• 1 This project is an ERC “starting grant”, entitled “At a Crossroads of Bantu Expansions: Present and (...)

2The conference was organized in the context and by the team of the BANTURIVERS project, a multidisciplinary project including linguists (Birgit Ricquier, ULB; David Kopa wa Kopa, ULB – University of Kisangani (UNIKIS)), anthropologists (Daou Véronique Joiris, ULB; Shingo Takamura, ULB), archaeologists (Alexandre Livingstone Smith and Els Cornelissen, Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA)) and an archaeo-ichthyologist, Laurent Nieblas Ramirez, ULB – Institute of Natural Sciences).1 The project investigates the role of riverine communities in the settlement of East-Central Africa. This involves unraveling the social and historical relations of a series of key communities along the Congo River. Contemporary anthropological and linguistic data, such as the distribution and affiliation of languages, commercial networks, and fishing techniques, constitute the starting point for our historical research. This implies, amongst others, the development of a referential database concerning fishing communities along the Congo River and in Central Africa in general. The analysis of the languages spoken by the same communities—including the specialized vocabulary of fishing techniques—allows for the investigation of their relations and affiliations. The anthropologists and archaeologists equally work on the chaîne opératoire of fishing techniques and, of course, on the usual technologies such as pottery. The objective is to produce a comparative analysis of knowledge and practices shared by different communities, but at the same time to highlight the social spaces in which they interact. These insights allow us to better target the archaeological surveys. The central theme of the conference—to start in the present to go back in the past, and this by means of various disciplines—thus presents a challenge inherent to the project.

• 2 The conference proceedings were published in a special edition of the journal African Archaeologica (...)

3Exactly ten years later, the conference followed on from the conference organized at Rice University in March 2011, “Thinking across the African Past: Archaeological, Linguistic and Genetic Research on Precolonial African History”.2 The organizers of this conference, Kathryn de Luna, Jeffrey Fleisher and Susan Keech McIntosh, wanted to respond to the regained interest in the interdisciplinary approaches to the ancient African past and to promote dialogue among researchers working on similar issues in Europe, Asia and Latin America. For this purpose, the organizers had asked the participants to concentrate on interdisciplinary research on the past. A decade later, the interdisciplinary dialogue remains in the spotlight. Indeed, the precolonial history of the African continent is of interest to numerous disciplines addressing the present and past of Africa from different perspectives—for instance, history, archaeology, linguistics, genetics and palaeo-environmental studies. This diversity is partly a reflection of the wide range of data sources used. Despite this diversity, the objective remains always to unravel the precolonial African past and to advance a complex and nuanced history. Collaborations between diverse disciplines have become the norm but are often linked to projects and/or specific themes or regions. To meet and discuss with peers confronted with the same research challenges, one needs to participate in conferences concerning disciplines that are not one’s own: linguists attend archaeological meetings, archaeobotanists historical linguistic encounters, historians are present at archaeobotanical workshops, anthropologists learn from advances in ethnohistory, human ecology and genetics, etc. Often, only a few panels of these meetings are truly pertinent for interdisciplinary research. Like its parent “Thinking Across the African Pastˮ, the conference of March 2021 focused on the pluridisciplinary nature of research on precolonial African history, adding a theme common to numerous researchers involved: extracting the past from the present.

• 3 J. Vansina, 1995; P. Robertshaw, 2000.
• 4 R.C. Bailey et al., 1989; S. Bahuchet, D. McKey, I. de Garine, 1991.
• 5 A.B. Stahl, 2001; K.M. de Luna, J.B. Fleisher, 2019; K.M. de Luna, J.B. Fleisher, S. Keech McIntosh (...)
• 6 A. Gallay, E. Huysecom, A. Mayor, 1994; E. Huysecom, 1992; A. Mayor, 1994; O. Gosselain, 1995; M. D (...)

