial history, Ehret explains both the historical linguistic method and why reconstructed words are useful forms of historical evidence. Some case studies from eastern Bantu branches. More useful for graduate students.
  198.  
  199. Find this resource:
  200.  
  201.  
  202. Journals
  203. The range of journals publishing material related to the Bantu Expansion is quite diverse as a result of the interdisciplinary nature of the research. The Journal of African History has published an ongoing series of articles on the Bantu Expansion since its inception in the 1960, though other African History journals, such as the International Journal of African Historical Studies and History in Africa, have also published articles on the Bantu Expansion specifically or articles with content that contributes to the debates tangentially. While other linguistics journals occasionally publish articles on the history of Bantu languages or Bantu classifications, three journals have been particularly important venues for publishing on this topic: Africana Linguistica, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, and Afrika und Übersee. The first developed alongside Bantu linguistics at the linguistics research department of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. The latter two follow in the German tradition of culture history, publishing interdisciplinary work that links linguistics, archaeology, and history. While many archaeologists’ contributions to the Bantu Expansion were published in the Journal of African History, Azania published some articles on the topic as it relates to eastern and, occasionally, southern Africa. As research on the Bantu Expansion has largely fallen out of fashion in archaeology, there are fewer articles in other mainstream journals of African archaeology.
  204.  
  205. Africana Linguistica. 1962–1994, 2006–.
  206.  
  207. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  208.  
  209. Originally developed to publish work produced in the African Linguistics Department of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, a renowned center of research on Bantu languages, this journal slowly opened to research by other scholars. Publishes general African linguistic research, but includes some historical linguistic research on Bantu.
  210.  
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  213.  
  214. Afrika und Übersee. 1951/1952–.
  215.  
  216. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  217.  
  218. Founded by Carl Meinhof, this journal is focused on language documentation and culture history with occasional articles related to the Bantu Expansion debates. Preceded by Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen (1910–1918/1919) and Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen (1919/1920–1949/1950).
  219.  
  220. Find this resource:
  221.  
  222.  
  223. Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa. 2009–.
  224.  
  225. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  226.  
  227. A publication of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the journal has published articles related to Bantu language and material cultural history. Before 2009, such articles focused on eastern and, sometimes, southern Africa. Formerly Azania: The Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa (1966–2009).
  228.  
  229. Find this resource:
  230.  
  231.  
  232. History in Africa. 1974–.
  233.  
  234. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  235.  
  236. A continent-wide journal on historical method, but with an interdisciplinary approach. Some articles of note on the Bantu Expansion and methodologies applied to its study have been published in this journal.
  237.  
  238. Find this resource:
  239.  
  240.  
  241. International Journal of African Historical Studies. 1972–.
  242.  
  243. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  244.  
  245. A continent-wide interdisciplinary journal with fewer articles on the Bantu Expansion than other journals. However, an important forum on the topic was published in 2001, and other articles have contextualized their findings in terms of the Bantu Expansion debates. Continues African Historical Studies (1968–1971).
  246.  
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  248.  
  249.  
  250. Journal of African History. 1960–.
  251.  
  252. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  253.  
  254. A continent-wide and interdisciplinary journal founded in 1960 by John Fage and Roland Oliver, who had a keen interest in the Bantu Expansion. This journal has carried numerous influential articles written by scholars using historical, linguistic, biological, and archaeological evidence to explore the Bantu Expansions.
  255.  
  256. Find this resource:
  257.  
  258.  
  259. Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika. 1979–.
  260.  
  261. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  262.  
  263. This journal has become increasingly irregular in production, but carries articles on topics related to the Bantu language and culture history. It also occasionally publishes relevant monograph-length pieces in its supplements series.
  264.  
  265. Find this resource:
  266.  
  267.  
  268. Early Bantu Studies and the Question of Origins
  269. Though Bleek 1862 is credited with founding comparative Bantu studies and assigning the name “Bantu” to this group of closely related languages, other travelers to Africa had long recognized the similarity of the languages spoken across the southern half of the continent. Indeed, this was a phenomenon of great interest to missionaries who were often producing the first grammars and lexicons of these languages. As missionaries and others sought to explain how and why such similar languages were spoken across such a wide territory, they often drew on the ideas they knew best. For 19th-century thinkers, the Bantu problem became a quest for the origins of the languages and/or their speakers. The Bible was, not surprisingly, a very influential source for ideas and models for early scholars of the Bantu Expansion, as illustrated in the conflicting geographical origins of Bantu languages and speakers posited in Appleyard 1850, Holden 1963, and Torrend 1891. Inspired by new 19th-century ideas about evolution, Kolbe 1888 offers an alternative explanation for the multiplication of Bantu languages from a supposedly less evolved language. The emergence of comparative philology and the reconstruction of the language and population histories of Europe were also influential ideas for 19th-century scholars of the Bantu Expansion, as is clear in Johnston 1886. In each case, the familiar ideas that shaped explanations of the Bantu Expansion were steeped in the racist ideologies of the day, as Dubow 1995 demonstrates (cited under General Overviews; see also Era of Colonialism and Hamitic Hypothesis). Doke 1940 and Doke 1945 (cited under General Overviews) provide a useful overview of many more of the publications on Bantu languages produced in the 19th century.
  270.  
  271. Appleyard, John W. The Kaffir Language: Comprising a Sketch of Its History; Which Includes a General Classification of South African Dialects, Ethnographical and Geographical: Remarks Upon Its Nature: and a Grammar. King William’s Town, South Africa: Wesleyan Missionary Society, 1850.
  272.  
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  274.  
  275. Appleyard, a missionary influenced by the Bible, argued that the origin of the speakers of the original Bantu language was “Ismailite” and, therefore, related to Arabian tribes.
  276.  
  277. Find this resource:
  278.  
  279.  
  280. Bleek, Wilhelm. A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages. 2 vols. London and Cape Town: Trübner, 1862.
  281.  
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  283.  
  284. Bleek is considered the founder of comparative Bantu studies and, indeed, coined the term “Bantu” to refer to the group of similar languages. In addition to tracing some of the similarities in grammar among Bantu languages, Bleek also explored the relationship between Bantu and what we now call Niger-Congo languages.
  285.  
  286. Find this resource:
  287.  
  288.  
  289. Doke, Clement. “Bantu Language Pioneers of the Nineteenth-Century.” Bantu Studies 14.1 (1940): 207–246.
  290.  
  291. DOI: 10.1080/02561751.1940.9676115Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  292.  
  293. This is a broad overview of the Bantu linguistics of the 19th century by a leading Bantuist of the 20th century.
  294.  
  295. Find this resource:
  296.  
  297.  
  298. Holden, William C. The Past and the Future of the Kaffir Races. Cape Town: C. Struik, 1963.
  299.  
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  301.  
  302. Originally published in 1866, Holden, a missionary, believed the ancestors of Bantu speakers migrated from the “cradle of mankind” near the Tigris and Euphrates.
  303.  
  304. Find this resource:
  305.  
  306.  
  307. Johnston, Harry H. The Kilima-Njaro Expedition: A Record of Scientific Exploration in Eastern Equatorial Africa. London: Kegan Paul and Trench, 1886.
  308.  
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  310.  
  311. Johnston is credited with being the first to suggest that the Bantu languages derived from a common ancestral language and that their diffusion was the result of a large-scale migration. He would develop several revisions to his Bantu Expansion narrative, with a fairly complete narrative in place by 1919 (see Johnston 1919, cited under Dictionaries and Databases of Reconstructed Vocabulary).
  312.  
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  314.  
  315.  
  316. Kolbe, F. W. A Language Study based on Bantu: Or, an Inquiry into the Laws of Root Formation, the Original Plural, the Sexual Dual, and the Principles of Word-Comparison. London: Trübner, 1888.
  317.  
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  319.  
  320. Kolbe may have been the earliest scholar to apply the concept of evolution to the development of the Bantu languages. He claimed that Herero was the most archaic language and then ranked all other languages in comparison to Herero and each other to put them in order of evolutionary development.
  321.  
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  323.  
  324.  
  325. Torrend, Jules. A Comparative Grammar of the South-African Bantu Languages. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891.
  326.  
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  328.  
  329. A typical 19th-century comparative grammar. Influenced by the Bible and the writings of early Arabic scholar al-Mascudi, Torrend argues that Bantu speakers were the sons of Kush, a son of Ham. Torrend offers a two-phase model for the expansion of Bantu Speakers into and through Africa.
  330.  
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  333.  
  334. The Era of Colonialism
  335. As most of the continent came under formal colonial rule by Europeans powers, many of the 19th century ideas shaping the study of the Bantu Expansion persisted in new forms. While origins and migration remained key concepts, the location of the Bantu homeland and the role of non-Africans and non-Bantu in the Bantu Expansion were debated in new ways. For most scholarly works, the origins of Bantu speakers and the Bantu languages remained outside the continent, whether Homburger 1949 on Egypt, Van Oordt 1907 on Sumer, or references to Biblical populations of the Middle East, including the sons of Ham (see Hamitic Hypothesis), as argued in Theal 1910 (cited under Hamitic Hypothesis), Meinhof 1915, Seligman 1930 (cited under Hamitic Hypothesis), and Meinhof 1938. Yet, some works, like Van Warmelo 1930 and Johnston 1919 (cited under Dictionaries and Databases of Reconstructed Vocabulary), posit sub-Saharan origins for the Bantu languages and an expansion that took place only on the continent. Meinhof 1915 and Meinhof 1938 take intermediate positions, suggesting that Bantu languages were mixed languages, influenced by “non-black” languages like Fulbe. This allowed the author to account for the complex history of the development of Bantu languages without attributing this complexity to dark-skinned Africans, an example of the way racism shaped early studies of the Bantu Expansion. As demonstrated in Johnston 1919, scholars at the time believed that superiority (and the capacity to colonize) was a matter of birth that adhered to particular races. Significantly, these and later debates rested on a new professionalization of the study of Bantu languages and the cultures and histories of their speakers. Thus, scholars like Meinhof and Johnston increasingly sought to understand the relationships amongst Bantu languages, and between them and related but non-Bantu languages spoken in West Africa, and to link those conclusions to explanations about the how and why of the Bantu Expansion (see also Linguistic Approaches). While the impetus to study the relationship between Bantu and other West African languages of the Niger-Congo phylum was sound, the interpretation of the evidence through the lens of racism skewed the resulting explanations.
  336.  
  337. Homburger, Lilias. The Negro-African Languages. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1949.
  338.  
  339. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  340.  
  341. Homburger argues that all African languages descended from ancient Egyptian including Bantu. She claims Bantu peoples were “mixed” and moved in a swift migration south to the Great Lakes area, from which point they spread across the southern half of the continent in waves.
  342.  
  343. Find this resource:
  344.  
  345.  
  346. Johnston, Harry H. A Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages of Africa. Oxford: Clarendon, 1919.
  347.  
  348. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  349.  
  350. An early advocate of a shared origin of Bantu languages in one ancestral language, Ur-Bantu, Johnston posited that overpopulation, superior technology, and military invasion explained the multiple, successful waves of migration of Bantu speakers from a homeland in the northwestern region of the Bantu zone.
  351.  
  352. Find this resource:
  353.  
  354.  
  355. Meinhof, Carl. An Introduction to the Study of African Languages. Translated by Alice Werner. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1915.
  356.  
  357. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  358.  
  359. A translation of Die Moderne Sprachforschung in Afrika, originally published in 1910. Meinhof used evolutionary theories to account for language similarities, proposing Bantu as a “mixed language” and Fulbe as a “missing link” connecting Bantu to non-African Hamitic and African “Sudanic” languages. Meinhof’s early ideas were an important in establishing the Hamitic Hypothesis.
  360.  
  361. Find this resource:
  362.  
  363.  
  364. Meinhof, Carl. “Die Entstehung der Bantu Sprachen.” Zeifschrift für Ethnologie 70.3–5 (1938): 144–152.
  365.  
  366. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367.  
