•West Africa is one of the most complex regions of the world, linguistically speaking
•Three unrelated language phyla meet and
interact there and there are also traces of language
isolates, i.e. languages of prior populations
•The geographical fragmentation of these language groups
suggests considerable movement and ‘layering’ in prehistory
•In principle it should be possible to correlate
these with archaeology
•In practice, the density of archaeological
sites is far too low to put forward more than
speculations