5The history of research using the African present to explore its past is long, full of misunderstandings and a rationale that often remains anchored in the discipline. We obviously think about the debate between archaeologists, historians and historical linguists concerning the question of the “Bantu Expansion” or, another notable example, the debate between historians and archaeologists concerning the role of their respective disciplines in the construction of historical narratives.3 We may also think of the controversy on the “wild yam question” at the end of the 1980s, still relevant, confronting anthropologists’ viewpoint of cultural ecology with that of ethnosciences on the joint or not settlement of farmers and hunter-gatherers.4 The debate is vast and complex. As has already been demonstrated by several authors—for instance, Stahl in the introduction to her book Making History in Banda in 2001, de Luna and Fleisher in Speaking with Substance, and de Luna, Fleisher and Keech McIntosh in the introduction to Thinking Across the Past—epistemological and methodological reflections impose themselves.5 Several schools of pluridisciplinary research that anchored research on the past in the present have arrived at important results—for example, the “direct historical approach” and African “ethnoarchaeology”.6 However, despite these efforts, and a decade after the publication of Thinking Across the Past, it is clear that the same challenges persist and that the development of an architecture of pluridisciplinary research in the humanities is far from having been accomplished.

• 7 On the process of transformation, appropriation and invention, see for instance the work of Vansina (...)

6To read the past in the present could seem to speak for oneself. The past structures the present, and, beyond simple analogy, we can indeed read certain aspects of African history in a myriad of things that we see today—or almost do so. We can interpret the past in the organization of a village, in landscapes, in the composition of forests, or in the distribution of certain types of plants and animal species, and, of course, in the distribution of cultural traits such as languages, musical instruments, food preparations or metallurgy. We know that this is not that evident. If elements of the past permeate the present, this is also and foremost the product of a cultural mix, be it with respect to material or immaterial culture, resulting from a process of transformation, appropriation and invention. Reconstituting the trajectories of things and ideas proves thus to be a necessary step to surpass the simple interpretation of the past within the present.7

• 8 D. Hicks, 2013.

7To summarize all the ins and outs of pluridiscplinary research on the African present and past is a colossal task and will not be our purpose here; some even wonder if a summary is at all possible, considering that the field of historical research has enlarged and diversified.8 But we consider it important to underline certain issues, already raised by other researchers, concerning the resilience of evolutionist perspectives, the pitfalls of pluridisciplinary research, and the positivist dimensions of the idea to extract the past from the present.

• 9 A.B. Stahl, 2001; M.-R. Trouillot 1995.
• 10 Terms such as Stone Age, Neolithic and Iron Age refer to evolutionary stages influenced by the Thre (...)
• 11 P. Poutignat, J. Streiff-Fenart, 1995; P. Poutignat, J. Streiff-Fénart, 2017; A.B. Stahl, 2001, p. (...)

8Indeed, the various disciplines dedicated to the African past and present are still, to different degrees, permeated by evolutionist perspectives inherited from the 19th century.9 Think of the simplifying and static visions of identities, especially in relation to ethnicity, of the categorization of “Age” in archaeology;10 of a preference for political or economic power; or of the disdain for traditional crafts in favor of themes considered more contemporary.11 Stahl highlights, for instance, a series of studies demonstrating the strategies implemented in the creation, maintenance or resistance to identity claims. In anticipation of a major methodological project in the human sciences, we should bear in mind the contextualized, dynamic and fluid nature of the various forms of identity, and the need to promote nuanced approaches to African history.

• 12 E. Sapir, 1916.
• 13 D. Hicks, 2013.
• 14 R. Borofsky, 2002; S.B. Ortner, 1984, 1991; T. Spear, 1994; A.B. Stahl, 2001.
• 15 P. Minard et al., 2002.
• 16 S. Palmié, C. Stewart, 2016.