  368. A major revision of Meinhof’s previous ideas about Bantu origins, he now argues that race and language are linked. Bantu languages were brought to the continent from the Caucasus. Thus, a “master race” brought Bantu languages to Africa, and they spread through conquest by an expanding hypothetical Bantu state.
  369.  
  370. Find this resource:
  371.  
  372.  
  373. Van Oordt, J. F. Origin of the Bantu. Cape Town: Cape of Good Hope Government, 1907.
  374.  
  375. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  376.  
  377. Under commission by the government of Cape Colony, Van Oordt argued for the Sumerian origins for the speakers of the common ancestral Bantu language because both Sumerian and Bantu languages used prefixes. He links Sumerian, Bantu, Dravidian, and other language groups. This was a fairly influential hypothesis at the time.
  378.  
  379. Find this resource:
  380.  
  381.  
  382. Van Warmelo, N. J. “Early Bantu Ethnography from a Philological Point of View.” Africa 3.1 (1930): 31–48.
  383.  
  384. DOI: 10.2307/1155122Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  385.  
  386. Van Warmelo’s contributed to debates about the origins and subsequent expansion of Bantu languages by insisting that Bantu languages were indigenous to Africa. By reconstructing cultural vocabulary that might indicate the environment in which proto-Bantu was spoken, Van Warmelo suggested a homeland in the Great Lakes Region.
  387.  
  388. Find this resource:
  389.  
  390.  
  391. The Hamitic Hypothesis
  392. The Hamitic Hypothesis draws on the Table of Nations, a Hebrew allegory in which the sons of Noah populate different parts of the earth; Africans were originally designated as the cursed sons of Ham, “Hamites.” In the 19th century, new ideas about race led many scholars to conclude that Africans were not capable of the many architectural, political, and artistic achievements discovered in Africa. If the Hamites were considered to be black before the 19th century, they were imagined to be lighter skinned Eurasians by the end of the 19th century. The Hamitic Hypothesis suggested that mobile Hamitic pastoralists migrated to Africa in the distant past; it is to this immigrant population that scholars supporting the Hamitic Hypothesis attributed the great feats of civilization they could not imagine Africans had independently produced. In the hierarchical modes of ranking common to 19th-century science, the noun class systems of Bantu languages were considered by some to be too complex for Africans to invent. The Hamitic Hypothesis provided linguists with an explanation for the complexity that is accurately documented in works like Meinhof 1938 (cited under Era of Colonialism) that could also fit the racist thinking of the times. The broad expansion of Bantu languages was likewise understood to be beyond the capabilities of Africans. Theal 1910, written by the first historian to consider the Bantu Expansion, uses the Hamitic Hypothesis as an a priori explanation. Seligman 1930 popularizes the conflation of race, language, and culture inherent to the Hamitic Hypothesis and lays out what was accepted at the time as anthropological evidence of a half-Hamitic group, the “Nilotes,” another conflation of race, language, and culture. The Hamitic Hypothesis as it relates to African History and the Bantu Expansion was clearly a creation of 19th-century racist thinking. Research into language or cultural differences was interpreted within a racist framework, leading to faulty conclusions even when the evidence itself was valid (for example, there is a genetically valid Nilotic branch of Nilo-Saharan language phylum). As early as the 1960s, scholars were rejecting the historical validity of the Hamitic Hypothesis; Sanders 1969 is an early study of the role of the Hamitic Hypothesis in colonial ideology and colonial science. Though it has been entirely discredited in academic circles, this form of racist thinking remains distressingly common. While the rise of genetic research has demonstrated the social rather than biological basis of “races,” the continued conflation of language, genetic heritage, culture, and race keeps ideas like the Hamitic Hypothesis alive in popular thought. Khan 2011 exemplifies the kind of thinking that uses the seemingly irrefutable methods of genetics (but his sample size is one individual who has presumably told Kahn that he self-identifies as “three quarters Rwanda Tutsi and one quarter Rwandan Hutu”) to sustain the racist thinking underpinning the Hamitic Hypothesis.
  393.  
  394. Khan, Razib. “Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu.” In Discover. August 29, 2011.
  395.  
  396. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  397.  
  398. In an example of circular reasoning, Khan selects samples for genetic testing to prove the difference between Hutu and Tutsis on the basis of preconceived, socially constructed ideas about population distinctions, distinctions rooted in the discredited Hamitic Hypothesis’s separation of black “Bantu” and Eurasian “Hamites” (see also Biological Approaches).
  399.  
  400. Find this resource:
  401.  
  402.  
  403. Sanders, Edith. “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective.” Journal of African History 10.4 (1969): 521–532.
  404.  
  405. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700009683Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  406.  
  407. Explores the racial underpinnings of the population category “Hamite” and how the Hamitic Hypothesis was used in African Studies to attribute achievements discovered on the continent to non-Africans. Demonstrates how research on culture and language bolstered the seeming validity of this now discredited population category.
  408.  
  409. Find this resource:
  410.  
  411.  
  412. Seligman, Charles. Races of Africa. London: Thornton Butterworth (Home University Library), 1930.
  413.  
  414. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  415.  
  416. An influential introduction to African societies at the time, Seligman conflates language, culture, and race in a way that is reminiscent of Bleek and typical of the early to mid-20th century. The author largely followed Meinhof and Johnston’s versions of the Bantu Expansion and was a proponent of the Hamitic Hypothesis.
  417.  
  418. Find this resource:
  419.  
  420.  
  421. Theal, George M. The Yellow and Dark Skinned People of South Africa, South of the Zambezi. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1910.
  422.  
  423. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  424.  
  425. The first historian’s narrative of the Bantu Expansion, Theal’s conclusions closely follow Torrend’s immigration to northeastern Africa, from whence Bantu speakers spread southward along the east coast and eventually westward as well. A combination of population increase, military conquest, and innate intelligence serve as catalysts in Theal’s story.
  426.  
  427. Find this resource:
  428.  
  429.  
  430. Linguistic Approaches
  431. As a phenomenon defined primarily in linguistic terms, interpretations of the Bantu Expansion have long relied on the information generated by linguists about relationships between languages (among Bantu languages as well as between Bantu and non-Bantu languages) and about the history of speakers of ancestral, or proto-, Bantu languages. The former kind of evidence, information about relationships between languages, often comes in the form of language classifications, or “family trees.” The latter information comes from words that can be reconstructed to particular proto-languages, that is, to particular periods of Bantu language family history. This section addresses the historical development and debates within scholarship on Bantu classifications and reconstructions of Bantu vocabulary.
  432.  
  433. Early Comparative Studies and Classifications
  434. Though Johnston 1886 (cited under Early Bantu Studies and the Question of Origins) recognized that the Bantu languages likely developed from a common ancestor, it was not until 1899 that the data and methodologies were robust enough to attempt to reconstruct a proto-language. Meinhof 1932 (originally published in 1899) was the first to reconstruct an ancestral Bantu language, Ur-Bantu, through an analysis of vocabulary and patterns in the phonology of Bantu languages. Most studies of Bantu languages in the 19th and early 20th centuries were merely comparative (see Early Bantu Studies and the Question of Origins and Era of Colonialism). With the professionalization of African Studies across the academic disciplines, classifications of the Bantu languages were debated in university lecture halls and in print. The most important debate of the immediate post-war years was between Guthrie 1948, which carefully studies relationships between Bantu languages and develops a relational, geographical classification, and Greenberg 1955, which studies the relationship between Bantu and non-Bantu languages and emphasizes genetic relationships. This debate resulted from dramatically different methods for classifying Bantu and resulted in two different locations for Bantu origins, with grave implications for other scholars seeking to trace out the expansion of Bantu languages from that homeland (see Research at Mid-century). The rise of lexicostatistics as a new method for measuring the degree of relatedness between pairs of languages on the basis of shared cognates in basic kinds of words offers a new tool to resolve the Guthrie-Greenberg debate. The year 1973 was a turning point in the classification of Bantu languages, as Henrici 1973, Heine 1973, and Meeussen 1973 offer alternative classifications that largely support Greenberg 1955. Nurse 1994–1995 is a useful comparison of classifications from 1973 to the early 1990s. Flight 1981 explains what was at stake in the Greenberg-Guthrie debate.
  435.  
  436. Flight, Colin, “Trees and Traps: Strategies for the Classification of African Languages and Their Historical Significance.” History in Africa 8 (1981): 43–74.
  437.  
  438. DOI: 10.2307/3171508Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439.  
  440. Flight assesses the value of Greenberg’s classification for historians and explores the contradictory relational classifications that emphasized the mixed origins of languages. He contextualizes debates about genetic tree-structured classifications as products of a time when the idea that Africans (and, therefore, their languages) had a history was “preposterous.”
  441.  
  442. Find this resource:
  443.  
  444.  
  445. Greenberg, Joseph. Studies in African Linguistic Reconstruction. New Haven, CT: Compass, 1955.
  446.  
  447. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  448.  
  449. Republication of articles from Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. Greenberg’s classification of Niger-Congo defined the Bantu family and its relationship to similar West African languages and confirmed a proto-Bantu homeland in the Benue valley, debunking theories asserting non-African origins for Bantu languages. Though widely accepted today, Greenberg’s conclusions only slowly gained recognition.
  450.  
  451. Find this resource:
  452.  
  453.  
  454. Guthrie, Malcolm. The Classification of the Bantu Languages. London: Oxford University Press, 1948.
  455.  
  456. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  457.  
  458. Guthrie proposed a classification of the Bantu languages that was “referential” rather than genetic. It was developed as a practical tool to discern clusters of languages on the basis of geographic proximity and shared typological features. Importantly, Guthrie disagreed with most of the contemporaneous hypotheses proposed by Greenberg.
  459.  
  460. Find this resource:
  461.  
  462.  
  463. Heine, Bernd. “Zur Genetische Gliederung der Bantu-sprachen.” Afrika und Übersee 56 (1973): 164–185.
  464.  
  465. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  466.  
  467. Heine applied lexicostatistics to basic vocabulary from 173 languages and produced a genetic classification with multiple early branches marking dispersals with identifiable directions.
  468.  
  469. Find this resource:
  470.  
  471.  
  472. Henrici, Alex. “Numerical Classification of Bantu Languages.” African Language Studies 14 (1973): 82–104.
  473.  
  474. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475.  
  476. Henrici applied lexicostatistics to twenty-eight of Guthrie’s test languages and concluded that there were no primary coordinate splits of proto-Bantu into an East and West Bantu. Rather, the divergence of the Bantu core involved a succession of splits.
  477.  
  478. Find this resource:
  479.  
  480.  
  481. Meeussen, A. E. “Comparative Bantu: Test Cases for Method.” African Language Studies 14 (1973): 6–18.
  482.  
  483. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  484.  
  485. Meeussen critiqued Guthrie’s classification of Bantu. Meeussen argued that Guthrie treated his geographically defined sub-units of Bantu as genetic units, conflating those language similarities that develop from contact and borrowing when languages are in close geographic proximity (convergence) with those language similarities that exist as features inherited from a shared ancestor.
  486.  
  487. Find this resource:
  488.  
  489.  
  490. Meinhof, Carl. Introduction to the Phonology of the Bantu Languages. Translated by Nicolaas J. Van Warmelo. Berlin: D. Reimer/E. Vohsen, 1932.
  491.  
  492. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  493.  
  494. A translation of Grundriss einer Lautlehre der Bantu Sprachen originally published in 1899. With the slow accumulation of comparative data about Bantu languages, Meinhof was able to reconstruct an ancestral language, Ur-Bantu, on the basis of phonological shifts and to propose some roots reconstructable to Ur-Bantu.
  495.  
  496. Find this resource:
  497.  
  498.  
  499. Nurse, Derek. “Historical Classifications of the Bantu Languages.” Azania 29–30 (1994–1995): 65–89.
  500.  
  501. DOI: 10.1080/00672709409511662Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  502.  
  503. This article is a useful introduction to the different classifications of Bantu languages proposed since the early 1970s. Nurse compares classifications and the assumptions that underlie them. He identifies points of agreement and debate and implications for the Bantu Expansion. Includes helpful maps and diagrams that simplify the classifications compared.
  504.  
