INTRODUCTION Thinking Across the African Past: Interdisciplinarity and Early History Kathryn M. de Luna & Jeffrey B. Fleisher & Susan Keech McIntosh # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 Introduction The contents of this special issue of African Archaeological Review stem from a conference convened at Rice University in March, 2011, “Thinking across the African Past: Archaeological, Linguistic and Genetic Research on Precolonial Afri- can History,” and reflect a renewed interest in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Africa’ s early past (Blench & MacDonald 1999; Swanepoel et al. 2008; Stahl 2009, 2010; Stahl & LaViolette 2009; Tishkoff et al. 2009; Delius & Schoeman 2010; Mulaudzi et al. 2010; Pakendorf et al. 2011). The conference sought both to showcase new, explicitly interdisciplinary work on African history and to create an opportunity for dialog with scholars working on similar problems in Europe, Asia, and Latin America (see Appendix). Conference invitations charged the participants with two tasks. First, it was hoped that they would engage earlier criticism of attempts at correlating streams of historical data from different methodologies and even propose alternative means of connecting historical records. Yet, such new methodologies needed to respect the production and analysis of each form of evidence within discipline- specific epistemologies. Second, it was assumed that the range of participants would allow debate to move past disciplinary gridlock by identifying how distinctive, discipline-specific knowledge can contribute to African historiography. Thus, the con- ference was convened to invigorate discussion of and beyond the confirmation para- digm, in which scholars seek out evidence from other historical disciplines to confirm the when and where of their own conclusions and, as a result of this limited interdisci- plinary engagement, confine the interpretive step of historical reconstruction to the evidence from their own discipline (see also Robertshaw 2000). The organization of the conference and composition of the panels were vital to meeting these goals. Prominent scholars in archaeology, linguistics, and genetics opened the conference with a series of comments on the state of research on early Afr Archaeol Rev (2012) 29:75–94 DOI 10.1007/s10437-012-9123-y K. M. de Luna (*) : J. B. Fleisher : S. K. McIntosh Rice University, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: kdeluna@rice.edu