This article looks at the way archaeology and history have been practised and taught at the Livingstone Museum, Zambia and the University of Zambia in relation to each other as closely allied disciplines between 1973 and 2016. It identifies some of the areas in which they have either collaborated well, or need to do so, and those that set them apart in their common aim to study the past.

If colonial anthropologists produced knowledge essential to the exercise of colonial power, colonial historians no less denied the existence of African history before colonialism than assumed that the history of Zambia and of the African continent in general, was the history of Western imperial entrepreneurship (see, for examples, Gann 1964; Gann and Duignan 1967; Gelfand 1961).