  505. Find this resource:
  506.  
  507.  
  508. Sociolinguistics, Lexicostatistics, and the Problem of Convergence
  509. Even as consensus around Greenberg 1955 (cited under Early Comparative Studies and Classifications) seemed to arise out of new lexicostatistical methods of classification, advances in sociolinguist studies of language acquisition, multilingualism, and creole languages challenged the validity of lexicostatistical approaches. Möhlig 1979 advances a new stratification theory that takes findings from sociolinguistics and applies them to the historical development of the Bantu language family in order to account for the skewing affect of borrowing and contact (“convergence” to linguists) on lexicostatistical analysis. Möhlig 1981 goes so far as to reject whether genetic relationships between Bantu languages could ever be recovered. Vansina 1995 likewise seeks to explain the Bantu Expansion and relationships between Bantu languages in terms of the concerns sociolinguists have with contact, borrowing, and multilingualism by insisting on the multiple inputs that contributed to the creation of a new language. Other scholarly works seek ways to engage with the problem of convergence in their efforts to classify Bantu languages. Bastin, et al. 1999, for example, applies a variety of computational models that recognize different kinds of contact to their lexicostatistical study. Many scholars followed the efforts of Möhlig 1979, which attempts to classify Bantu languages using features other than vocabulary and methods other than lexicostatistics. Hombert and Hyman 1999 provides a variety of examples of such efforts. Most attempts focus on one or another feature of language: morphology, phonology, and so forth. The full comparative historical linguistic method, which is explained in Nurse 1997 and requires the rigorous diachronic analysis of multiple features of languages to produce a classification, was recently applied to the entire Bantu family by Nurse and Philippson 2003.
  510.  
  511. Bastin, Yvonne, André Coupez, and Michael Mann. Continuity and Divergence in the Bantu Languages: Perspectives from a Lexicostatistic Study. Tervuren, Belgium: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, 1999.
  512.  
  513. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  514.  
  515. This study applied a series of computer models to a set of 92 core vocabulary terms from 542 languages. In addition to two early northwestern branches, a West/Central and East/Southern split is fairly consistent. Yet, many other languages shift allegiance between subsequent sub-branches, depending on the statistical model applied.
  516.  
  517. Find this resource:
  518.  
  519.  
  520. Hombert, Jean-Marie, and Larry M. Hyman, eds. Bantu Historical Linguistics: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives. Stanford, CA: CSLI, 1999.
  521.  
  522. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  523.  
  524. The first part of this volume in particular offers a variety of efforts (and methods) to classify all or portions of the Bantu language family while paying attention to the skewing affects of contact and borrowing between speakers of Bantu languages.
  525.  
  526. Find this resource:
  527.  
  528.  
  529. Möhlig, Wilhelm. “The Bantu Nucleus: Its Conditional Nature and Its Prehistorical Significance.” Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 1 (1979): 109–141.
  530.  
  531. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  532.  
  533. Möhlig argued that genetic relationships within Bantu were indiscernible because of the long history of convergence. Rather, similarities and differences in Bantu languages demonstrate a history of multiple layers of language contact as languages merged and diverged over time. This article brought language contact back into debates about language spread and change.
  534.  
  535. Find this resource:
  536.  
  537.  
  538. Möhlig, Wilhelm. “Stratification in the History of the Bantu Languages.” Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 3 (1981): 251–316.
  539.  
  540. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  541.  
  542. In this second article on stratification theory, Möhlig took his argument further, rejecting the idea of a single origin or proto-language. Using phonological evidence, Möhlig argued that the many strata of Bantu languages had unknown and unknowable relationships and instead constituted geographical areas with shared phonological traits and innovations.
  543.  
  544. Find this resource:
  545.  
  546.  
  547. Nurse, Derek. “The Contributions of Linguistics to the Study of History in Africa.” Journal of African History 38 (1997): 359–391.
  548.  
  549. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853797007044Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  550.  
  551. This article introduces the comparative historical linguistic method to non-specialists. Nurse explains the problem of classification based on lexicostatistical analysis alone to account for skews relating to contact and borrowing across Bantu languages.
  552.  
  553. Find this resource:
  554.  
  555.  
  556. Nurse, Derek, and Gérard Philippson. “Towards a Historical Classification of the Bantu Languages.” In The Bantu Languages. Edited by Derek Nurse and Gérard Philippson, 164–181. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
  557.  
  558. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559.  
  560. This historical classification tries to balance the impacts of both inheritance and borrowing on language change. It is a rare example of a classification that is not based on lexicostatistics; rather, it assesses the distribution of phonological and morphological features that might be historically diagnostic.
  561.  
  562. Find this resource:
  563.  
  564.  
  565. Vansina, Jan. “New Linguistic Evidence and the ‘Bantu Expansion.’” Journal of African History 36 (1995): 173–195.
  566.  
  567. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700034101Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  568.  
  569. Blending findings from sociolinguistics and data later published in Bastin, et al. 1999, Vansina posited a “wave” model of language change: new languages develop from clusters of regional dialects rather than a single ancestor. The article was influential for arguing that the Bantu Expansion could not result from large-scale human migration because new Bantu languages emerged from local contexts of contact.
  570.  
  571. Find this resource:
  572.  
  573.  
  574. Recent Classifications
  575. After more than a century and a half of study, there is still no consensus around the classification of the Bantu languages. While some matters, such as the placement of Bantu within the Niger-Congo phylum, its homeland in the Benue and Cross Rivers area, or the classification of more recent subgroups, are widely accepted, the number, order, dating, and membership of the earliest branches of Bantu are still a matter of debate. The prevalence of convergence through contact, borrowing, and multilingualism make it very difficult to detect the earliest relationships within the Bantu classification. Many of these issues are explored in Marten 2006, which offers a useful summary and comparison of recent classifications. Some scholarly works, like Bostoen 2008, Bastin, et al. 1999 (cited under Sociolinguistics, Lexicostatistics, and the Problem of Convergence, and Nurse and Philippson 2003, argue that two main branches—East and West Bantu—best characterize the early stages of proto-Bantu divergence. Other works, including Ehret 2001, Holden and Gray 2006, and Rexová, et al. 2006, identify East Bantu not as a primary branch of Bantu but as a later offshoot, often developing out of an intermediate group called “Savanna” and characterized by tremendous internal borrowing and contact and itself an offshoot of West Bantu as opposed to Forest Bantu. Nurse 1994–1995 (cited under Early Comparative Studies and Classifications) compared some earlier iterations of this debate. Klieman 2003 offers a similar classification with a series of early divergences rather than an East/West divide and very early dates for these divergences. More recent studies have incorporated computational methods to apply various statistical analyses to large volumes of data.
  576.  
  577. Bostoen, Koen. “Bantu Spirantization: Morphologization, Lexicalization, and Historical Classification.” Diachronica 25.3 (2008): 299–356.
  578.  
  579. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  580.  
  581. This article uses morphological innovations to classify Bantu and produces results similar to Nurse and Philippson 2003, with distinct east and west branches diverging from proto-Bantu. Bostoen traces patterns in Bantu Spirantization, a process by which some ancestral languages changed with the shift from a seven to five vowel system.
  582.  
  583. Find this resource:
  584.  
  585.  
  586. Ehret, Christopher. “Bantu Expansions: Re-Envisioning a Central Problem in early African History.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34.1 (2001): 5–87.
  587.  
  588. DOI: 10.2307/3097285Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  589.  
  590. Ehret proposes a new method to factor out the skewing influence of convergence in lexicostatistical studies. He supports a classification with a Savanna-Bantu group and a successive series of divergences across central and eastern Africa. He then considers how this classification impacts narratives of the Bantu Expansion.
  591.  
  592. Find this resource:
  593.  
  594.  
  595. Holden, Claire J., and Russell D. Gray. “Rapid Radiation, Borrowing and Dialect Continua in the Bantu Languages.” In Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages. Edited by Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew, 19–31. Cambridge, UK: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006.
  596.  
  597. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  598.  
  599. Using network (rather than tree) analysis to identify relationships among the Bantu languages, Holden and Gray argue that different historical processes underlay divergence in eastern and western Bantu languages. In the west, nearly simultaneous divergence produced many major branches. In the east, early borrowing was an important factor.
  600.  
  601. Find this resource:
  602.  
  603.  
  604. Klieman, Kairn. “The Pygmies Were Our Compass”: Bantu and Batwa in West Central Africa, Early Times to c. 1900 C.E. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.
  605.  
  606. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  607.  
  608. Klieman applies the lexicostatistical methods of Ehret 2001 to the Bantu languages of West Central Africa. She posits very early dates for the initial divergence of proto-Bantu, which she envisions as a series of successive divergences. See pp. 35–65.
  609.  
  610. Find this resource:
  611.  
  612.  
  613. Marten, Lutz. “Bantu Classification, Bantu Trees, and Phylogenetic Methods.” In Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages. Edited by Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew, 43–55. Cambridge, UK: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006.
  614.  
  615. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  616.  
  617. A useful summary of the methods of classification and a comparison of the classic Bantu classifications, like Guthrie 1948 and Greenberg 1955 (both cited under Early Comparative Studies and Classifications), with more recent efforts since the 1990s. Offers a detailed assessment of Holden and Gray 2006.
  618.  
  619. Find this resource:
  620.  
  621.  
  622. Nurse, Derek, and Gérard Philippson. “Towards a Historical Classification of the Bantu Languages.” In The Bantu Languages. Edited by Derek Nurse and Gérard Philippson, 164–181. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
  623.  
  624. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  625.  
  626. This classification is based on the comparative method and identifies early and discrete East and West branches of Bantu. For Nurse and Philippson, similarities that support the “Savanna” branch were actually created through a more recent process of convergence south of the equatorial forest.
  627.  
  628. Find this resource:
  629.  
  630.  
  631. Rexová, Kateřina, Yvonne Bastin, and Daniel Frynta. “Cladistic Analysis of Bantu Languages: a New Tree Based on Combined Lexical and Grammatical Data.” Naturwissenschaften 93 (2006): 189–194.
  632.  
  633. DOI: 10.1007/s00114-006-0088-zSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  634.  
  635. This cladistic analysis of eighty-seven languages supports a new Bantu classification that follows the east out of west model and is used to support a new interpretation of the Bantu Expansion, including a single migration through the rainforest, in contrast to the multiple waves described in Vansina 1995 (cited under Sociolinguistics, Lexicostatistics, and the Problem of Convergence).
  636.  
  637. Find this resource:
  638.  
  639.  
  640. Dictionaries and Databases of Reconstructed Vocabulary
  641. In addition to the historical information embedded in classifications of the Bantu languages, scholars have reconstructed words and their meanings to the ancestral languages (proto-languages) of the Bantu family. This information can tell us something of the lifestyle, economy, politics, and social organization of the speakers of the proto-languages, from proto-Bantu, the ancestral language that gave rise to all Bantu languages that exist today, to the last proto-languages to diverge into extant languages (see also Historiography and Methods of African History). Thus, reconstructed words serve as one kind of primary source for the reconstruction of the expansion of Bantu languages and their speakers. Guthrie 1967–1971, a four-volume compendium, is Malcolm Guthrie’s most famous collection of reconstructed words. Several scholars laid the groundwork for the Guthrie study. Reconstructions by Meinhof were compiled by his students and are most widely available in Bourquin 1953 and Bourquin and Westermann 1969. To a lesser degree, the wordlists in Johnston 1919 likely contributed to Guthrie’s efforts. The most impressive collection of common Bantu roots was begun by Achiel Meeussen in 1969 at the Linguistics research section of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium, and later published posthumously in Meeussen 1980. This collection of common Bantu reconstructed roots provided the foundation for two major revisions by the team of linguists at the RMCA. The most recent version, Bantu Lexical Reconstructions 3, has been published online as a set of over 10,000 roots, though there is a downloadable file that includes the attestations in individual languages.
  642.  
  643. Bantu Lexical Reconstructions 3. Edited by Yvonne Bastin, André Coupez, Evariste Mumba, and Thilo C. Schadeberg. Tervuren, Belgium: Royal Museum for Central Africa, 2002.