9As far as multidisciplinary research is concerned, there is still a long way to go. Although the importance of multidisciplinary work has long been recognized, in practice the methodological harmonization of disciplines concerned with the present and past of societies, African or otherwise, is still in its infancy. In addition to a lack of understanding of each other’s methods, there is an almost total lack of integration of advances in related disciplines—even if we consider only the human sciences. This is rather a paradox, given that the merits of such integration have long been praised. In the United States, the idea of the “Four-Fields Approach”—namely, archaeology, linguistics, physical and cultural anthropology—is supported since at least the start of the 20th century by Boas. Sapir, a student of Boas, sketches a true integration of the human sciences concerned with the past, in his 1916 publication Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture.12 He proposes to consider ethnology as a historical discipline, and he reviews aspects of physical anthropology, ethnology and linguistics allowing for indirect historical inferences, as opposed to the direct inferences offered by archaeology. This publication is an important step in the direction of true integration, even if it draws on older work.13 Today at least, this integration is still more of a project than a reality.14 The situation is hardly any better in Europe. In France, for instance, there has been a tug-of-war between sociology, anthropology and history from the beginning of the 20th century. The idea of multidisciplinarity, bringing together at least sociology and anthropology, was present in the work of Durkheim and then Mauss, but the debate between historians and anthropologists on the prevalence of one or the other discipline continued in the second half of the 20th century and persists to the present day.15 Despite the importance of the debate, we are a long way from developing a common toolkit.16

• 17 “[...] upstreaming, that is going backwards in time” (J. Vansina, 1990, p. 31). Vansina refers to F (...)

10The idea of extracting the past from the present must avoid other pitfalls in the multidisciplinary approach. Linguistics was one of the first fields to examine the past by using current data. For Africa, for example, Sigismund Koelle published his Polyglotta Africana in 1854, while Wilhelm Bleek coined the term Bantuistik in 1859, after identifying the relationship between a series of languages of the east coast of Africa and sketching out the idea of a family of Bantu languages. Although they had no historical research in mind, the question of the origin and dispersion of languages quickly became a subject of research. Curiously, Sapir, who was mentioned earlier and who came up with the idea of the “direct historical approach”, is also a linguist. The idea, along with a series of important principles, was taken up by Vansina under the term “upstreaming”.17

• 18 J. Vansina, 1961.
• 19 M. Bloch, 1931; H. Collet, 2020.
• 20 d’Alembert, 1821.
• 21 Petelo Boka, 1910; J. Cuvelier, 1953.

11The commitment of historians was delayed by the debate on the validity of oral history—historical data revealing the way in which a certain meaning is given to the present—and it was not until the methodological breakthrough of the 1960s, often attributed to Vansina, that the analysis of oral history data became structured.18 However, among French historians, regressive history has been accepted since the work of Marc Bloch, who set out several principles of the method that are still valid today.19 For the record, let us not forget that the idea of looking at history in a backwards direction is attributed to d’Alembert.20 It should also be noted that historical knowledge was already being collected and transcribed by African people around 1900. For example, Carl Christian Reindorf (an Afro-European pastor) published his History of the Gold Coast and Asante in 1895—initially written in Ga—and Petelo Boka, a cleric of Kongo origin, compiled a manuscript in Kikongo on the history of Kongo clans.21 Even though these two authors are not historians in the academic sense of the term—their aim was not to analyze and criticize, but to reproduce and use the historical tradition—their work is a good indication of the interest in knowledge of the past and of a preference for this form of historical tradition on the African continent.

• 22 O.P. Gosselain, A. Livingstone Smith, 2013.
• 23 Even today, historical periods as perceived through archaeological sources are often divided into A (...)
• 24 P. Robertshaw, 1990; A.B. Stahl, 2001.
• 25 F. Pierot, 1987.
• 26 A. Haour, 2018.
• 27 N. Arazi et al., 2020.

12Archaeologists have come particularly late to the debates on African history. Indeed, the archaeological contribution to African history was originally focused on the Stone Age and the origin of humanity. The first to take an interest in recent history (i.e. the present era) were in fact outsiders to the discipline—such as the architect Laidler, who sought to establish a link between the pottery style of Great Zimbabwe and the surrounding Bantu populations.22 It was not until the end of the Second World War that archaeology moved away from the Stone Age. From then on, Africanist archaeologists increasingly devoted themselves to the archaeology of the so-called Iron Age, one of the relics of the evolutionary theories mentioned above.23 Interest in what was then known as the “Late Iron Age” grew.24 From there, certain questions crossed disciplines, and archaeologists were confronted with historians and linguists. For example, in the 1980s Pierre de Maret excavated Mashita Mbanza, following up on a lead laid out by Jan Vansina on the origins of the Pende populations.25 Finally, in more recent developments in this interest in history rooted in the present, archaeological research is being developed in close conjunction with oral traditions. As part of Anne Haour’s ERC “Crossroads of Empires” project, the exact location of certain archaeological excavations was decided by oral history informants.26 The first archaeological layer was the floor of a concession. In Noémie Arazi’s project “Arabo-Swahili Heritage in Maniema”, the archaeological excavations were guided by the memory of landscape the informants have through oral tradition.27 Although much remains to be done to structure this type of approach methodologically, we can conclude that a fluid integration of oral history and archaeology is possible.

