Analysis of the cultural history of the northern coast in the ‘medieval’ period encounters two major difficulties, the information available for assessment and the terminology. (Thus, any resolution of the earlier part of this period, especially, has to be very speculative and stated in the broadest terms possible.) Coastal historians are not faced with the usual problem of paucity of sources. Indeed, they are, if anything, especially fortunate among Africanists for having a comparatively large number of written documents and recorded oral traditions at their disposal, all of which have been augmented in the past twenty-odd years by the published results of various crucial archaeological and ethnolinguistic studies. Each type of source used, be it oral tradition(s), written eyewitness accounts, archaeological reports, or linguistic studies, presents its own peculiar set of strengths and pitfalls of which the historian must be aware if he is going to use it effectively. Fortunately, these various sources of historical data often complement each other in terms of their relative strengths and in the nature of the information they provide. The historian, then, draws upon as wide a range of information as possible, if he is wise, in his historical interpretations. While this usually is quite rewarding, problems inevitably appear in efforts to reconcile different types of data and the terminology applied to these data, which are often at some variance with each other.