  644.  
  645. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  646.  
  647. The corpus of more than ten thousand reconstructed forms of Bantu root words, with notes on distribution, range of meaning, etymology, related words, and proposed reconstructions by previous scholars. Reconstructions are not attributed to specific proto-languages within the Bantu family or to proto-Bantu itself, nor are individual attestations included online. Good bibliography.
  648.  
  649. Find this resource:
  650.  
  651.  
  652. Bourquin, Walther. “Weitere Ur-Bantu Wortstämme.” Africa und Übersee 38.1 (1953): 27–48.
  653.  
  654. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  655.  
  656. This article updates the 1923 Neue Ur-Bantu-Wortstämme and contains over ninety common stems and, importantly, the attestations in individual languages and comparative phonology that sustain the word stems proposed.
  657.  
  658. Find this resource:
  659.  
  660.  
  661. Bourquin, Walther, and Diedrich Westermann. Neue Ur-Bantu-Wortstämme: nebst e. Beitr. zur Erforschung der Bantu-Wurzeln. Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1969.
  662.  
  663. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  664.  
  665. This is a more widely accessible reprint of a similarly titled 1923 publication that collects the lists of Bantu reconstructions developed by Meinhof and his students and colleagues. The contents of the collection have been assessed and incorporated into the BLR3 online database.
  666.  
  667. Find this resource:
  668.  
  669.  
  670. Guthrie, Malcolm. Comparative Bantu: An Introduction to the Comparative Linguistics and Prehistory of the Bantu languages. 4 vols. Farnborough, UK: Gregg International, 1967–1971.
  671.  
  672. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  673.  
  674. Corpus of proposed forms of common Bantu root words, including attestations of the proposed roots in modern languages. Guthrie proposes grouping Bantu into zones of overall similarity, but insists that he is not making historical claims about the historical development of Bantu languages from his zones, groups, and phonological patterns.
  675.  
  676. Find this resource:
  677.  
  678.  
  679. Johnston, Harry H. A Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages. Oxford: Clarendon, 1919.
  680.  
  681. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  682.  
  683. Though not a collection of reconstructions per se, this remains an important assemblage of attestations of specific terms in several hundred Bantu languages. Also includes a useful history of Bantu studies through the first few decades of the 20th century, including debates about the spread of Bantu languages.
  684.  
  685. Find this resource:
  686.  
  687.  
  688. Meeussen, Achiel Emiel. Bantu lexical reconstructions. Archives d’Anthropologie, no. 27. Tervuren, Belgium: Royal Museum for Central Africa, 1980.
  689.  
  690. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  691.  
  692. The foundation for the Bantu Lexical Reconstructions database, this edition is a publication of the original 1969 manuscript held at the Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. It includes proto-Bantu reconstructions describing a broad range of human activity; most of the reconstructions have held up over time. No attestations from extant languages.
  693.  
  694. Find this resource:
  695.  
  696.  
  697. Reconstructions of Regional and Thematic Vocabulary
  698. Scholarship has shifted from focusing on the origins and subsequent spread of the Bantu languages as a whole to regional or thematic approaches to histories of the Bantu languages and their speakers. While historians, represented here by Ehret 1998, Vansina 1990, Vansina 2004, and Schoenbrun 1997, tend to reconstruct words related to multiple themes in order to produce political, social, and economic histories of smaller regions (see also Regional Histories of Speakers of Bantu Languages), linguists tend to focus their efforts by reconstructing the lexicon associated with a particular activity. Klein-Arendt 2004 reconstructs metallurgical vocabulary and Comparative Bantu Pottery Vocabulary reconstructs pottery lexicons across the entire or larger portions of the Bantu group. The linguistic work of Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993 focuses on the Swahili coast, contradicting this pattern. The work of historians, such as Vansina 1990, Vansina 2004, and Ehret 1998, contain reconstructions as “archives” of primary sources that are often appended to end of historical monographs or included in footnotes, with or without the versions (or “attestations”) of these words in extant languages. Schoenbrun 1997 takes a different approach, producing an etymological dictionary that makes available all the individual attestations—the “raw” data from which the reconstructions are proposed. Though these more narrow approaches may seem disconnected from the larger problem of the Bantu Expansion, reconstructed words for material culture like iron objects and pottery have the capacity to link the linguistic and archaeological approaches to the Bantu Expansion (see also Correlating Data from Multiple Disciplines), while regional studies, often produced by historians, illuminate the intermediate scale processes of language and population spread.
  699.  
  700. Comparative Bantu Pottery Vocabulary. Tervuren, Belgium: Royal Museum for Central Africa, 2007.
  701.  
  702. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  703.  
  704. This useful online database of pottery lexicon from across the Bantu languages can be searched by a variety of criteria and browsed by topic or region. Unlike the online version of Bantu Lexical Reconstructions 3, this database includes the attestation of words in specific languages.
  705.  
  706. Find this resource:
  707.  
  708.  
  709. Ehret, Christopher. An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.
  710.  
  711. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  712.  
  713. In a long appendix, Ehret proposes wide-ranging reconstructions for the many ancestral languages within the “Mashariki” (largely eastern Bantu) branch. The large number and broad themes of the reconstructed lexicons and careful attention to borrowing within Bantu languages and with non-Bantu languages is particularly useful. No attestations from extant languages.
  714.  
  715. Find this resource:
  716.  
  717.  
  718. Klein-Arendt, Reinhard. Die traditionellen Eisenhandwerke der Savannen-Bantu: eine sprachhistorische Rekonstruktion auf lexikalischer Grundlage. Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 2004.
  719.  
  720. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  721.  
  722. This dense volume advances a new methodology for deciphering the meanings of words reconstructed to particular proto-languages and applies this methodology to vocabulary for iron-working in the Savanna branch of Bantu.
  723.  
  724. Find this resource:
  725.  
  726.  
  727. Nurse, Derek, and Thomas Hinnebusch. Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Publications in Linguistics, 1993.
  728.  
  729. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  730.  
  731. Addresses the linguistic history of the broader Swahili group and related languages, which together constitute the Sabaki family, with sections on phonology, tense/aspect morphology, internal classification and status within eastern Bantu languages, and an appendix of terms reconstructed to Sabaki and subsequent Swahili dialects and regional clusters.
  732.  
  733. Find this resource:
  734.  
  735.  
  736. Schoenbrun, David Lee. The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu Cultural Vocabulary: Etymologies and Distributions. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1997.
  737.  
  738. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  739.  
  740. Dictionary of words reconstructed to proto-Great Lakes Bantu (and sometimes older branches of Bantu) and subsequent proto-languages within that subgroup. Attestations in modern Great Lakes Bantu languages are included, sourced from both Schoenbrun’s extensive fieldwork and published dictionaries. Detailed etymologies. Some entries are historicized distributions, not reconstructions based on phonology.
  741.  
  742. Find this resource:
  743.  
  744.  
  745. Vansina, Jan. Paths through the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
  746.  
  747. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  748.  
  749. The appendix contains about 150 reconstructions of proto-Western Bantu terms, some attributed to proto-Bantu, and others identified as more recent innovations. Draws heavily from Guthrie’s Comparative Bantu, but re-evaluates distributions, phonological forms, and meanings based on evidence from dictionaries and ethnographies of Bantu-speaking societies of the rainforests. Some attestations in notes.
  750.  
  751. Find this resource:
  752.  
  753.  
  754. Vansina, Jan. How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004.
  755.  
  756. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  757.  
  758. Reconstructions in this volume focus on the Njila or Southwest Bantu branch and are presented in the text and the footnotes. Derivations and etymologies as well as comments about phonology are in the footnotes. Many attestations from extant languages are offered to support proposed reconstructions.
  759.  
  760. Find this resource:
  761.  
  762.  
  763. Research at Mid-century
  764. During the mid-20th century, research on the Bantu Expansion was transformed by the emergence of African History as a professional scholarly field and by new interests among archaeologists. Africanist historians were concerned to reconstruct histories in which Africans created their past, rather than merely reacting to changes assumed to originate from outside the continent. Africanist archaeologists, meanwhile, connected archaeological evidence of the African past to V. Gordon Childe’s influential narratives of diffusion and migration in Eurasia. Research on the Bantu Expansion was essential to both intellectual agendas. Archaeologists systematically compared pottery recovered from sites across eastern and southern Africa, developing typologies to articulate their degree of similarity. Posnansky 1961a, Posnansky 1961b, and Clark 1959 are early attempts to explain similarities in pottery across eastern and southern Africa. They argue that such similarities resulted from Bantu speakers migrating into eastern and southern Africa from the Great Lakes region, bringing this kind of ceramic tradition with them. Guthrie 1962a and Guthrie 1962b explore the historical implications of a new classification of the Bantu languages that included a Bantu homeland south of the equatorial forests, from which Bantu languages spread. Explanations for the Bantu Expansion varied. Wrigley 1960 emphasizes a constellation of prestige, iron-working technology, and later, military might; Clark 1959 emphasizes the militaristic nature of the “second wave” of Bantu migration. Bryant 1963, however, rejects the idea that Bantu languages spread by migration and conquest. Guthrie 1962a, Posnansky 1961a, and Posnansky 1961b see metallurgy as a significant catalyst, though agricultural technology is also significant in Posnansky. Similarly, Murdock 1959 explains the Bantu Expansion in terms of over-population and agricultural innovation. Though many of these scholarly works were presented at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London in the 1960s, they agreed on very little. Indeed, the discrepancies of mid-century research on the Bantu Expansion—disagreements about the regions from which Bantu speakers seemed to spread, catalysts of the expansion, its characteristics as violent or peaceful—serve as the context and inspiration for the next phase of Bantu Expansion scholarship and Roland Oliver’s famous synthesis (see SOAS and the London Paradigm).
  765.  
  766. Bryant, Alfred T. Bantu Origins: The People and Their Language. Cape Town: C. Struik, 1963.
  767.  
  768. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  769.  
  770. Bryant provides a useful summary of previous scholars’ theories of the origins of Bantu languages. He argues that Bantu languages originated in central Africa and only slowly expanded as groups repeatedly broke away from the Bantu cradle, thus accounting for evidence for convergence. Bryant rejects conquest and migration as explanatory devices.
  771.  
  772. Find this resource:
  773.  
  774.  
  775. Clark, J. Desmond. The Prehistory of Southern Africa. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1959.
  776.  
  777. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  778.  
  779. Clark envisaged an early wave of Bantu speaking, iron-working farmers associated with channeled and stamped pottery wares migrating from East Africa, followed by a second wave of Bantu-speaking warriors and agriculturalists associated with the “ruin ware” migrating from the Congo and expelling previous inhabitants. Clark linked expansion to specific areas.
  780.  
  781. Find this resource:
  782.  
  783.  
  784. Guthrie, Malcolm. “Some Developments in the Prehistory of the Bantu Languages.” Journal of African History 3 (1962a): 273–282.
  785.  
  786. DOI: 10.1017/S002185370000311XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  787.  
  788. One of three articles published on the Bantu Expansion in 1962, Guthrie argues here that the homeland of Bantu speakers was in a band across the continent, south of the equatorial rainforest. He also claims that iron-working was both catalyst and engine for the Bantu expansion.
  789.  
  790. Find this resource:
  791.  
  792.  
  793. Guthrie, Malcolm. “Bantu Origins: A Tentative New Hypothesis.” Journal of African Languages 1 (1962b): 9–21.
  794.  
  795. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  796.  
  797. Guthrie suggests a cradle of Bantu speech south of the equatorial rainforest in the general area of Shaba, contradicting Greenberg and Johnston’s arguments for a homeland in the northwestern Bantu domain. Guthrie considers the impact of environment on the expansion and sees the equatorial forest as an obstacle.
  798.  
  799. Find this resource:
  800.  
  801.  
  802. Murdock, George P. Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.
  803.  
  804. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  805.  
  806. Murdock advanced a new reconstruction of the Bantu Expansion using the methods of culture history, but conflated culture and language. A complicated interplay between agricultural experimentation, population explosion, and (later) state systems produced waves of migration from a homeland in Cameroun. Murdock closely followed and popularized Greenberg’s linguistic hypotheses.
