In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

An earlier version of this chapter was published as C. Ehret, “Linguistic stratigraphies and Holocene History in northeastern Africa,” in Marek Chlodnicki and Karla Kroeper (eds.), Archaeology of Early Northeastern Africa (Poznan: Poznan Archaeological Museum, 2006), pp. 1019–1055; used by permission. 135 6 History in the sahara Society and Economy in the Early Holocene is chapter presents the first of four studies exemplifying in different ways the application of linguistic testimony to writing history as historians write it—to the overall courses of social, cultural, economic, demographic, and other developments among the peoples of particular regions and ages of history. ese studies proceed chronologically, with this chapter tackling the transformative changes of the early Holocene transition from gathering and hunting to herding and farming in the saharan belt of Africa. several elements of the wider history of the Holocene sahara , relating to the roles of nilo-saharan peoples in these developments, served previously as illustrations of method in chapter 2. A primary contribution of the chapter to world history is its revelation of how deep and ancient are the African roots of the Afrasian family. Chapter 7 focuses on developments equally transformative , but of a quite different nature, taking place in the Horn of Africa in the last thousand years bCE. Chapter 8 models how one undertakes the challenging task of uncovering the histories of peoples who have le no modern-day direct descendant communities; its regional and time focus is eastern Kenya in the past 2,000 years. Finally, chapter 9 tracks the spread of American crops in East Africa during the Atlantic Age of the last 500 years, presenting this history as a model for discovering the particular ways in which ideas and things have spread in different ages from centers to peripheries in world history. 136 Chapter 6 THE PEoPLinG oF THE HoLoCEnE sAHArA For the whole of the Holocene, greater northeastern Africa has formed a zone of ongoing encounter between speakers of nilo-saharan languages and speakers of Afrasian (Afroasiatic) languages. e history of cultural change among these groupings of peoples and the history of interfamilial language contacts over this long period le its mark in myriad ways in the vocabularies of the Afrasian and nilo-saharan languages. We gain access to the early eras of this history by laying out the linguistic stratigraphies of both families. With this base established, we can then situate the appearance of new vocabulary of subsistence (and of other areas of culture) in the stratigraphy, according to when it first came into use. We can similarly identify the words adopted from languages of one family into languages of the other, situate the times and directions of the particular word borrowings within the stratigraphy, and seek out the cultural and sociolinguistic significance of different individual loanwords as well as sets of loanwords. From these varied bodies of evidence several important conclusions emerge. e most important of all is that both language families, Afrasian as well as nilosaharan , originated in Africa. is point can hardly be too strongly emphasized, considering how oen scholars in non-African fields of study still presume that, somehow , the Afrasian family had an Asian homeland. is idea has its roots in old, unexamined Western views about Africa. Much recent work in biological anthropology continues to start off from this presumption, and, as a result, scholars too oen still allow this view to shape, a priori, the interpretation of the dnA evidence. A second discovery is that, from the very early periods, cultural and technological influences have flowed in both directions, from nilo-saharans to Afrasians as much as from Afrasians to nilo-saharans. in addition, the regions extending from the red sea westward along the line of climatic transition in the central sahara, from Mediterranean subtropical to African tropical regimes, have formed a long-term zone of shiing language-family boundaries and interfamilial influences. Last, the areas between the red sea and the nile have been affected by significant episodes of population and language replacement over the course of the Holocene era. ese findings have major implications for future work on the archaeology and the biological anthropology of the peoples of northeastern Africa in the Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene eras. on THE AFriCAn oriGin oF THE AFrAsiAn LAnGUAGE FAMiLy e cumulative work of many scholars on the historical reconstruction of the Afrasian language family, from Greenberg’s work in the late 1940s down to...

Share