If you are talking about departments IN Africa which include archaeologists and teach it, you need to look at the colonial national model followed, as well as indigenous African attitudes toward archaeological practice. In former British colonies, the traditional separation of archaeology from both social anthropology and the natural sciences in UK has led in some places (e.g. Nigeria) to establishment of Departments of Archaeology. Since anthropology is still a very unpopular discipline among independent African states, and since the link between social anthropology, biological anthropology, and prehistoric archaeology has never been strong in UK (until Hodder & Co. discovered "culture"), archaeologists in smaller-scale settings (the case in most of Africa, where the first 2-3 PhD.'s in archaeology are immediately impressed into service as Directors of Antiquities Departments, heads of museum departments of archaeology, etc.) tend to track into history departments. In my opinion, this is because the first wave of indigenous archaeologists were interested in Iron Age and other relatively recent periods, in which links with ethnohistory, linguistics, and history were strong. Africans practicing archaeology see themselves as documenting history, as so such Latin American archaeologists as Jose Lorenzo, whose now-venerable article in World Archaeology drew the disciplinary and political distinction between archaeology north and south of the Rio Grande: 1981 Archaeology south of the Rio Grande. World Archaeology 13: 190-208. Only slowly is a more anthropological emphasis developing, in part because of the training of so many archaeologists in the U.S. It remains to be seen how the South African institutions, which have combined some social anthropology with their archaeology, will influence indigenous practices in other areas. Perhaps persons more familiar with the French and Belgian traditions in Africanist archaeology can comment on practices in francophone Africa. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez [log in to unmask] Anthropology U. of California Santa Cruz