  807.  
  808. Find this resource:
  809.  
  810.  
  811. Posnansky, Merrick. “Bantu Genesis.” Uganda Journal 25 (1961a): 86–93.
  812.  
  813. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  814.  
  815. Posnansky links EIA “dimple-based ware,” newly discovered in east and central Africa, to EIA “channeled ware” to the south and suggests their link serves as archaeological evidence for the Bantu expansion, which was likely triggered by the transformative effect of metallurgical and agricultural innovation on population growth and migration.
  816.  
  817. Find this resource:
  818.  
  819.  
  820. Posnansky, Merrick. “Pottery Types from Archaeological Site in East Africa.” Journal of African History 2 (1961b): 177–198.
  821.  
  822. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700002401Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  823.  
  824. In this article, Posnansky makes an association between Bantu speakers and a particular ceramic tradition. He argues that the dimple-based ware (later called Urewe) associated with Early Iron Age sites in the Great Lakes Region is a marker of the spread of Bantu speakers into the region.
  825.  
  826. Find this resource:
  827.  
  828.  
  829. Wrigley, Christopher. “Speculations on the Economic Prehistory of Africa.” Journal of African History 1 (1960): 189–203.
  830.  
  831. DOI: 10.1017/S002185370000178XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  832.  
  833. Wrigley integrated economic and political history, arguing that prestige was the catalyst for the earliest spread of Bantu languages, whose speakers worked iron and were successful hunters, but that iron became increasingly important as a source of weaponry in a second wave of militarized expansion and state building.
  834.  
  835. Find this resource:
  836.  
  837.  
  838. SOAS and the London Paradigm
  839. The School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) played an important role in Bantu Expansion research in the middle of the 20th century by bringing together historians, linguists, and archaeologists for the SOAS African History Seminar series (University of London, United Kingdom) and conferences on precolonial African history and the Bantu Expansion. Dalby 1970 is a collection of some of the papers presented at the seminar during this period. Flight 1988 and Vansina 1979 (cited under General Overviews) detail the history of the debates and agreements that unfolded in the corridors of SOAS. Oliver 1966 was an attempt to synthesize the different positions of archaeologists and linguists on the timing, direction, and causes of the Bantu Expansion. This was probably the most influential piece ever written on the topic, and its confirmation by Posnansky 1968, through a reinterpretation of the archaeological record, and by Hiernaux 1968, through an interpretation of biological evidence, solidified the paradigmatic status of Oliver’s synthesis. Even after decades of critique of the so-called “London Paradigm” developed by Oliver, it remains a standard reference for non-specialists.
  840.  
  841. Dalby, David, ed. Language and History in Africa. London: Frank Cass, 1970.
  842.  
  843. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  844.  
  845. This edited volume is a collection of papers presented at the SOAS African History Seminar between 1967–1969. Many deal directly with the Bantu Expansion, the problem of correlating linguistic and archaeological data, and Oliver’s 1966 synthesis.
  846.  
  847. Find this resource:
  848.  
  849.  
  850. Flight, Colin. “The Bantu Expansion and the SOAS Network.” History in Africa 15 (1988): 261–301.
  851.  
  852. DOI: 10.2307/3171863Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  853.  
  854. Flight traces the influence of the network of scholars connected to the SOAS faculty on Bantu Expansion scholarship from the 1930s through the early 1970s, with an emphasis on the development of Guthrie’s classification and Oliver’s 1966 synthesis.
  855.  
  856. Find this resource:
  857.  
  858.  
  859. Hiernaux, J. “Bantu Expansion: The Evidence from Physical Anthropology.” Journal of African History 9 (1968): 505–515.
  860.  
  861. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700009014Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  862.  
  863. Like Posnansky’s, this was an important article because it tried to use human biological data to validate the synthesis proposed by Oliver in 1966. Hiernaux linked the spread of the “Negro” race to the spread of the Bantu languages. Such phenotypic studies were rejected with the rise of molecular anthropology (see also Biological Approaches).
  864.  
  865. Find this resource:
  866.  
  867.  
  868. Oliver, Roland. “The Problem of the Bantu Expansion.” Journal of African History 7.3 (1966): 361–376.
  869.  
  870. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700006472Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  871.  
  872. Perhaps the most influential piece written on the Bantu Expansion. Oliver sought to synthesize debates within the scholarship by claiming four stages of expansion and a variety of Bantu and non-Bantu participants. Agricultural and metallurgical experimentation facilitated population growth, the catalyst of expansion.
  873.  
  874. Find this resource:
  875.  
  876.  
  877. Posnansky, Merrick. “Bantu Genesis: Archaeological Reflections.” Journal of African History 9 (1968): 1–11.
  878.  
  879. DOI: 10.1017/S002185370000832XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  880.  
  881. Like Hiernaux’s, this was an important article because it tried to use archaeological evidence to validate the synthesis proposed by Oliver in 1966. Posnansky argued that the two Early Iron Age ceramic styles attributed to Bantu speakers (channeled ware and dimple-based ware) derived from an as yet undiscovered source.
  882.  
  883. Find this resource:
  884.  
  885.  
  886. Critiques of and Alternatives to the London Paradigm
  887. The London Paradigm as developed in Oliver 1966 (cited under SOAS and the London Paradigm) inspired two major conferences on the Bantu Expansion in 1968 (Chicago) and 1977 (Viviers, France), but the papers presented at the conferences highlighted the many deficiencies of the Oliver 1966 synthesis, particularly the author’s dependence on Guthrie’s classification and reconstruction of the Bantu Expansion. New methodologies for classifying Bantu languages (see Sociolinguistics, Lexicostatistics, and the Problem of Convergence) produced results that were quite different from Guthrie’s classification. Indeed, these new studies supported Greenberg’s earlier hypothesis of a Bantu homeland in the Benue/Cross River area and inspired historians, who were beginning to produce their own classifications and reconstructed vocabularies, to produce alternatives to the London Paradigm, including Ehret 1972 and Vansina 1984, the latter an elaboration of a hypothesis advanced in 1973. Greenberg 1972 is a highly technical response to the model put forth by Guthrie and Oliver. Similarly, Flight 1980 demonstrates why Guthrie’s analysis was problematic and how even non-specialists could have identified his errors. Though Guthrie’s classification of Bantu and its role in the London Paradigm was rejected by the late 1970s, there were still many matters of debate among linguists about the classification of Bantu and its relationship to closely related west African languages, as demonstrated with Bouquiaux 1980, a three-volume collection of presentations from the 1977 Bantu Expansion conference in Viviers. Huffman 1970, seeks to reconcile the conflicting typologies of all the pottery continuously being added to the archaeological dataset for Bantu-speaking regions. The antiquity of iron working and its role in the Bantu Expansion was another matter of debate among archaeologists and linguists. While Guthrie asserted that proto-Bantu speakers already possessed iron-working technology, Greenberg claimed that it was a more recent innovation. Thus, debates about the antiquity of metallurgy and its distribution across Iron Age sites became a “proxy” text of whether Greenberg or Guthrie was more reliable. De Maret and Nsuka 1977 is illustrative of this debate. Finally, Hiernaux and Gauthier 1977 dramatically critiques Hiernaux 1968 (cited under SOAS and the London Paradigm), which had confirmed the London Paradigm, thereby further questioning its validity.
  888.  
  889. Bouquiaux, Luc, ed. L’Expansion Bantoue. 3 vols. Paris: Société d’Études Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France, 1980.
  890.  
  891. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  892.  
  893. This collection stems from the 1977 conference on Bantu Expansion in Viviers, France. At the conference, there was great debate among linguists about which languages counted as Bantu and the implications of this debate for Bantu Expansion research. Archaeologists and historians also contributed to the conference and subsequent publication.
  894.  
  895. Find this resource:
  896.  
  897.  
  898. de Maret, Pierre, and F. Nsuka. “History of Bantu Metallurgy: Some Linguistics Aspects.” History in Africa 4 (1977): 43–66.
  899.  
  900. DOI: 10.2307/3171579Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  901.  
  902. Guthrie and Greenberg emphatically disagreed on whether the earliest Bantu speakers worked iron. De Maret and Nsuka attempted to resolve this debate, but could not do so easily, probably due to borrowing between languages and the poor preservation of artifacts. They hypothesized that metallurgy was not a proto-Bantu technology.
  903.  
  904. Find this resource:
  905.  
  906.  
  907. Ehret, Christopher. “Bantu Origins and History: Critique and Interpretation.” Transafrican Journal of History 2 (1972): 1–10.
  908.  
  909. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  910.  
  911. Ehret largely confirmed Greenberg’s hypothesis that Bantu languages spread from the Benue Valley to the forest and then outward. He also linked the Early Iron Age material culture to eastern Bantu languages and highlighted the importance of borrowed words for understanding the history of Bantu languages and their speakers.
  912.  
  913. Find this resource:
  914.  
  915.  
  916. Flight, Colin. “Malcolm Guthrie and the Reconstruction of Bantu Prehistory.” History in Africa 7 (1980): 81–118.
  917.  
  918. DOI: 10.2307/3171657Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  919.  
  920. Flight, a non-linguist, compared Guthrie’s scholarship on internal relationships within the Bantu family to Greenberg’s efforts to place Bantu in the wider Niger-Congo phylum. Flight demonstrated the faults in Guthrie’s analysis and the means by which even non-specialists should have been able to critique his work.
  921.  
  922. Find this resource:
  923.  
  924.  
  925. Greenberg, Joseph. “Linguistic Evidence Regarding Bantu Origins.” Journal of African History 13 (1972): 189–216.
  926.  
  927. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700011427Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  928.  
  929. A very technical article, but an important one. Greenberg used linguistic evidence to reject Guthrie’s location of the Bantu homeland and, therefore, his version of the Bantu Expansion. He also critiqued Oliver’s 1966 compromise using linguistic evidence. Greenberg’s criticisms of both works are generally accepted today.
  930.  
  931. Find this resource:
  932.  
  933.  
  934. Hiernaux, J., and A. M. Gauthier. “Comparision des affinities linguistiques et biologiques de douze populationas de langue Bantu.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 66–67 (1977): 241–253.
  935.  
  936. DOI: 10.3406/cea.1977.2452Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  937.  
  938. This study sought to reassess Hiernaux 1968 (cited under SOAS and the London Paradigm). Its conclusions contradict the earlier study and argue for great variability in whether biological and linguistic measurements of difference between populations and speakers align.
  939.  
  940. Find this resource:
  941.  
  942.  
  943. Huffman, Thomas N. “The Early Iron Age and the Spread of the Bantu.” South African Archaeological Bulletin 25 (1970): 3–21.
  944.  
  945. DOI: 10.2307/3888762Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  946.  
  947. Huffman used the concept of a “co-tradition” to reconcile the different typologies of Early Iron Age pottery recovered from eastern and southern Africa into a group with a shared origin. He then linked the diffusion of this tradition to the spread of Bantu speakers across the same region.
  948.  
  949. Find this resource:
  950.  
  951.  
  952. Vansina, Jan. “Western Bantu Expansion.” Journal of African History 25 (1984): 129–145.
  953.  
  954. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700022829Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  955.  
  956. This influential article elaborates on a hypothesis first published in 1971. Contrary to Guthrie’s hypothesis and Oliver’s adoption of it, Vansina argued that Bantu speakers spread into and through the equatorial forest at an early date and that environmental knowledge was likely a key aspect of the lengthy process of expansion.
  957.  
  958. Find this resource:
  959.  
  960.  
  961. Revisions from SOAS
  962. Scholars in the SOAS network engaged with the critiques leveled at the London Paradigm from the late 1960s through the 1970s. Dalby 1975 and Oliver and Fagan 1975 demonstrate efforts to better accommodate the consensus emerging around Greenberg’s Bantu homeland in the northeast. It is not until Oliver and Fagan 1978, however, that Guthrie’s classification and his version of the Bantu Expansion are completely rejected by Oliver.
  963.  
