This chapter provides a review of the current state of knowledge of early agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa from its inception in different regions to c. 500 ce.
‘Agriculture' is used here in its broadest sense to imply any and all forms of food production, including subsistence systems largely reliant on the cultivation of crops (glossed here as ‘farming', although this took many forms, from shifting cultivation to horticulture and even forest gardening), those that rely primarily on tending livestock (referred to here as either ‘herding' or ‘pastoralism'), and those that entail a broadly balanced combination of farming and herding (termed ‘agropastoralism' here).
As the following discussion highlights, such broad categories mask considerable diversity and tend to simplify often quite complex systems of food production. Arboriculture, for example - as perhaps best indicated by the exploitation of oil palm in and at the margins of the rainforest belt but also evident in the savanna parklands of West Africa and in parts of the dry nyika hinterland of the East African coast - provided an important component of many agricultural systems from quite an early date.Co-existence of different food production systems in the same landscape often enhanced food security and risk-reduction strategies. Their co-existence also required mediation by different groups of human participants through a complex of social relations and exchange mechanisms. The spread of agriculture throughout sub-Saharan Africa also entailed considerable population movement, although perhaps more often in the form of incremental spread than actual intentional migration, due in no small part to the uneven distribution of soils, vegetation complexes, and rainfall regimes that were suited to either crop cultivation or livestock herding or some combination of these with foraging, fishing, and hunting. The farming and herding communities that moved into new areas brought with them their own social and material practices and had their own languages, all of which would have diverged from those among the pre-existing autochthonous hunter-fisher- forager populations that already inhabited these areas, thereby creating quite diverse ethnolinguistic mosaics and social landscapes. That both immigrant and autochthonous populations interacted, exchanged goods and services, incorporated elements of each other's practices and beliefs, and also intermarried, is well attested by linguistic and genetic histories and the material archaeological record.
That at times these relationships and interactions were fraught with tension and even hostility also seems probable, and can perhaps be inferred from elements of the material record - especially where traces of physical violence have survived, quite literally, embodied and embedded in human remains. It is also worth bearing in mind that even though different agricultural systems were well established across most of sub-Saharan Africa by c. 500 ce, and even more so by the end of the first millennium ce, there remained many vibrant hunter-gatherer populations from the rainforest to the Kalahari and from West to East Africa for centuries afterwards, such that their living descendants are still found in many parts of the continent to this day.With a few notable exceptions, the nature and significance of these interactions have only relatively recently become a feature of archaeological research. Moreover, because of the common problems of equifinality that often limit interpretation of archaeological records, determining their precise nature at different times and in different places in the past remains quite challenging methodologically, analytically, and even in theoretical terms. Equally hard to define, perhaps even more so, are the processes of domestication, how and why it occurred in different localities, what mechanisms were involved, and how it may be identified from archaeological and palaeoecological traces.