50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (The Evidentiary Plurality — Historical Records as Not Just Written but Including Oral Traditions, Archaeological Material Finds, Reconst…

50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (The Evidentiary Plurality — Historical Records as Not Just Written but Including Oral Traditions, Archaeological Material Finds, Reconstructed Ancient Lexicons of Culture and Belief Through Historical Linguistics, Comparative Ethnography, and Genetics — African Historical Studies Having Already Developed a Long Pedigree in the Correlative Application of These Methods): The records of these histories are not just written. They include oral traditions, the material finds of archaeology, the reconstruction of ancient lexicons of culture, belief, and material life through historical linguistics, the testimony of comparative ethnography long used to unveil the ancient roots of more recent cultural practices, and — most effectively — the correlative findings produced when these different approaches are brought together. Genetics has emerged as a newly important resource, though with interpretive problems of its own. Ehret observes that while world historians increasingly draw on archaeological findings, the other methods remain mostly unfamiliar to them. In African historical studies, by contrast, the correlative application of archaeological, historical linguistic, oral traditional, and comparative ethnographic evidence already possesses a long pedigree and an extensive body of published scholarship. This is a quietly devastating observation: the field that the broader discipline has treated as methodologically impoverished is in fact methodologically richer than the disciplines that patronize it. African historians were forced by the absence of conventional archives to develop more creative, more rigorous, and more interdisciplinary approaches to the past — and in doing so they built a methodological toolkit from which the rest of the profession has everything to learn and nothing to condescend about.