  964. Dalby, David. “The Prehistorical Implications of Guthrie’s Comparative Bantu.” Journal of African History 16 (1975): 481–502.
  965.  
  966. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700014511Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  967.  
  968. As opinions were turning against Guthrie’s referential classification of Bantu, this article was an attempt to synthesize Guthrie’s ideas with new evidence on the significance of northwestern languages in identifying the Bantu cradle. But, Dalby still used Guthrie’s problematic classification and reconstructions to reconstruct the early history of Bantu speakers.
  969.  
  970. Find this resource:
  971.  
  972.  
  973. Oliver, Roland, and Brian Fagan. Africa in the Iron Age: c. 500 BC–1400 AD. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
  974.  
  975. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  976.  
  977. In this historical synthesis, Oliver and Fagan began to develop their own revision of the influential London Paradigm. Significantly, they provided a slight accommodation for new research on the significance of northwestern languages for the location of the homeland of the earliest Bantu speakers while predominantly following Guthrie’s arguments.
  978.  
  979. Find this resource:
  980.  
  981.  
  982. Oliver, Roland, and Brian Fagan. “The Emergence of Bantu Africa.” In The Cambridge History of Africa, II, c. 500 B.C. to A.D. 1050. Edited by John D. Fage, 342–409. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
  983.  
  984. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  985.  
  986. Oliver and Fagan finally broke with Guthrie, following linguists’ arguments for a homeland in the northwest and incorporating new archaeological data. They distinguished between forest and savanna cultures, with horticulture defining the former, and the slow diffusion of iron and cereals and Bantu languages across eastern and southern Africa.
  987.  
  988. Find this resource:
  989.  
  990.  
  991. Archaeological Approaches
  992. In addition to the London Paradigm, archaeological approaches to the Bantu Expansion in the mid-20th century inspired a subfield of archaeology that has remained fairly active, particularly on the continent (see also Research at Mid-century). In trying to connect particular pottery traditions to Bantu speakers, Clark 1959, Posnansky 1961a, and Posnansky 1961b (all cited under Research at Mid-century) applied the methodologies of culture history to the archaeological record of Bantu speaking Africa. Thomas Huffman and David W. Phillipson are probably the best-known producers of “archaeologies of the Bantu Expansion,” to borrow from de Maret 2013 (cited under Reference Works). Phillipson 1976 attempts to interpret eastern, central, and southern African ceramic traditions in light of linguistic classifications of the Bantu languages. As debates about classifications continued to unfold, Phillipson 1977 revises the original interpretations of the archaeological record. While such efforts demonstrate the author’s commitment to reading and understanding those linguistic debates, with implications for the Bantu Expansion with which he was concerned, this kind of circular reasoning was highly criticized beginning in the mid-1970s, when scholars questioned the idea that ceramics could serve as a proxy for migration (see Critiques of Interdisciplinary Research). Phillipson 1985 reflects such changing attitudes about the value and even the possibility of directly connecting the linguistic and archaeological records, though the author persisted in writing about the Bantu Expansion at a time when many archaeologists had turned away from the problem. Thomas Huffman also continued to write about the spread of material culture, human populations, and Bantu languages in southern Africa long after it fell out of fashion among archaeologists. He worked to connect material culture and worldview into “streams” that broadly aligned with the East and West branches of Bantu; Huffman 1989 is a good example of such efforts. Huffman and Herbert 1994–1995 complicates the easy correlation of material cultural streams developed from the archaeological and ethnographic record with the eastern and western branches of the Bantu classification. Eggert 2005 (cited under Textbooks) and de Maret 2013 (cited under Reference Works) provide good overviews of this kind of archaeology in Africa.
  993.  
  994. Huffman, Thomas N. Iron Age Migrations: The Ceramic Sequence in Southern Zambia, Excavations at Gundu and Ndonde. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1989.
  995.  
  996. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  997.  
  998. A careful description of excavations of two Iron Age sites in Zambia is followed by an interpretation of the eastern and western Bantu cultural “streams,” which Huffman detects through material culture, language, settlement pattern, economy, leadership, etc.
  999.  
  1000. Find this resource:
  1001.  
  1002.  
  1003. Huffman, Thomas N., and R. K. Herbert. “New Perspectives on Eastern Bantu.” Azania 29–30 (1994–1995): 27–36.
  1004.  
  1005. DOI: 10.1080/00672709409511659Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1006.  
  1007. Huffman and Herbert compare “cultural profiles” developed from ethnographic and grammatical features of eastern Bantu languages to develop new ethnolinguistic groups, which are then associated with pottery traditions from the archaeological record. This serves as a more recent and more complicated example of correlating linguistic subgroups with ceramic traditions.
  1008.  
  1009. Find this resource:
  1010.  
  1011.  
  1012. Phillipson, David W. “Archaeology and Bantu Linguistics.” World Archaeology 8 (1976): 65–82.
  1013.  
  1014. DOI: 10.1080/00438243.1976.9979653Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1015.  
  1016. Phillipson was an important figure in efforts to link the ceramic typologies of eastern and southern Africa to patterns emerging from linguistic classifications of Bantu and the historical implications of those classifications for the direction of the Bantu Expansion.
  1017.  
  1018. Find this resource:
  1019.  
  1020.  
  1021. Phillipson, David W. “The Spread of the Bantu Languages.” Scientific American 236 (1977): 106–114.
  1022.  
  1023. DOI: 10.1038/scientificamerican0477-106Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1024.  
  1025. In a revised dispersal narrative, Phillipson changes his interpretation of the archaeological evidence from his earlier work to better account for new paradigms arising in linguistics resulting from classification in Heine 1973 (cited under Early Comparative Studies and Classifications).
  1026.  
  1027. Find this resource:
  1028.  
  1029.  
  1030. Phillipson, David W. African Archaeology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
  1031.  
  1032. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1033.  
  1034. Here, explanations of the distribution of ceramics in eastern and southern Africa (the Chifumbaze Complex) does not directly engage linguistics, reflecting the changing attitudes among Africanist archaeologists about the relative value and feasibility of connecting explanations for the distribution of pottery styles to explanations for the distribution of Bantu languages.
  1035.  
  1036. Find this resource:
  1037.  
  1038.  
  1039. Critiques of Interdisciplinary Research
  1040. Even as some efforts at collaboration and correlation persisted into the late 20th century, many scholars rejected such interdisciplinary research. Indeed, there were many debates from the 1970s through the 1990s about what kind of information different disciplines could and should contribute to research on the Bantu Expansion, as summarized by Vansina 1979 (cited under General Overviews) through the 1970s and by de Luna, et al. 2012 through the early 21st century. Lunyiigo 1976, for example, finds that the perplexing debates about classifications of the Bantu languages prove the limited value of language evidence for tracing the Bantu Expansion. Kuper and van Leynseele 1978 offers the perspective of cultural anthropologists, noting that the key question of whether there had ever been a common Bantu culture determines the degree to which cultural anthropologists might contribute to the study of the Bantu Expansion. Some scholarly works began to question the value of the interdisciplinary approach. Written by a linguist, Möhlig 1989 advises against interdisciplinary collaboration, lamenting that it only produced “cloning” of results across disciplines. The value of both interdisciplinary research and the Bantu Expansion as a research problem was a vexing matter for archaeologists in particular, as migration and diffusion became less popular explanatory paradigms in their discipline; rather, studies of local, in situ development became the norm, a shift described in Eggert 2005. As Schmidt 1975, Gramsley 1978, and works by many other archaeologists note, archaeological evidence, especially for the timing and direction of the spread of metallurgical, ceramic, and agricultural technologies (the so-called “Bantu toolkit”), was being made to fit the linguistic narrative. These works called for greater attention to local material cultural sequences; Robertson and Bradley 2000, in particular, emphasizes the significance of ecological context. One outcome of these critiques and the shift of archaeologists’ research away from the monolithic Bantu Expansion was a hiatus of collaborative efforts between historians, linguists, and archaeologists, as de Luna, et al. 2012 describes. See also Correlating Data from Multiple Disciplines.
  1041.  
  1042. de Luna, Kathryn M., Jeffrey B. Fleisher, and Susan Keech McIntosh. “Thinking Across the African Past: Interdisciplinarity and Early History.” African Archaeological Review 29 (2012): 75–94.
  1043.  
  1044. DOI: 10.1007/s10437-012-9123-ySave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1045.  
  1046. A summary of more recent debates about methodologies for correlating archaeological, linguistic, and genetic data to understand the Bantu Expansion and other aspects of early African history, this article links such debates to how different disciplines use ethnography and navigate the narrative scales elucidated by particular kinds of evidence.
  1047.  
  1048. Find this resource:
  1049.  
  1050.  
  1051. Eggert, Manfred K. H. “The Bantu Problem and African Archaeology.” In African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction. Edited by Ann Stahl, 301–326. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
  1052.  
  1053. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1054.  
  1055. Eggert traces the ways in which early archaeological interpretations were made to fit linguistic models. Linguists then used those problematic archaeological interpretations as independent confirmation of their own linguistic models. Proposes interim study of contexts of migration before advancing explanations of the Bantu Expansions.
  1056.  
  1057. Find this resource:
  1058.  
  1059.  
  1060. Gramsley, Richard. “Expansion of Bantu Speakers versus Development of Bantu Language and African Culture In Situ: An Archaeologist’s Perspective.” South African Archaeological Bulletin 33 (1978): 107–112.
  1061.  
  1062. DOI: 10.2307/3888147Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1063.  
  1064. Since the parts of the so-called “Bantu toolkit” (agricultural, ceramic, and metallurgical technologies) did not spread together and cannot be connected to the Bantu languages, Gramsley argues that there never was a migration of Bantu speakers. Rather, technologies and languages developed in situ, a view that remains popular among archaeologists.
  1065.  
  1066. Find this resource:
  1067.  
  1068.  
  1069. Kuper, Adam, and Pierre van Leynseele. “Social Anthropology and the ‘Bantu Expansion.’” Africa 48 (1978): 335–352.
  1070.  
  1071. DOI: 10.2307/1158800Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1072.  
  1073. Kuper and van Leynseele argued that if there had been a common Bantu culture, social anthropologists had a role to play in explaining the Bantu expansions by providing evidence from which archaeologists, linguists, and historians might draw out analogies for the deeper past. If not, further methodological innovation was necessary.
  1074.  
  1075. Find this resource:
  1076.  
  1077.  
  1078. Lunyiigo, Lwanga. “The Bantu Problem Reconsidered.” Current Anthropology 17 (1976): 282–286.
  1079.  
  1080. DOI: 10.1086/201717Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1081.  
  1082. Lunyiigo found disagreements amongst linguists distracting enough to reject any contribution linguistics might make to the study of the Bantu Expansion. Rather, Lunyiigo argued, archaeological and biological evidence were better suited to study cultural diffusions. Lunyiigo uses “Bantu” as a cultural, rather than linguistic, category.
  1083.  
  1084. Find this resource:
  1085.  
  1086.  
  1087. Möhlig, Wilhelm. “Sprachgeschichte, Kulturgeschichte und Archäologie: die Kongruenz der Forschungsergebnisse als methodologisches Problem.” Paideuma 35 (1989): 189–196.
  1088.  
  1089. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1090.  
  1091. Möhlig is concerned with the interdisciplinary “cloning” that characterizes how linguistic and archaeological evidence are brought together to confirm the findings in the other discipline. Möhlig was an early advocate of rejecting collaboration to avoid circular argumentation.
  1092.  
  1093. Find this resource:
  1094.  
  1095.  
  1096. Robertson, John H., and Rebecca Bradley. “A New Paradigm: The African Early Iron Age without Bantu Migrations.” History in Africa 27 (2000): 287–323.
  1097.  
  1098. DOI: 10.2307/3172118Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1099.  
  1100. Strong proponents of the in situ development of language and material cultural change, Roberts and Bradley also argue that narratives of the Bantu Expansion fail to take into account local factors like topography, disease vectors, and other aspects of the environment when they posit paths of migration.
  1101.  
  1102. Find this resource:
  1103.  
  1104.  
