Kathryn de Luna

Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary sources, this sweeping study explores the place of bushcraft and agriculture in the precolonial history of south central Africa from the tenth century BCE to the seventeenth century CE. Contrary to popular conceptions that place farming at the heart of political and social change, as historian Kathryn de Luna reveals, political innovation in precolonial African farming societies was actually contingent on developments in food collection-- the very activities farming supposedly replaced. Engaging new linguistic and archaeological evidence, the author investigates bushcraft in and beyond the Botatwe-speaking cultures of south central Africa, from the transition to cereal agriculture to the early modern Indian Ocean ivory and slave trades. What she uncovers are previously unappreciated links among bushcraft, fame, talent, political authority, landscape, gender, language, and personhood.

To center Africans’ intellectual contribution to the Americas, we need to tether the Atlantic’s archives and methods to those used to recover earlier histories of oral societies’ terms of debate in Africa. African words have long been a key resource for locating Africans’ origins and, thus,
decoding their practices, but comparative historical linguistic methods allow us to move beyond origins to explore enslaved Africans’ fraught, contested efforts to build shared understanding within and across the language boundaries of Atlantic contexts. In Africans’ Atlantic, such
exchanges almost always occurred between speakers sharing—if one goes back far enough—a common linguistic and, therefore, intellectual heritage. Histories of ancient words and earlier multilinguistic interaction shaped what enslaved men and women from distant parts of Africa
could understand of each other in the Americas, both in terms of speech and in terms of the conceptual worlds underlying words spoken. Analysis of a few African words recorded in Saint Domingue in the second half of the eighteenth century reveals the significance of Africa’s deep pasts and Africanists’ methods to our understanding of the ideologies undergirding enslaved men and women’s political collaboration in more recent Atlantic contexts.

The word busongo names a kind of technological 'know-how' across a large number of languages in south central Africa, a distribution that is a testament to the word's age. This essay reconstructs the history of the invention and changing meanings 10 of busongo from its first millennium origins and tracks its use to the present using the methods of comparative historical linguistics. The resulting history illustrates the interplay of affective and sensory dimensions of technology in the creation of new under-standings of technological practices in medieval central Africa. As 15 a form of conceptual history, the story of busongo also raises new questions about the relationship between tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge © and speech: is speech a form of tacit knowledge? If so, what are the implications for the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge?

This essay takes as its starting point a question: do historians of Africa’s early and more recent pasts need each others' labor histories when studying the relationship between work and mobility? This commentary reflects on the contributions to a special issue of African Economic History, "Labor and Mobility in African History" edited by Zachary Kagan Guthrie with contributions from the editor, Ireen Mudeka, Paul Ocobock, Isaie Dougnon, Enrique Martino, Héctor Guerre Hernandez, Alexander Keese, Jennifer Hart and Marcia Schenck.

In many societies in central, eastern and southern Africa, practitioners of technologies undertaken away from the village, in the bush, enjoy a special status. The invention of a new landscape category, isokwe ("the bush"), and the novel status of these seasonal technicians marks the development of a new kind of virile masculinity available to some men; it was a status with deeply sensuous, material and social meanings for women as well. Among the Botatwe-speaking societies of south-central Africa, the status accorded hunters, smelters and other technicians of the bush was crafted in the centuries around the turn of the first millennium by combining old ideas about the blustery character of fame and spirits, and the talk that engendered both with the observation that technicians working in the bush shared a kinesthetic experience of piercing, poking and prodding into action during the generative activities of working smelts and taking down game. Yet the micro-politics of bushcraft knowledge also involved the bodies and feelings of spearmen and metallurgists’ wives, lovers, mothers, sisters, and sometimes those of the entire neighborhood. Part of a special issue of Kronos on the micro-politics of knowledge.

de Luna, Kathryn M. “Bantu Expansion.” In Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies. Ed. Thomas Spear. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

An entry in the Oxford Online Bibliography for African Studies; includes 130+ annotated citations about the study of the Bantu Expansion and Bantu languages from the 19th century through the 21st century. Citations cross the disciplines of linguistics, history, archaeology, and genetics and include works in English and European languages.

