Interdisciplinary methods involving language have become nearly indispensable for some historians of Africa, particularly those working on the distant past, for whom comparative historical linguistics and oral traditions offer glimpses of a time without written forms of record keeping. Especially during the past half century, both approaches have opened up new possibilities for recovering reliable narratives throughout sub-Saharan Africa for periods before the nineteenth-century advent of colonial rule.1 As more disciplinarians embraced nontraditional methods, longue durée approaches spanning millennia became common and, to some extent, familiar. By necessity, however, the use of language-centered methods require proficiency in multiple disciplines. Those already committed to mixed methods frequently work with archaeological and climatological evidence as well. These scholars tend to be, in the words of Albaugh and de Luna, “unrepentant disciplinary appropriators” (5), sampling what they need to construct the most complete and informative histories possible.
The use of language-centered methods...