  1105. Schmidt, Peter. “A New Look at Interpretations of the Early Iron Age in East Africa.” History in Africa 2 (1975): 127–136.
  1106.  
  1107. DOI: 10.2307/3171469Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1108.  
  1109. Schmidt critiques efforts to determine the direction of migrations on the basis on sparse carbon-14 dates and broad similarities in the decorative style of ceramics. Local material cultural sequences should be studied before attempting to work out migration paths. Further, new crops don’t automatically lead to population increase and migration.
  1110.  
  1111. Find this resource:
  1112.  
  1113.  
  1114. Biological Approaches
  1115. From the 1950s through the 1990s, most biological research in Africa analyzed protein polymorphisms like blood type or the indirect biological evidence available through phenotypic comparison. Hiernaux and Gauthier 1977 is a classic example of the application of this earlier biological approach to the Bantu Expansions. In recent decades, molecular genetics has offered a new kind of evidence for tracing demographic processes in the past, with important implications for the study of the Bantu Expansion. Cavalli-Sforza, et al. 1994 is a groundbreaking book that traces the distribution of 110 traits among populations around the world to recover early migration histories, including an attempt to connect this data to existing scholarship on the Bantu Expansion. However, early efforts by Cavalli-Sforza and others often reified contemporary ethnolinguistic groups with implications for their conclusions, as MacEachern 2000 describes. Pakendorf, et al. 2011, authored by two molecular anthropologists and an historical linguist who has written on the Bantu Expansion, similarly addresses the problem of ethnolinguistic population groupings in the study of African genetic history and provides an accessible critical review of genetic approaches to the Bantu Expansion.
  1116.  
  1117. Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi, Paulo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
  1118.  
  1119. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1120.  
  1121. This influential book offers a new way to use biological evidence from genetic studies as historical evidence of human migration and contact. Importantly, it integrates African demographic history into world history and draws some conclusions about the Bantu Expansion.
  1122.  
  1123. Find this resource:
  1124.  
  1125.  
  1126. Hiernaux, J., and A. M. Gauthier. “Comparision des affinities linguistiques et biologiques de douze populations de langue Bantu.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 66–67 (1977): 241–253.
  1127.  
  1128. DOI: 10.3406/cea.1977.2452Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1129.  
  1130. A classic example of the kind of phenotypic level approach undertaken before the emergence of molecular level approaches common today, this study uses forms of human biological difference often associated with race (skin and hair color) to identify patterns of difference to illuminate the spread of human populations.
  1131.  
  1132. Find this resource:
  1133.  
  1134.  
  1135. MacEachern, Scott. “Genes, Tribes, and African History.” Current Anthropology 41.3 (2000): 357–384.
  1136.  
  1137. DOI: 10.1086/300144Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1138.  
  1139. This article and subsequent comments critique the common practice in earlier genetic research on African populations of allowing contemporary ethnolinguistic groupings to represent primordial population groupings. More specifically, it is a sustained engagement with Cavalli-Sforza, et al. 1994 and their interpretation of African historical demography, including the Bantu Expansion.
  1140.  
  1141. Find this resource:
  1142.  
  1143.  
  1144. Pakendorf, Brigitte, Bostoen, Koen, and Cesare de Filippo. “Molecular Perspectives on the Bantu Expansion.” Language Dynamics and Change 1 (2011): 50–88.
  1145.  
  1146. DOI: 10.1163/221058211X570349Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1147.  
  1148. Low Y-chromosomal and high mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation patterns attest to migrations by ancestors of modern Bantu-speaking populations and favor a scenario in which men migrated, reproduced with local women and, perhaps, practiced polygamy. The authors assess the impact of uneven genetic datasets on scholarship and provide a list of studies up to 2011.
  1149.  
  1150. Find this resource:
  1151.  
  1152.  
  1153. Molecular Genetics and the Bantu Migration Debate
  1154. As is clear from debates among archaeologists, linguists, and historians, the role of human migration in the spread of Bantu languages is still unclear. Often, these debates revolve around the definition of migration: is it a total displacement of another population by a large group of immigrants, or a slow drift of communities as they cut out new agricultural fields? Molecular genetics offers an important new tool for determining whether there were human migrations in the times and places archaeologists and historical linguists have associated with the expansion of Bantu languages and possibly related material cultures and populations. Tishkoff, et al. 2009 is an important recent study that concludes that the Bantu Expansion included human migration and puts that story in the context of wider demographic processes across Africa and the diaspora. In contrast, Sikora, et al. 2011 argues that, according to the genetic evidence, the spread of Bantu languages need not have included human migration, a discrepancy explored in Pakendorf, et al. 2011 (cited under Biological Approaches). Today, research on the genetic history of contemporary Bantu speaking populations often focuses on Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences, which allow scholars to trace the distribution and of maternal and paternal lineages across time and space, thereby differentiating migration patterns by sex. Berniell-Lee, et al. 2009, de Filippo, et al. 2011, and Wood, et al. 2005 analyze Y-chromosomal sequences, narrowing down specific lineages that might be associated with the expansion of Bantu populations. They compare patterns of low diversity in Y-chromosomes across space to determine the speed of migration and its direction, usually as a continuous forward migration of small groups of men (a serial founder effect) or small scale migrations followed by continuous backward and forward migration into ancestral and new populations. While Wood, et al. 2005 compares the Y-chromosome research to published data on African mtDNA, Salas, et al. 2002 focuses solely on mtDNA and concludes that patterns of high diversity could be explained by a scenario in which immigrant men married local women, or a genetically diverse population undertook a larger scale migration or successive waves of migration. Wood, et al. 2005 and Pakendorf, et al. 2011 (cited under Biological Approaches) compare high mtDNA diversity and Y-chromosomal sequences and tend to favor the first scenario.
  1155.  
  1156. Berniell-Lee, Gemma, Francesc Calafell, Elena Bosch, et al. “Genetic and Demographic Implications of the Bantu Expansion: Insights from Human Paternal Lineages.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 26 (2009): 1581–1589.
  1157.  
  1158. DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msp069Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1159.  
  1160. This study of fifty-nine Y-chromosomal markers from 833 individuals in twenty-two Bantu-speaking and three central African hunter-gatherer populations finds low diversity within Bantu groups and greater diversity among hunter-gatherers, suggesting the recent origin of most central African paternal lineages through the migration of Bantu populations, which erased previous Y-chromosomal diversity.
  1161.  
  1162. Find this resource:
  1163.  
  1164.  
  1165. de Filippo, Cesare, Chiara Barbieri, Mark Whitten, et al. “Y-Chromosomal Variation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Insights into the History of Niger-Congo Groups.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 28.3 (2011): 1255–1269.
  1166.  
  1167. DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msq312Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1168.  
  1169. A fine-grained analysis of haplogroup E1b1a, often associated with the Bantu Expansion. De Filippo, et al. demonstrate that patterns, in short tandem repeat haplotypes and in sub-lineages E1b1a7a and E1b1a8, result from a rapid initial migration followed by continuous backward and forward migrations in Bantu-speaking areas, rather than a serial founder effect.
  1170.  
  1171. Find this resource:
  1172.  
  1173.  
  1174. Salas, Antonio, Martin Richards, Tomás De la Fe, et al. “The Making of the African mtDNA Landscape.” American Journal of Human Genetics 71 (2002): 1082–1111.
  1175.  
  1176. DOI: 10.1086/344348Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1177.  
  1178. Salas, et al. conclude that mtDNA variation correlates better with geography than language. Higher mtDNA variation might result from successive waves of migration, a larger-scale migration of a genetically diverse population, or local women reproducing with immigrant men. They connect paths of migration to previous Bantu Expansion scholarship.
  1179.  
  1180. Find this resource:
  1181.  
  1182.  
  1183. Sikora, Martin, Hafid Laayouni, Francesc Calafell, David Comas, and Jaume Bertranpetit. “A Genomic Analysis Identifies a Novel Component in the Genetic Structure of Sub-Saharan African Populations.” European Journal of Human Genetics 19 (2011): 84–88.
  1184.  
  1185. DOI: 10.1038/ejhg.2010.141Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1186.  
  1187. By comparing 2,841 autosomal markers in twelve sub-Saharan populations, Sikora, et al. conclude that slowly changing genes associated with disease immunity suggest that the expansion of Bantu languages in southeastern Africa may have unfolded without significant population movement through the assimilation of autochthones who adopted Bantu languages.
  1188.  
  1189. Find this resource:
  1190.  
  1191.  
  1192. Tishkoff, Sarah A., Floyd A. Reed, Françoise R. Friedlaender, et al. “The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans. Science 324 (2009): 1035–1044.
  1193.  
  1194. DOI: 10.1126/science.1172257Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1195.  
  1196. This macro-scale study analyzes over one thousand highly variable autosomal markers (non-sex chromosomes) in over two thousand samples from 121 African populations (ethno-linguistic identification). They find that the Bantu Expansion included migration based on a strong signal of genetic relationship among Niger-Congo groups throughout sub-Saharan Africa and on weaker signals between specific sub-groups.
  1197.  
  1198. Find this resource:
  1199.  
  1200.  
  1201. Wood, Elizabeth T., Daryn A. Stover, Christopher Ehret, et al. “Contrasting Patterns of Y Chromosome and mtDNA Variation in Africa: Evidence for Sex-Biased Demographic Processes.” European Journal of Human Genetics 13 (2005): 867–876.
  1202.  
  1203. DOI: 10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201408Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1204.  
  1205. In their detailed study of Y-chromosomal diversity, specifically the E1b1a7 sub-lineage associated with the Bantu Expansion, in comparison to published studies of mtDNA, Wood, et al. find a correlation between language and Y-chromosomal variation that is opposite to the mtDNA variation. This suggests that languages tended to be passed from father to children.
  1206.  
  1207. Find this resource:
  1208.  
  1209.  
  1210. Correlating Data from Multiple Disciplines
  1211. Though interdisciplinary collaboration was an important part of the mid-20th century approach to the Bantu Expansion, many scholars were uneasy with the way that distinct forms of historical evidence were connected to prove or disprove particular narratives of the Bantu Expansion (see SOAS and the London Paradigm and Critiques of and Alternatives to the London Paradigm). The advent of genetic research and the interest of molecular anthropologists and geneticists in the demographic history of Bantu speakers has renewed debates about the appropriate methods for correlating linguistic, archaeological, genetic, and other forms of evidence to elucidate the Bantu Expansion and similar events in other parts of the continent (see also Biological Approaches). Ehret and Posnansky 1982 exemplifies earlier methods of correlating archaeological and linguistic evidence; the direct associations between reconstructed words and archaeological finds described in Vansina 2004 (cited under Regional Histories of Speakers of Bantu Languages) and de Luna 2012 offer alternative methods to link the two records. Jesse and Klein-Arendt 2007 proposes a collaborative methodology for connecting linguistic and archaeological evidence, though they conclude that such an endeavor requires collaborative fieldwork. Blench 2006 serves as a more recent example of correlating the earliest linguistic and archaeological evidence of particular items, such as domesticated food species. Many attempts to correlate archaeological and linguistic evidence are tied to efforts to date different phases of the Bantu Expansion. Dating has been a particularly difficult problem because glottochronology, the primary method used by many historians to date divergences in the Bantu classification, is largely rejected by linguists. Ehret 2000 and Vansina 2004 (cited under Regional Histories of Speakers of Bantu Languages) present historians’ arguments for and against glottochronology. De Luna 2012 takes an intermediate stance, dating language change through connections to the archaeological record, a method that can test the validity of glottochronology on a case-by-case basis. References in each of these sources offer further citations on debates about glottochronology in Bantu studies and beyond. Some articles collected in Fleisher, et al. 2012 follow older methods of connecting linguistics and archaeology while others try to make links with genetic evidence as well. MacEachern 2000 and commentators on the article offer suggestions for correlating linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence in several case studies throughout Africa, including Bantu areas. Schoenbrun 1991 offers methodological insights for connecting the linguistic with paleo-climatological records through the study of pollen cores.
  1212.  
  1213. Blench, Roger. Archaeology, Language, and the African Past. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2006.
  1214.  
  1215. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1216.  
