This roundtable is an opportunity for historians, archaeologists, and historian-linguists to discuss with the audience critical issues emerging over the last half decade in the field of African history regarding the precolonial African world (before the 1800s). The aim is to 1) highlight questions around research methods; 2) examine Africa’s impacts in both the eastern and western hemispheres; 3) share groundbreaking research emerging on Africa’s precolonial eras; and 4) problematize the turn away from early African history among scholars. With a growing focus on colonial and post-colonial issues in Africanist scholarship and a decline in early African history, the scholars on this panel suggest it is important for historians and archaeologists to forefront the importance of precolonial histories in understanding Africa and its diasporas into the present.

While the colonial archive has often been relied upon, it poses various challenges for understanding and reconstructing early African history. African histories have long been efficaciously transmitted through oral record keeping methods and effectively recorded with material objects rather than written documents. Keeping in mind the value placed on oral sources in the precolonial world, this roundtable builds on new and growing momentum in interdisciplinary research. The panelists focus on explaining outcomes of their own research that has: 1) opened new opportunities for work on African history by drawing on and further developing interdisciplinary approaches; 2) engaged questions about people’s motivations, intellectual strategies, value systems, as well as technologies and institutions so often focused on in histories; and/or 3) begun to develop cross regional discussions and collaborations with scholars working on similar issues in other continents, regions, and time periods.This group of scholars who study early African histories in Eastern, Southern, and Western Africa invite the audience to engage in discussions about how we are reconstructing the illusive aspects of affect, identity, social values, and legacies in Africa and its Atlantic world Diasporas. As archaeologists and historians of Africa, we regularly pull data from the seemingly obscure cracks of the past.