Description
Book SynopsisLike stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such births. It reconstructs the history of African societies before European contact, employing a provocative combination of archaeology and historical linguistics. The author uncovers what drove each society's developmental path, revealing the motivations behind how societies are born.
Trade ReviewEven scholars who know better tend to assume without thinking that the people the Portuguese found had been the same since time began. - Book News, Inc. ""How Societies Are Born represents a political and agrarian history of a period and region for which absolutely no scholarly histories have been written, and Vansina possesses rare and unmatched skills in marshaling a recalcitrant and multilingual body of historical sources."" - David Schoenbrun, Northwestern University, author of A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity between the Great Lakes to the 15th Century
