ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews changing approaches to the anthropological, historical, and archaeological study of ethnicity' and some of the more relevant insights from ethno archaeology before going on to consider how archaeologists working in Eastern Africa have responded to these theoretical developments. It examines the consequences of prevailing assumptions for the interpretation of the region's later Holocene archaeology and to suggest avenues for future research and alternative conceptual frameworks. The idea that ethnicity was self-evident, primordial, and the primary factor behind the structuring of material culture variability was central to the culture history school of archaeology that dominated the discipline from the late 19th century into the 1960s. The rise of archaeological interest in these early farming and iron-using societies and their descendants also coincided with the emergence of African history as a legitimate academic discipline. Earlier archaeological approaches, couched in terms of a primordialist construct, endeavoured but failed to identify discrete bounded units.
