and if we accept the premise of that title, then the archaeology of francophone Africa can best be characterized as the marginalized within the insular. Vast portions of ex-French colonies have yet to be trod upon by a prehistorian, but marginalization has an even deeper foundation in the institutionalized scorn for theory, a French national style that is exaggerated when exported to francophone Africa. As P. de Maret despairs, “From a theoretical point of view, apart from the rather pointless discussion over nomenclature, the archaeologists hardly seemed to concern themselves with larger explanatory models” (Maret 1990, 134).

Yet, as de Maret’s pronouncement upon his colleagues in central Africa suggests, self-criticism is franker in Africa than perhaps in any other part of the loose commonwealth of French-speaking nations called La Francophonie. This is one of the several paradoxes (and hidden strengths) of francophone African archaeology. Criticism goes well beyond claims of inadequate methods and meager results. Africans have leveled charges that an effort to train a cadre of indigenous prehistorians, educated in France, was a cynical effort to maintain metropolitan influence, an effort begun only when independence was recognized as an inevitability. Local prehistorians accuse the large French-funded projects of the late 1970s and 1980s of overwhelming African national research priorities, yet some of those same massive-budget projects have been models of interdisciplinary research. France has also funded several national site inventories, a national priority in many countries. Paradoxes are legion in the history of archaeological research in francophone Africa.

It is quite true that theory is dismissed as an “Anglo-Saxon aberration,” yet francophone Africa has been a proving ground for several of the most global theoretical positions as the focus of debates going back to the nineteenth century. An epic struggle between Kulturkreise and culture evolution raged in the forests of central Africa. Proponents of a very narrow reading of culture particularism debated a diffusionist form of culture evolutionism championed by the abbé henri breuil for several decades following World War I, and today, a variety of national styles (German empiricism, Anglo-American processual and postprocessual archaeology, and Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist archaeology) vie with recent trends in “French pragmatics” for the intellectual loyalty of a new generation of African prehistorians.

Most research has been conducted by amateurs using methods antiquated even by metropolitan standards. Yet cream does rise, and the history of each region can boast a handful of crossover practitioners from fields as diverse as medicine, administration, and public works who became infected with a passion for prehistory. Such amateurs set for themselves the highest standards of data collection and analysis. It is quite true that the Bordesian quantitative analysis reforms have been incompletely assimilated and that the days of obsession with “belles pieces” (aesthetically pleasing specimens) are not far past, yet innovations in ethnoarchaeology and in the social and technical analysis of stone tool manufacturing known as chaines operatoires have been imported into France from francophone Africa.

It is also true that the large majority of the techniques of excavation and surface survey are still far from what they could be. Yet the French have created opportunities for the prompt publishing of research monographs by their nationals and by citizens of their ex-colonies that are the envy of the rest of the archaeological world. It is also quite true that post–cold war changes in the political balance among nations have led to a reassertion of France’s claim to exclusive monetary and cultural influence over the lands of La Francophonie, yet there are few other places in the world where so many national styles comingle—as do Malian, French, English, Norwegian, German, American, Swiss, and Dutch in the middle Niger of Mali; Cameroonian, French, Belgian, American, and English in the so-called proto-Bantu homeland of Cameroon; or Madagascan, French, Swedish, and American on the island of madagascar.

Francophone Africa is a vast area with a rich and astonishingly diverse (and largely unappreciated) past. There are two natural breaks in the history of investigations. It is important to understand