URL (subscription service): http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199846733/obo-9780199846733-0165.xml?rskey=yOyylA&result=1

"Down-the-Line" in Deep Time: Worldliness, Mobility, and Sedentism on the Central Frontier, 1000 BCE to 1900 CE,” (paper presented at the  “Connections and Disconnections in the History and Cultures of Eastern Africa,” British Institute in Eastern Africa, Nairobi, March 30-31, 2015).

“Hunting Affect: The Words & Things of Technological Savvy in Ancient Africa, 1000 BCE-1900 CE” (paper presented at the Object Emotions, Revisted workshop, Yale University, February 20-21, 2015).

This paper links a new project on ancient technologies to a completed book project that used reconstructed word histories to trace the invention and history bushcraft—dangerous forms of hunting and fishing—in farming communities to reveal the cultural history of celebrity and ambition across three millennia in central Africa. The “Words & Things” method has long been used alongside archaeology to recover the past of societies without a documentary record, but does so on scales beyond any individual’s experience.  Ancient words for subsistence technology were surprisingly laden with both affectivity and emotion. For example, a verb for “dangerous, fearsome spear hunting” was invented from an older verb for “trying, mimicking, aspiring” and eventually became a term for a practice of cultivating affection and material exchange with long-term lovers outside marriage. These words demonstrate the complicated articulation of the sensuous, the material, and the affective across time in ancient central Africa. Regional ritual practices likewise depended on cosmologies that confound our belief in the separate ontological status of people, objects, and spirits; shared feelings about each collapsed their distinctions. In ancient central Africa, technological innovation in subsistence, potting, divining, and metallurgy required thinking in new ways about people, objects, spirits, and the emotions that mediated relationships among them. This paper uses the material cultural record and historical linguistics to explore how histories of technology reveal the changing ways emotions linked people, spirits, objects, and places across three thousand years in central Africa.

while comprehensive, complex and colourful, is not well supported and sometimes mistakes results for causes. For example, they claim that 'sedentarization' causes the 'loss of pastoral mobility' rather than results from it. The most frustrating of the academic errors is a lack of citation for the majority of data presented, combined with the practice of including less than generally acceptable academic sources, such as Wikipedia, in the bibliography. In addition, it seems clear that several students relied on one or two sources to collect their data, resulting in an incomplete investigation of the aspect in question. The advocacy paper resulting from the analysis of the Karamoja syndrome includes over 120 recommendations to seven targeted audiences such as governments from industrial countries, the United Nations, and the African Union. While the recommendations are based on a sincere desire to improve the situation for pastoralists, they range from the generic (a recommendation to NGOs to coordinate their work with the Government of Uganda) to the naïve (a recommendation to the United Nations to stop the arms trade across the board in order to support the disarmament programme in Karamoja). A lack of prioritization, along with the difficulty inherent in implementing many of the recommendations (for example, making the Karamojong feel secure so that they can be disarmed easily), makes the advocacy paper less realistic as a practical guide for policy makers. The articles comprising the second and third parts of the book vary widely in terms of readability, relevance to Karamoja, and academic credibility. Chosen from conferences organized as part of the Karamoja campaign, some of the articles are based on solid data collected in recent years, while others seem to be based on anecdotal evidence or uncited sources. They cover a wide variety of topics ranging from a definition of sustainable development to an analysis of reindeer herders' use of the term 'carrying capacity' and from an analysis of the legitimacy of common land use without private ownership to the diffusion of ethnoveterinary knowledge in Karamoja. This collection of articles provides a wide array of perspectives on pastoralism in general and the concerns facing the Karamojong in particular. A final section of the book illustrates various artistic efforts aimed at increasing European awareness of the Karamojong and their needs.

