Christopher Ehret is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of many books, including Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (UC Press), An African Classical Age, and, most recently, The Civilizations of Africa.

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments PART ONE. EVIDENCE AND METHOD 1. Methods and Myths 2. Writing History from Linguistic Evidence 3. Historical Inference from Transformations in the Vocabularies of Culture 4. Historical Inference from Word Borrowing 5. Linguistic Dating PART TWO. APPLICATIONS 6. History in the Sahara: Society and Economy in the Early Holocene 7. Social Transformation in the Horn of Africa, 500 BCE to 500 CE 8. Recovering the History of Extinct Societies: A Case Study from East Africa 9. Cultural Diffusion in the Atlantic Age: American Crops in East Africa Appendix 1. Outline Classification of Afrasian (Afroasiatic): Diagnostic Branch Innovations Appendix 2. Proto-Afrasian and Proto-Erythraic Subsistence Appendix 3. Development of Nilo-Saharan Lexicons of Herding and Cultivation Appendix 4. Interpreting the Ethiosemitic Cognation Matrix Appendix 5. Cushitic Loanwords in Ethiosemitic Core Vocabulary Index

"[A] valuable book which deserves to assume its rightful position as required reading for students and scholars of American history." -- Neil Kodesh Journal Of African History