• 28 F. Braudel, 1958.
• 29 C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, 2021.
• 30 J. Vansina 1961; 1985.
• 31 See for instance the work of eco-anthropologist Edmond Dounias on the Mvae Fang of southern Cameroo (...)
• 32 J. Lave, 1988; J. Lave, E. Wenger, 1991; C. Corniquet, 2011, 2013; O.P. Gosselain, 2016.
• 33 A.B. Stahl, A.P. Roddick, 2016; O.P. Gosselain, 2016.
• 34 G. Condominas, 1980; A. Livingstone Smith, 2016.

13As far as anthropology and its multidisciplinary collaborations with archaeology and historical linguistics are concerned, two relatively distinct contributions can be identified: those inherited from the complex relationship between history and anthropology, on the one hand; and those stemming from ethnography, ethnoecology in some of its aspects, and material culture studies, on the other hand. It is impossible to avoid the past when discussing with people what they do, how they do it and why they do it in a particular way. “Tradition” is almost systematically invoked by informants when explaining things. But for a long time, anthropology showed little interest in “real” history. The debate between Lévi-Strauss and Braudel in the 1958 issue of Annales bears witness to this.28 At the same time, the work of anthropologists, historians and ethnohistorians, who are committed to combining written sources, archives and what the Africanist historian Coquery-Vidrovich calls “living memory”, has progressed and been enriched methodologically.29 Turning its back on the de-historicizing enterprise of colonial anthropology and then structuralism, current research places the institutions studied in the “short term”—a far cry from the long term defended by Braudel. Rather than “oral tradition”, it is based on the study of “oral history”.30 This dynamic and innovative area of research in anthropology, which combines the study of the past with that of the present, is clearly what we see as a way forward. In addition, the anthropological tradition of ethnography, historical ethnoecology and material culture studies represents a body of knowledge that archaeologists and ethnolinguists can more easily exploit. Drawing on contemporary empirical material—such as settlement patterns, ethnoecological lexicon and the description of a chaîne opératoire—has become part of intra- and multidisciplinary practice.31 However, this approach deserves to be developed further. From the point of view of material culture studies, there have also been some very local but important advances. Following the work of Lave and Lave and Wenger, Corniquet and Gosselain have proposed using a series of sociological concepts from the theory of communities of practice to describe the world of female artisan potters in sub-Saharan Africa—more specifically, in Niger.32 Different levels of relationships, from the family nucleus to the communities of practice, can be found around firing sites, clay sources and markets. Through the biographies and genealogies of artisans, they have shown how networks of potters (conveying a whole series of ideas) were deployed in time and space in the form of “constellations”.33 These constellations fit in perfectly with what Condominas has also defined in anthropology as social space or as the materialization of present or past networks of social interaction.34

• 35 C. Bromberger, 1984; C. Bromberger, A. Morel, 2001.

14Chaîne opératoire, “community of practice”, “constellation of communities”, “social space”, rémanence, to name but a few of the theoretical contributions of socio-anthropology, sound like buzzwords, but they have provided Africanists dealing with material culture and history with a fantastic toolbox to explore the present and past of African societies—and, indeed, to link the two. Combined with theoretical contributions from other fields, such as the linguistic method “words and things” and spatial analysis, they constitute a comfortable multidisciplinary environment in which anthropologists, linguists and archaeologists, among others, can share questions, tools and concepts and not just results, avoiding compartmentalized reasoning from a disciplinary point of view.35 Bringing more anthropological concepts of this kind to other disciplines can nourish our ability to draw inspiration from the present in order to imagine the past.