This chapter is both a review and a preview. It recapitulates, from the earliest to the most recent periods, the broad developments in the history of earlier societies across the five periods of the East-Central African past identified in chapter 2 from the linguistic and archaeological records. It adds to this chronology of historical periods an overview of the major developments in the social and gendered history of the different eras, in this way previewing findings more fully considered in chapters 4–7.

Before Agriculture: East-Central Africa, from the Second Millennium to 100 BCE

For several millennia before the closing centuries BCE, two broad groupings of gatherer-hunter peoples predominated in East-Central Africa. In more northerly areas with higher rainfall lived the peoples who created the Natchikufan cultural tradition. The peoples of this tradition had connections with cultures immediately to the north in the Congo. Whether they had cultural links to the communities called Batwa (“Pygmies”) of the rainforest is still unclear; in more recent history they were wetlands specialists. In the open savannas of the central and more southerly parts of Zambia, the Wilton tool tradition had been established long before the early first millennium BCE. The creators of this tradition can be identified with considerable confidence as Khoisan speakers, who formed part of the wider cultural sphere of the Khoisan peoples living in southern Africa.

In the areas immediately north of East-Central Africa, quite different developments were taking place in the second millennium BCE. Eastern Savanna Bantu-speaking agriculturalists would have begun to settle across the woodland savannas at the southern edge of the equatorial rainforest belt, as the language evidence indicates. The linguistic and archaeological evidence for this history cannot yet be balanced against each other, because these regions remain to be studied archaeologically.