I started to write this book in 1983, with previous editions appearing in 1987 and 2001 and a Japanese translation in 1993. Any book that originated so long ago and has remained in print for so long will become seriously out of date, but this is particularly the case for a publication about later African archaeology, which has seen an enormous increase in research activity in recent years. I am therefore very grateful to Cambridge University Press for the opportunity to provide a third edition. In doing so, I feel it essential to stress two points. First, people are sometimes unconvinced about the newness of new editions, but this really is a new edition and I hope that it will assist those who have ignored the second edition and continued to cite the outdated first edition. Second, preparing a new edition of a book will inevitably be constrained to some extent by the thinking that influenced its original content and form, in this instance many years ago; the only way to prevent this is to write a completely new book.

Failing this, what is new about this ‘new’ edition? First, it is larger and covers the whole continent, not just tropical Africa, like the two previous editions. This has meant the addition of three completely new chapters, on Egypt, North Africa, and South Africa. Although the book is consequently longer, the extra chapters could only be added by also shortening some of the chapters that already existed. In addition, those chapters have required considerable additions to include recent research, and as a result parts of some of them have been substantially rewritten or subjected to numerous smaller changes. Inevitably this has resulted in the deletion of older source material, wherever it could be replaced by newer information. This has included the replacement of some illustrations, as well as the addition of new ones. The whole process has taken more than three years but I remain concerned about recent publications that might have been missed; in spite of the Internet, accessing sources remains one of the main difficulties for the writers of syntheses. However, as far as possible, I have tried to include a representative sample of recently published material. I hope that not too many people will think that I have ignored their work.