  1217. This is a study of the problems of correlating African historical linguistics with archeological data, with a strong focus on the spread of agricultural practices and foods.
  1218.  
  1219. Find this resource:
  1220.  
  1221.  
  1222. de Luna, Kathryn M. “Surveying the Boundaries of Historical Linguistics and Archaeology: Early Settlement in South Central Africa.” African Archaeological Review 29.2–3 (2012): 209–251.
  1223.  
  1224. DOI: 10.1007/s10437-012-9112-1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1225.  
  1226. De Luna contrasts two methods to connect linguistic and archaeological evidence: the correlation in time and space of hypothesized proto-languages and archaeological traditions and developing clusters of direct associations between archaeological and linguistic evidence for specific items or practices. The problem of dating via glottochronology is also addressed.
  1227.  
  1228. Find this resource:
  1229.  
  1230.  
  1231. Ehret, Christopher. “Testing the Expectations of Glottochronology Against the Correlations of Language and Archaeology in Africa.” In Time Depth in Historical Linguistics. Edited by C. Renfrew, A. McMahon, and L. Trask, 373–399. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2000.
  1232.  
  1233. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1234.  
  1235. Ehret uses correlations with archaeology to test the validity of glottochronology. While linguists reject glottochronology because they believe it presumes a constant rate of language change, Ehret argues that it follows common statistical patterns whereby random, unpredictable changes accumulate into predictable rates of language change over long periods of time.
  1236.  
  1237. Find this resource:
  1238.  
  1239.  
  1240. Ehret, Christopher, and Merrick Posnansky, eds. The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982.
  1241.  
  1242. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1243.  
  1244. Alternating chapters place linguistic and archaeological evidence for four regions of Africa side by side. Published as critiques of interdisciplinary research were underway, the chapters tend to emphasize the importance of correlating Iron Age complexes with proto-languages that seem to overlap in time and space, an early method of correlation.
  1245.  
  1246. Find this resource:
  1247.  
  1248.  
  1249. Fleisher, Jeffrey, Kathryn de Luna, and Susan Keech McIntosh. “Thinking Across the African Past: Archaeological, Linguistic, and Genetic Research on the Precolonial African Past.” African Archaeological Review 29.2–3 (2012): 75–317.
  1250.  
  1251. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1252.  
  1253. This guest-edited special double issue contains summary statements on the state of the various fields of historical linguistics, archaeology and genetics in Africa, as well as articles that seek to connect linguistic, archaeological, and/or genetic evidence in new ways, some in non-Bantu speaking areas.
  1254.  
  1255. Find this resource:
  1256.  
  1257.  
  1258. Jesse, Friederike, and Reinhard Klein-Arendt. “Putting Together Archaeology and Historical Linguistics: The Case of Pottery.” Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 18 (2007): 87–101.
  1259.  
  1260. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1261.  
  1262. Jesse and Klein-Arendt identify the challenge of connecting linguistic and archaeological evidence through the published record. They insist on the importance of collaboration during the research phase and offer a new methodology to create and analyze a shared dataset.
  1263.  
  1264. Find this resource:
  1265.  
  1266.  
  1267. MacEachern, Scott. “Genes, Tribes, and African History.” Current Anthropology 41.3 (2000): 357–384.
  1268.  
  1269. DOI: 10.1086/300144Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1270.  
  1271. This article and subsequent comments critique the common practice in earlier genetic research on African populations of allowing contemporary ethnolinguistic groupings to represent primordial population groupings. Archaeologists, geneticists, and historical linguists share ideas for connecting these different forms of historical record.
  1272.  
  1273. Find this resource:
  1274.  
  1275.  
  1276. Schoenbrun, David. “Treating an Interdisciplinary Allergy: Methodological Approaches to Pollen Studies for the Historian of Africa.” History in Africa 18 (1991): 323–348.
  1277.  
  1278. DOI: 10.2307/3172070Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1279.  
  1280. A rare correlation of the linguistic and paleoclimatic records to trace ecological and cultural change. Reconstructed words offer evidence of people’s actions in and on past environments, while pollen cores illuminate changes in the vegetation environments in which speakers of Great Lakes Bantu lived.
  1281.  
  1282. Find this resource:
  1283.  
  1284.  
  1285. Regional Histories of Speakers of Bantu Languages
  1286. In light of critiques of interdisciplinary feedback within scholarship on the Bantu Expansion, and archaeologists’ disinterest since the 1970s in diffusion and migration, the methods of comparative historical linguistics have been brought to bear on regional historical studies of Bantu languages and their speakers. While most of this work is not research on the Bantu Expansion per se, regional studies that incorporate linguistic evidence often lay out both a regional classification as well as a settlement narrative, describing how Bantu languages spread into the area. In connecting stories of migration and language shift to broader political, economic and social contexts, regional histories elucidate the local developments that combined to make up the monolithic Bantu Expansion. Nurse and Spear 1984 is one of the earliest regional histories to incorporate linguistic evidence to elucidate the settlement of Bantu speakers into a region; language evidence was one of the few indigenous historical sources that could be brought to bear on the question of Swahili origins. Though Vansina 1990 draws on previous models, including articles by Christopher Ehret and Vansina 1978, it is the first regional history to use language evidence in combination with archaeological and ethnographic evidence to trace the development and transformation of political traditions over long periods of time across the equatorial forest. It has become a model for other regional histories, including Vansina 2004, a more recent monograph on west central Africa, and Stephens 2013. Ehret 1998 likewise connects multiple sources to linguistics to reconstruct the social, economic, and political history of eastern and southern Africa, connecting the histories of Bantu speakers and the spread of their languages to the histories of speakers of non-Bantu languages. Significantly, Christopher Ehret’s students have produced most of the regional precolonial histories that have used linguistic evidence to reconstruct the early histories of communities speaking ancestral Bantu languages (see UCLA School of Linguistic Historians). Bostoen 1997 criticizes the regional approach of historians using linguistics evidence because scholars might not trace out the distribution of cognates across the entire Bantu group (and beyond) if they focus so persistently on a single region and, usually, a single sub-branch. If the narrow focus of the study reflects a narrow hunt for attestations, Bostoen notes, reconstructions posited to be quite recent innovations from that region or sub-branch might, in fact, be far older.
  1287.  
  1288. Bostoen, Koen. “Pots, Words, and the Bantu Problem: On Lexical Reconstruction and Early African History.” Journal of African History 48.2 (1997): 173–199.
  1289.  
  1290. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1291.  
  1292. Bostoen demonstrates the value of reconstructions of cultural vocabulary (compared to classifications) in tracing the expansion of Bantu languages. Bostoen also critiques historians using linguistic evidence for failing to trace attestations widely across and beyond the Bantu languages, a problem whereby incorrect time depths are attributed to historical processes.
  1293.  
  1294. Find this resource:
  1295.  
  1296.  
  1297. Ehret, Christopher. An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 BC to AD 400. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.
  1298.  
  1299. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1300.  
  1301. Ehret focuses on divergence and convergence in a large sub-branch of eastern and southern Bantu languages, “Mashariki.” He articulates a model of continuous language spread with some small-scale population movement interconnected with the spread of farming across east and southern Africa.
  1302.  
  1303. Find this resource:
  1304.  
  1305.  
  1306. Nurse, Derek, and Thomas Spear. The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800–1500. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.
  1307.  
  1308. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1309.  
  1310. This collaboration is an early effort to reconstruct regional history using language evidence alongside oral traditions, early documents, comparative ethnography, and archaeology. However, the evidence of indigenous innovation available in the linguistic record in particular allowed Nurse and Spear to make the revolutionary argument that Swahili culture was, in large part, African.
  1311.  
  1312. Find this resource:
  1313.  
  1314.  
  1315. Stephens, Rhiannon. A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  1316.  
  1317. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139344333Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1318.  
  1319. Early chapters include a revised classification and settlement history of North Nyanza speakers, a branch of Great Lakes Bantu. Stephens demonstrates how ideologies of motherhood shaped and transcended the cultural-linguistic divides. An example of how to connect early linguistic histories to the methods and sources of more recent histories.
  1320.  
  1321. Find this resource:
  1322.  
  1323.  
  1324. Vansina, Jan. The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.
  1325.  
  1326. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1327.  
  1328. This is one of Vansina’s earliest efforts to apply evidence from language and comparative ethnography to the reconstruction of history. The book focuses on the southern savannas from the mid-first millennium to c. 1600. However, Vansina’s 1990 monograph, Paths in the Rainforest, is a more precise application of comparative historical linguistic data.
  1329.  
  1330. Find this resource:
  1331.  
  1332.  
  1333. Vansina, Jan. Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
  1334.  
  1335. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1336.  
  1337. This path-breaking book transformed the use of reconstructed vocabulary to recover the history of speakers of ancestral equatorial Bantu languages by applying the method to ideas and institutions in addition to concrete things, which were usually the focus of the method in Africa and beyond.
  1338.  
  1339. Find this resource:
  1340.  
  1341.  
  1342. Vansina, Jan. How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004.
  1343.  
  1344. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1345.  
  1346. This history of west central Africa traces developments in social and political institutions, such as matrilineality and kingship, against the backdrop of economic change from early times through the 17th century. Significantly for specialists, Vansina rejects the use of glottochronology to date linguistic evidence.
  1347.  
  1348. Find this resource:
  1349.  
  1350.  
  1351. The UCLA School of Linguistic Historians
  1352. In training many students at UCLA, Christopher Ehret has made a lasting impact on the development of a subfield of African History that uses comparative historical linguistics to reconstruct regional histories, usually of Bantu speaking communities. These regional histories of Bantu languages and their speakers have broadened our knowledge about stories of language contact, spread, and human migration at the intermediate scales of time and space and, therefore, serve as important “stepping stones” to a fuller understanding of the broader Bantu Expansion. Schoenbrun 1998 brings matters of public healing, gender, and innovations in subsistence to bear on histories of successive patterns of settlement of Bantu speakers in the Great Lakes region. Klieman 2003 reconstructs the very early histories of Bantu-speaking communities and their spread through the equatorial forests. Gonzales 2009 and Saidi 2010 likewise take up the themes of ritual and gender, offering new classifications of Bantu languages spoken in Tanzania and Zambia, and narratives of the spread of those languages. In addition to these works, Ehret has supervised a number of PhD theses that remain unpublished.
  1353.  
  1354. Gonzales, Rhonda M. Societies, Religion, and History: Central East Tanzanians and the World They Created, c. 200 BCE to 1800 CE. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
  1355.  
  1356. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1357.  
  1358. Gonzales offers a new classification of the Ruvu languages spoken in southern Tanzania. Her story of how Bantu language spread to this area and came to predominate draws out the significance of indigenous cosmology and social institutions organized around matrikin.
  1359.  
  1360. Find this resource:
  1361.  
  1362.  
  1363. Klieman, Kairn. “The Pygmies Were Our Compass”: Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to c. 1900 CE. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.
  1364.  
  1365. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1366.  
  1367. Klieman proposes a new classification of the earliest branches of the Bantu family and posits a far earlier dating for those divergences. The body of the book traces how ritual powers associated with autochthony shaped relationships between Bantu speakers and hunter-gatherer communities as Bantu languages and speakers spread throughout west central Africa.
  1368.  
  1369. Find this resource:
  1370.  
  1371.  
  1372. Saidi, Christine. Women’s Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010.
  1373.  
  1374. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1375.  
  1376. Saidi reconstructs the history of settlement and language in south central Africa, offering new classifications of a number of Savanna sub-branches, including Sabi, Botatwe, Central Savanna, and Mashariki. Saidi demonstrates the significance of gendered networks and institutions to the success of Bantu communities.
  1377.  
  1378. Find this resource:
  1379.  
  1380.  
  1381. Schoenbrun, David Lee. A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998.
  1382.  
  1383. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1384.  
  1385. Drawing on a wide range of historical sources, Schoenbrun connects the histories of subsistence, gender, and public healing to the expansion of Great Lakes Bantu languages. The “Note on Evidence” proposes a method to connect the linguistic and ethnographic records for historical purposes.
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