Abstract: Archaeologists who work in sub-Saharan Africa (as in other parts of the developing world), are often called upon to justify their research and demonstrate the relevance of their results to broader societal goals and aspirations. Different contexts have evoked different responses to such demands. In the first few decades of post-colonialism, many archaeologists tended to emphasise the role archaeology could play in nation building and in ‘recovering’ Africa’s multiple, pre-colonial histories. As the continent’s different nation states have matured, the strength of such arguments has diminished and, as a consequence, additional uses of the archaeological past have had to be sought. Currently, these include the suggestion that archaeological data on subsistence strategies and settlement patterns and distributions, combined with palaeoenvironmental records, have the potential to challenge many of the environmental narratives that drive international donor policies and interventions that affect African livelihoods. This paper outlines the basis of such debates, and using the example of recent interdisciplinary studies of the origins and history of soil erosion in Kondoa District, Tanzania, examines the potential for similar studies of the long-term, historical ecology of African landscapes.