Ecological Variables in the Origin and Evolution of African States: the Buganda Example CONRAD P. KOTTAK University of Michigan Anthropologists have been interested in African societies and cultures for several decades. Few will dispute the contributions which British social anthropologists and others have made to the understanding of African institutions, especially in the domains of kinship and marriage, political organization, and most recently in urban studies. Many of these studies, however, have been avowedly synchronic; they are intended as descriptions of societies at a single time level. Even in those cases where the anthropo- logist has been privileged to conduct research within the same society over an extended period of time, the problems of social and cultural change which he documents generally involve modifications of 'traditional' insti- tutions and behavior in the context of colonialism, postcolonialism, and world capitalism. While such studies are extremely important, the processes they describe do not exhaust the limits of the study of change in African society. A surge of interest in precolonial African history has arisen rapidly with the end of colonialism. In the United States, under the guidance of Professor Vansina and others and with the inspiration of certain British historians, the study of African history has become a recognized specialty in many American universities, and one which seems to be in great demand. Anthro- pologists, too, have grown more interested in the African past. Given their long established acquaintance with Africa and the fact that anthropology includes, by virtue of anthropological archaeology, an historical dimension, it seems likely that more and more anthropologists will begin to orient their research interests towards the interpretation of African history. Africa is a most appropriate laboratory for the study of sociocultural process, for the societies of precolonial Africa exhibit a rich diversity in terms of complexity and range of adaptation to a variety of environments. Some of the world's most complex and tightly organized preindustrial civilizations, including Buganda, the subject of this paper, grew up on the African continent, while I wish to thank Elliott P. Skinner and Nan Pendrell for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. 351