Bantu Genesis An Inquiry into Some Problems of Early Bantu History

recently launched a major research project concerning the origins of the Bantu-speaking peoples who to-day number some seventy millions and occupy most of Africa south of the Equator. At first sight it may seem surprising that this project is being launched under the direction of an archaeologist, Dr. Brian Fagan, and from an East African base which is clearly far from the centre of the Bantu world. How, you may ask, can any archaeologist possibly know what kind of language was spoken by the subjects of bis investigation? Is it not one of the first principles of archaeology that it is about cultures and not about peoples, and that an archaeologist should never assume an ethnic identity for the makers of any particular culture unless he can demonstrate a really convincing continuity between that culture and some historically identifiable human society? I though that maybe the best response I could make to this invitation from the Royal Society of Arts would be to try and fill in some of the background thinking which has led to the definition of the Bantu Origins project in its present form. Granting from the start tha