AFRICA IN TIME-PERSPECTIVE: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources

175pp. 12mo, sewn binding in red cloth. Rear hinge starting, clean and sound otherwise; DJ tips a bit worn. 'The book is based on a series of lectures given in the University of Ghana in the academic year 1960-61. Their purpose was to explain the links between the various kinds of evidence about the past that are available to the historian: archaeology, oral tradition, linguistics, ethnol-ogy, ethno-botany, ethno-zoology, human biology and epidemiology, art, etc. The author writes: a methodology of historical reconstruction, must be more than a collection of methods; it must provide a synthesis of all the individual methods; this involves not only determining the inter-relation-ships between different classes of data, but the problem of weighing one set of data against another in the same class, or of one class against another'. In his final chapter the author gives some idea of how this organization can be effected.' (From the DJ flap).