ABSTRACT This book is a major contribution to the now-growing body of African historical works that systematically marshal nonwritten documentation in recovering the African longue dúree. These works apply the long-established techniques for using the comparative method of historical linguistics in conjunction with ethnography to reveal the ideas, culture, and material lives of peoples of earlier times. Anthropologists and Indo-Europeanists have long utilized the techniques piecemeal or with limited goals in mind. Africanist historians have re-adapted the methods of linguistic and ethnographic reconstruction to build up complex regional histories and anchor these findings chronologically by identifying their points of conjunction with the available archaeology, oral tradition, and written documentation. Vansina is one of the major movers in this kind of history. Despite its title, How Societies Are Born is not primarily a work of theory or comparative history. It is a first foray into reconstructing the broad sweep of the pre-1600 eras of history across southwestern Central Africa, from the upper Zambezi River areas on the east to the Atlantic coast at the west, and from northern Angola on the north to the Kalahari and northern Namibia on the south. Vansina builds a story of how the particular societies present in these regions by the seventeenth century came into being. The story begins around 2000 years ago with the arrival of the first farming communities, coming from the rainforests to the north. These first farmers spoke the proto-Njila language, which other scholars in previous works have called the proto-Western Savanna Bantu language. As the proto-Njila communities scattered across West-Central Africa into environments suited to their farming, their linguistic commonality broke down, and the original proto-Njila tongue evolved into a variety of distinct Njila languages. Vansina views the Njila of the first millennium c.e. as comprising a low-density scattering of communities, in which earlier indigenous foragers were still the primary occupants of a large proportion of the land. Particularly in the more southerly regions, the Njila faced great challenges in coping with their new dry environments. The crucial development for the Njila farmers was the spread from the east of savanna agricultural crops, such as sorghum. Cattle diffused from the east during the same eras, and in the farthest southern areas of Njila settlement, in the Okavango and the middle and lower Kunene River regions, the adoption of cows encouraged the establishment of strongly pastoralist economies in the driest climatic zone of all. The additional spread from the east of ironworking to all of West Central Africa completed the technological and economic transformations of the first millennium c.e. Pfouts subsequently placed these developments in the first half of the first millennium c.e., earlier than Vansina implies. Vansina identifies the close of the first millennium as a crucial period of rapid transition to larger scales of sociopolitical cooperation in several distinct parts of the wider region. When denser concentrations of Njila communities began to emerge, especially in areas with access to varied productive environments, Njila peoples began to create a variety of new institutions of wider cooperation. Across the western and southern regions, the emergence of territorial chiefdoms and principalities led to the rise of at least one major early state in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries and, by the fourteenth or fifteenth century, to a number of kingdoms in the highlands of what is today western Angola. In the eastern regions, local clusters of villages initially joined in cooperative groups (sodalities) for administering rites of passage. A sort of oligarchic republican rule took shape in these multi-village polities. Particularly in the northeast parts of West Central Africa, this kind of governance lasted into recent centuries. In the southeastern areas, in contrast, two historically successive layers of further institutional change rest atop this foundation. The first layer was the addition of chieftaincy. Vansina is surely right in his dating of the restructuring of the southeastern multi-village polities into territorial chieftaincies at no later than the fourteenth or fifteenth century. By the seventeenth century, as a multiplicity of oral traditions reveals, a new kind of polity of even wider scope was widely taking shape across those areas...

Multiple lines of genetic and archaeological evidence suggest that there were major demographic changes in the terminal Late Pleistocene epoch and early Holocene epoch of sub-Saharan Africa1–4. Inferences about this period are challenging to make because demographic shifts in the past 5,000 years have obscured the structures of more ancient populations3,5. Here we present genome-wide ancient DNA data for six individuals from eastern and south-central Africa spanning the past approximately 18,000 years (doubling the time depth of sub-Saharan African ancient DNA), increase the data quality for 15 previously published ancient individuals and analyse these alongside data from 13 other published ancient individuals. The ancestry of the individuals in our study area can be modelled as a geographically structured mixture of three highly divergent source populations, probably reflecting Pleistocene interactions around 80–20 thousand years ago, including deeply diverged eastern and southern ...

