Bo o k Re v i e w

Archaeology, Language, and the African Past. By Roger Blench. AltaMira Press, Lanham, 2006, 388 pp. ISBN 978-0-7591-0466-2 (paperback). US$ 47.95.

Roger Blench’s Archaeology, Language, and the Afri- requiring the assumption of full domestication. Taking can Past is a valuable book in many respects. It serves, this distinction into account makes a great difference in above all, as a reference which the practitioners of how one interprets the interface between the archaeo- one discipline can use to learn something about the logical and linguistic testimony of plant manipulation. literature of other potentially correlative disciplines. Blench engages this issue with respect to sorghum. He Blench’s own proposals in the book sometimes sum up also cites Dorian Fuller’s suggestion that the rarity of a current consensus but, at least in the case of language this grain crop in the available sites may simply be due evidence and the discussions of the language family to lack of excavation in the right places (p. 214). relationships, too often add more untested ideas and speculative propositions to the mix. In consequence, the Inevitably, a survey of so wide a scope will miss sweep of its coverage, though very wide indeed, does some important sources. An example on the linguistic not make it a one-stop reference, but rather a starter historical side is Kairn Kl i e m a n ’s ‘The Pygmies Were guide to the specialist sources one needs to consult on Our Compass’ (2003), a major recent work seeking to a great many of the themes and controversies of deep- recover the long-term history of the equatorial rainforest time African history. hunter-gatherers (the so-called ‘Pygmies’). Also miss- ing is the work of Mohamed Nuuh Al i (1985), which One notable service of the book is to bring together provides a revised and more complex understanding in one volume a very wide array of the disparate materi- of how and when camel raising took hold in the Horn als, as of 2006, bearing on the histories of animals and of Africa. Ali’s conclusions differ markedly from the plants prominent in the evolution of food production picture presented by Blench (pp. 251–252), who relies in Africa. The survey presentations of the available on earlier work by Bernd He i n e (1978). Both Ali’s and archaeological, botanical, and zoological evidence Heine’s studies are based on solid historical linguistic for these plants and animals are accessible and often reconstructions, but Heine did not have access to exten- provide good informative detail. Blench has published sive and detailed camel lexicons from all the Soomaali on most of these topics previously, but in a variety of languages as Ali did. Similarly Blench, while citing individual articles of varying accessibility, so it is es- Ns u k k a & d e Ma r e t (1974) to support the idea that the pecially useful to now have these materials all together lexical evidence is ambiguous on ironworking spread, is in one place. apparently not aware of Eh r e t (2001a), which presents a large body of convergent evidence for the spread of iron- An important issue for scholars of early African working along several major routes across the southern food production is the distinction between cultivation half of Africa. Other readers may have further sugges- and domestication. It seems quite likely, as more than tions as to missed sources. Nevertheless, considering one student of this field has argued, that a recurrent the breadth of the topics Blench confronts, his overall interbreeding of cultivated with wild forms of the same coverage of the literature seems remarkably full. plants continued over a very long period in several parts of Africa. The reconstructed lexemes of plant food ex- On the linguistic side, this volume is remarkable ploitation, especially the verb lexicon, might well imply in a different way. The discussion of the broad issues cultivation at a relatively early stage in one or another of linguistic analysis and of the pitfalls and the gen- African family (e.g., Eh r e t forthcoming), without at all eral possibilities of this kind of evidence is generally

DOI 10.3213/1612-1651-10113 Published online in September 2008 © Africa Magna Verlag, Frankfurt M. Journal of African Archaeology Vol. 6 (2), 2008, pp. 25 -266 1 Book Review unexceptionable. Blench provides an introduction on his or her own full, systematic reconstruction of the pp. 48–52, for example, to the significance of linguistic family. Only after that has been done can one build innovations and how to interpret them in establishing a credible history based on the language evidence. which languages within a wider family have closer re- There is simply no other alternative if one wishes to use lationship to each other (subgrouping). The importance linguistic evidence in reconstructing the past. Without of regular sound correspondence in establishing the this basis one cannot even make informed decisions as cognation (relatedness) of different words is, in passing, to which proposed subclassifications of a family better given its due, as is the significance of breaking down fit the evidence. the morphological components (affixes and stems) of the words one compares. In practice linguists, lacking as yet a full system- atic reconstruction, do possess a large body of theory In actual execution, however, this linguistic so- and experience to fall back on that can help in generat- phistication is often nowhere to be found. And that ing fairly sophisticated guesses about which histories brings us to what is probably the most important service are more likely than others. But, as I have written in this review can provide for non-linguist readers: an another context (Eh r e t forthcoming), “If one does not explanation of where the linguistic evidence works in undertake rigorous linguistic historical reconstruction the book and where it does not, and why. first, or does not make use of existing such reconstruc- tions, it does not matter how sophisticated one’s un- The essential first requirement for tracking the derstanding of the possibilities and pitfalls of historical histories of individual words is the existence of a sys- linguistics. One can indeed make educated guesses and, tematic phonological reconstruction of the language often, guesses with a high probability of being correct, family or families in which the words occur. Because but guesses they remain nevertheless.” sound change histories in languages proceed accord- ing to regular rules, the systematic formulation of such Generating evidence-based guesses is the tack changes in a language family constitutes the essential taken in Archaeology, Linguistics, and the African Past. analytical apparatus for determining whether the sur- Except for a very few instances, the historical argu- face similarities between two words of like meaning ments about specific sets of words generally proceed are due to chance, to borrowing, or to actual common without the essential backup of a systematic reconstruc- derivation from a root word in the proto-language. In tion. Even in the case of the Eastern Cushitic branch addition, it is essential to correctly break down the mor- of the Cushitic languages, where the phonological re- phological structure of the words, explicitly identifying construction is full, generally accepted by those in the the structural division of a lexeme into the stem and any field, and not at all in contention, Blench makes no affixal elements (prefixes and suffixes), whenever this use of this critical apparatus to validate his proposed bears on explaining the history of the word. (By stem comparisons. Even more surprisingly, in at least three is meant the root element of the word, distinct from any instances his comparisons ignore the long-established prefixes or suffixes attached to it.) Words in different Bantu reconstruction, and in another instance, the simi- languages of a particular family can be established as larly long-established Semitic reconstruction. As a re- cognate reflexes of an ancient root word only if the stem sult his proposed cognate forms sometimes do amount element is specified and the phonological components to sophisticated guesswork, likely to prove out once a of the stem (vowels, consonants, etc.) show regular systematic phonological reconstruction is available, but sound correspondences throughout. The lack of regular at other times they are gravely off base. correspondence at any point in a word stem normally indicates that we are dealing with a later word borrow- In keeping with the book’s chosen tack, Blench ing or with a chance resemblance (see Eh r e t 2000 for uses the sign # to mark a hypothesized root not backed a simplified introduction to these issues). up by a systematic phonological reconstruction. An alternative sign, the asterisk, of course, is the linguists’ Blench takes the position that the existing recon- mark denoting a root that is founded on a systematic structions of various African language families have not reconstruction. been proven. Now a person can legitimately argue that a particular reconstruction is wrong or that it is conten- Just three tables, 1.15, 1.16, and 9.7, depend on tious and therefore suspect. But if one still intends to fully established correspondences to make their cases. reconstruct past developments from linguistic evidence, Table 1.15 provides a reconstruction of proto-Berber then there are just two possible courses of action. The ‘goat’ with unexceptionable supportive attestations person must either set about dissecting, critiquing, and from individual languages. Here the sound correspond- revising the existing reconstruction or else undertake ences are known and applied. Table 1.16 draws on

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