The East African Neolithic: An alternative view

Abstract

The East African Neolithic has been attributed to the migration of food- producing populations from the Sudan and Ethiopia. The migrants are thought to have entered the region via northern Kenya. Attempts have been made not only to reconstruct the routes taken by those migrants, but also to establish their linguistic and/or ethnic identity. These attempts have treated Neolithic pottery “wares” as discrete cultural entities and correlated them with specific linguistic and/or ethnic groups. The main problem with this approach is that it minimizes the contribution that contact and exchange or trade may have made to culture change. It also denies the groups concerned the dynamism that appears to have characterized their relationships with each other and with their environment. The present paper offers an alternative interpretation of the Neolithic phenomenon. The similarities and differences in material culture, like the ones that have been used to define the pottery “wares” in question, are reflections of the dynamic relationships that existed between the people responsible for its production and consumption. Production and consumption of the “wares” could have taken place among individuals living in a given area or among different villages or communities living as far apart as the Central Rift and the Lake Victoria basin