The first director, L. Cahen, organized several projects, but Stone Age research was dealt a psychological blow in 1978 when Cahen’s stratigraphical work at Gombe Point showed that materials can be carried great vertical distances by the ubiquitous Kalahari Sands, which threw into doubt many earlier associations. In the northeastern part of the country, F. van Noten’s meticulous work in Matupi Cave revealed microliths dating to 40,000 b.p.

In central Africa, however, the research focus has shifted to late-archaic Homo sapiens adaptations in the Semliki Valley (Congo), to the Iron Age, and to the beginnings of the so-called Bantu expansion. As early as 1953, Hiernaux suggested that the appearance of iron and dimple-based pottery could be associated with linguist J. Greenberg’s Bantu complex of languages. International research on the linking or disassociation of food production, iron, and particular ceramic types with peoples speaking Bantu languages took off in the late 1950s and 1960s. However, the Bantu hypothesis and the increasing prestige of work on the Iron Age did stimulate work in countries that had almost been completely ignored archaeologically, i.e., in the Central African Republic, Rwanda, and Burundi (linguistic archaeology) and especially in Gabon where the well-funded International Centre for Bantu Civilisations was founded in 1985.

Work in Congo on the presumed ancestors of ethnographic peoples and, particularly, the spectacular excavations at Sanga in the Upemba Depression must be mentioned. This large cemetery was discovered by Maesen of the Tervuren Museum, and preliminary excavations by Hiernaux and Nenquin were undertaken in the 1950s. But it was through an intensive campaign begun in 1974 by Pierre de Maret that we have come to appreciate the 1,000-year sequence of burials and the evidence therein of local growth of social stratification, chieftaincy, and external relations that would anticipate the historical expansion of the Luba empire.

By the 1970s, the search for Iron Age origins and for the “proto-Bantu” homeland had turned to Cameroon. In the southeastern part of that country, there has been an international frenzy of overlapping and generally collaborative research by Cameroonian (R. Asombang and J.-M. Essomba), Belgian (de Maret at Shum Laka and Obobogo), American (Schmidt), French (Warnier, Marliac), Canadian (David), and English (Michael Rowlands) archaeologists. The research continues and is a prime example of the intellectual excitement engendered when historians, linguists, and archaeologists, all from different national research traditions, apply themselves to testing various models and hypotheses for a complex prehistoric process. Since 1983, the German River Reconnaissance Project led by M. Eggert has doggedly surveyed the Congolese river system to extend the search for the first ceramic-producing inhabitants of the equatorial rain forest.

Elsewhere, in the former Afrique Equatoriale Française, work by Lebeuf on the “Sao” of the Lake Chad floodplain continued after national independence. His migration perspective was supplemented by environmentally oriented work on related mounds by G. Connah at Daima in Nigeria and, more recently, by A. Holl’s mortuary sociology at Houlouf in northern Cameroon. Noteworthy also are the late–Stone Age and Iron Age surveys of F. Treinen-Claustre in northeastern Chad and the extensive use of aerial photography by A. Marliac to map Iron Age settlement patterns in northern Cameroon.

Despite these advances in central African prehistory, the postindependence years there cannot compare to the expansion of archaeological research in Madagascar and West Africa. Madagascar and the Comoros Islands had almost no systematic archaeology before 1966 when Pierre Verin began work at seaport sites to investigate the date of first migrations. The Centre d’Art et d’Archéologie at the University of Madagascar organized research into past human geography, which included an aerial photographic survey of more than 16,000 fortified sites by A. Mille. In 1975, Henry Wright produced the first ceramic sequence for the islands, bringing his considerable experience in mesopotamia to bear on the problem of Malagasy state formation. One of his students, Suzanne Kus, has devoted an ethnoarchaeological career to the exploration of the deep-time cosmological ordering of space. These projects