The Contributions of Linguistics and Archaeology to the Understanding of the Peoples of the Southern Bauchi Area

The Southern quarter of the present-day Bauchi State of Nigeria is what is generally referred to as the Southern Bauchi Area. It is made up of the present-day south and south-eastern portions of Bauchi Local Government Area, Dass Local Government Area and then the Tafawa Balewa Local Government Area. The north-eastern portion of the Southern Bauchi Area which stretches from Bauchi Town, to as far south as Gakdi, and eastward to the Yankari Game Reserve, covering an area of about 40 by 60 kilometres square is predominantly occupied by the Jarawa speakers. To the immediate south of this area are the Sayawa who occupy most of Tafawa Local Government area, while to the west, occupying most of Dass Local Government Area are the Barawa and the Bankalawa ethnic groups. These four dominant ethnic groups in this vast area all trace their origin to the Present-day Borno State, particularly from the Kukawa area. They therefore see in themselves a common ancestry and thus a common ancestral homeland. And as a result the cultural practices of the ethnic groups are similar with a tendency for the few areas of variations in their cultural practices to merge into a common form in the near future. However, Linguistic studies in the area show that the ethnic groups of the Southern Bauchi Area belong to two totally different language families. Whereas the Jarawa and the Bankalawa groups belong to the Jarawa Bantu sub-group of the Benue-Congo language family, the Barawa and the Sayawa belong to the Chadic language family. Archaeological investigations have also shown that unlike the general believe of a common homeland in the Borno area the Barawa and the Sayawa’s homeland most likely traceable to the hills within the vicinity of Bauchi Town. This paper which is an attempt of a multidisciplinary approach, using linguistic correlation with archaeology, therefore investigates what earlier populations, such as the Barawa of this area could have been like in terms of the evolution of social organizations and cultural processes before the migrant Jarawan Bantu populations came in. It is only through such an interdisciplinary approach that we could begin to understand the history of the Southern Bauchi Area and indeed Central Nigerian societies as a whole.