Mixing, Moving, Making, Meaning: Possible Futures for the Distant Past

Abstract

Thinking Across the African Past," this special issue of the African Archaeological Review, bridges disciplinary conventions between archaeology, historical linguistics, and anthropological genetics in order to transform the results of their dialog and respect their distinct epistemologies.Thinking expansively, the essays published here reinvigorate old debates and open up entirely fresh ones.Debates about the timing of settlement sequences still exist, but increasingly address cultural dimensions of how settlement was accomplished, in regional contexts.Debates about correlating streams of evidence continue, but increasingly we ask questions about the common ground of meaning that the traces made in the past and the ways in which they have been borne into the present.Debates about integrating the powerful material of anthropological genetics still largely unfold within the frame of settlement sequences, but increasingly promise unparalleled fineness of resolution, bringing into view the embodied, sexed individual in a distant past.The way back to the long ago is at once familiar and exciting.The familiar mixing of disciplines and the exciting new emphases on process, meaning, and individuals happens through narrative strategies of exposition-in a word, stories.Stories bind the bench science, social science, and humanities around the people whose lives our work seeks to articulate.Whether the stories structure the arguments at stake or those arguments lie beneath the general narrative structure we build, all of us work through stories.Whether pushing a point or a story into the foreground, we all rely on narratives about the past, revising or confirming some parts of them as we work.In one sense, the interdisciplinary work in these articles could be conceived in terms of a shared investment in the rewards and risks of the narrative structures that live through, and are transformed by, the points of stories.Narrative structures reveal new gaps between the disciplines we use to write about the past, calling out as the blank spots in our knowledge of the African past change shape.Only the rare author, like Basil Davidson, adopted the qualities of the narrative