Surveying the Boundaries of Historical Linguistics and Archaeology: Early Settlement in South Central Africa

Drawing on evidence from South Central Africa, this paper explores two methods for linking the linguistic and archaeological records. Since the 1960s, scholars have correlated the hypothesized spatial and temporal overlaps of linguistic speech communities and pottery traditions, with varying success in the face of revisions to linguistic classifications and debates over pottery typologies. This paper assesses similar correlations between speech communities within the Bantu-Botatwe family and ceramic traditions of South Central Africa. Then, it proposes direct associations for specific activities and tools attested in both the linguistic and archaeological records in order to test correlations between pottery traditions and speech communities as well as the reliability of glottochronology. The development of a dense cluster of direct associations between the two records converging on the “when and where” of historical processes allows for the incorporation of theoretical and historical interpretations founded on one body of evidence into narratives developed from another type of data and, therefore, facilitates a “peer” engagement between the disciplines.