Using the history of bushcraft—specifically Botatwe-speaking societies of south central Africa—as a case study to explore the micropolitics of knowledge production, de Luna highlights the special status given in many central, eastern, and southern African societies to practitioners of technologies undertaken in the bush. The invention of a new landscape category, isokwe, and the novel status of seasonal technicians marks the development of a virile, sexualized masculinity available to some men; but it was also a status with deeply sensuous, material, and social meanings for women.

A large scholarship currently holds that before the onset of anthropogenic global warming, natural climatic changes long provoked subsistence crises and, occasionally, civilizational collapses among human societies. This scholarship, which we term the ‘history of climate and society’ (HCS), is pursued by researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, historians, linguists and palaeoclimatologists. We argue that, despite the wide interest in HCS, the field suffers from numerous biases, and often does not account for the local effects and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of past climate changes or the challenges of interpreting historical sources. Here we propose an interdisciplinary framework for uncovering climate–society interactions that emphasizes the mechanics by which climate change has influenced human history, and the uncertainties inherent in discerning that influence across different spatiotemporal scales. Although we acknowledge that climate change has sometimes had destructive effects on past societies, the application of our framework to numerous case studies uncovers five pathways by which populations survived—and often thrived—in the face of climatic pressures.

:This short essay explores Jan Vansina’s contributions to the study of Africa’s early pasts. In particular, it explores the impact of sustained ethnographic fieldwork on Vansina’s narrative style, which often imagined for deeper pasts the sorts of small-scale social interactions definitive of most experiences of fieldwork. This narrative style produced a tension between Vansina’s interest in large-scale institutions and historical processes and the smaller-scale social interactions sustaining them, offering us new research topics. Attention to the historical significance of the sorts of intimate interactions imagined by Vansina requires new approaches to the variety of archives he compelled us to consider in the pages of this journal.

The late fifteenth- to early seventeenth-century dates reported by Susan McIntosh and Brian Fagan (above) for the richest burials at Ingombe Ilede challenge well-known narratives concerning trade and politics in greater Zambezia. For example, as the authors indicate, Ingombe Ilede now seems more an outcome of the destabilised politics of Great Zimbabwe than a cause of its demise. The role that the inhabitants of Ingombe Ilede played in the shifting competitions and alliances that characterised political and economic life in sixteenth-century Zambezia must now be addressed.

This essay takes as its starting point a question: do historians of Africa’s early and more recent pasts need each others' labor histories when studying the relationship between work and mobility? This commentary reflects on the contributions to a special issue of African Economic History, "Labor and Mobility in African History" edited by Zachary Kagan Guthrie with contributions from the editor, Ireen Mudeka, Paul Ocobock, Isaie Dougnon, Enrique Martino, Héctor Guerre Hernandez, Alexander Keese, Jennifer Hart and Marcia Schenck.

ABSTRACTThe familiar mystique of African hunters was not a foregone conclusion to the practitioners, dependents, and leaders who created it. Late in the first millennium, Botatwe farmers’ successful adoption of cereals and limited cattle sustained the transformation of hunting from a generalist's labor into a path to distinction. Throughout the second millennium, the basis of hunters’ renown diversified as trade intensified, new political traditions emerged, and, eventually, the caravan trade and mfecane ravaged established communities. The story of Botatwe hunters reveals a longue durée history of local notables and the durability of affective, social dimensions of recognition in the face of changes in the material, political, and technological basis sustaining such status.

From its inception in 2014, the interdisciplin-ary Bantu Mobility Project has sought to refocus research on the Bantu Expansions away from the macro-scale towards a "writ small" approach within a well-defined region with well-understood episodes of language expansion, namely, the middle Kafue and middle Zambezi catchments of southern Zambia. This tighter focus enables the project to capture the human agency shaping movements of people, animals, material goods, and languages, and to consider the productive tension between mobility and rootedness as Bantu-speaking populations became settled in particular regions between the sixth and sixteenth centuries AD. From an archaeological standpoint, careful study of the spatial contexts of recovered artifacts-and of the various human activities that left them behind-captures different forms and scales of mobility that existed alongside the rootedness of mounded settlements occupied over generations. This paper shows how a better und...