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A New Paradigm: The African Early Iron Age without Bantu Migrations1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

John H. Robertson  and
Rebecca Bradley
John H. Robertson
Affiliation:
Mount Royal College
Rebecca Bradley
Affiliation:
Mount Royal College
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Extract

Between 1000 BC and AD 1000, or so the story goes, sub-Saharan Africa was the setting for one of the all-time great population movements of antiquity—the Bantu migrations. Sweeping to and fro across the continent in a kind of grand migrationary gavotte, absorbing or brushing aside the autochthonous hunter-gatherers, the ancestral Bantu speakers carried with them on their march the seeds of a settled life fueled by food production and iron technology. Their movements are represented by large arrows scything across big blank maps of the African interior. How good is the evidence that any of it ever happened?

In this paper we shall examine some of the serious methodological and practical problems that bedevil the migrationary model. We shall also present an alternative model for the prehistory of sub-Saharan Africa: in brief, that the development of the Early Iron Age in Africa was a process rather than an event; that autochthonous populations gradually adopted the suite of traits that define the Early Iron Age, without any large-scale movement of peoples; and that increasing sedentarization actually led to a population decline which was only overcome after AD 500.

The model constitutes a new paradigm that emphasizes continuity and takes into account a few observations that are awkward for the migrationary paradigm: that sub-Saharan Africa has a difficult topography that may put certain constraints on population movements, and that the continent was slowly filling up on its own when events starting in the sixteenth century turned the autochthonous peoples' lives upside down.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 27 , January 2000 , pp. 287 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2000

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Footnotes

1

We wish to thank the Earth Sciences Department at Mount Royal College, especially the chair, Wayne Haglund, and the technician, Mike Clark, for their support while we carried out research using their facilities. Librarian Margot Millard helped with reference sources and Jan Vausina gave great encouragement and support throughout the writing process. Of course, we alone are responsible for statements and conclusions.

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