This dissertation comprises an archaeological investigation of landscape occupation, food-getting repertoires, political and economic networks, and cosmological traditions over the last 3,000 years in what is now the Sandawe homeland of north-central Tanzania. Contemporary ethno-linguistic classification has been used as a proxy for reconstructing long-term socio-political and techno-economic histories of Africa. As the only location where all African language families exist side-by-side, north-central Tanzania has been described as one of the most ethnologically complex on the continent. Based on ethnographic, oral historical, linguistic, and genetic evidence, the Sandawe homeland has been characterized as an isolated social and ecological refuge for a relict population of Khoisan-speaking foragers. Khoisan-speakers are thought to be related branches of a deep-time lineage, ethnographic observations of which have contributed to an anthropological archetype: that of the low-latitude, immediate-return, egalitarian band. This social form has been described as stable and conservative baseline from which later complexity emerged. Thus, a dominant concern of scholarship on the Sandawe has been to “peel back” the effects of their interactions with food-producers to reveal the Khoisan cultural core, which is then projected into the past. Categorizing the Sandawe not only as Khoisan foragers (linguistically and culturally) but as autochthonous (that is, having emerged in situ) has led to historical reconstructions of the group that are, in effect, timeless. Oral histories describe a foraging past, but the Sandawe were engaged in a diverse food-getting repertoire that included agriculture and pastoralism at the time of their first ethnographic descriptions, and foraging contributes significantly to present-day Sandawe identity. Taken together, these factors make the homeland an ideal case study for examining interdisciplinary models concerning the spread of food production and the subsequent relations between foragers and food-producers – namely, those of food-producing frontiers and political economic mosaics. Remarkably, archaeology has seldom featured in reconstructions of Sandawe pasts even though the group and their homeland are often evoked in long-term histories of Africa. During two seasons of fieldwork between 2015 and 2018, the Usandawe Landscape Archaeology Project gathered multi-scalar, landscape-level artifactual assemblages through systematic surface and subsurface sampling, selective surveys of rockshelters, and excavations at open-air and rockshelter sites. Over 375 sites were recorded, yielding artifacts ranging from the Early Stone Age (up to 2.6 mya) to the present. Material culture and spatial analyses indicate that food production and extra-regional exchange were longer established and followed different trajectories than has been proposed for the homeland. A diverse food-getting repertoire that entailed both foraging and food-production is time-deep in the homeland, and inhabitants of this region had well-established links to networks that ranged in scale from the Rift Valley zone of eastern Africa to the commodity flows of the Indian Ocean World and global modernity. This suggests that the region’s characterization as a hinterland is based on a misrecognition of how its inhabitants have engaged with networks extending beyond the homeland through time rather than their actual isolation from these networks. Beyond interpretations based on ethnography, linguistics, and recent history, little material evidence exists concerning how the diverse foraging communities of eastern Africa organized themselves and in relation to changing regional milieus. This dissertation is one of the first to apply the methods of landscape and historical archaeology to the study of foraging in Tanzania rather than to complex societies of the interior or urban, coastal societies with well-documented ties to maritime trade networks and colonial states. In addition to reexamining the history of the homeland in relation to long-term regional trends, this dissertation contributes to scholarship on forager diversity, the spread of food production, precolonial political and economic systems, and interdisciplinary approaches to prehistory and history. Most broadly, this dissertation contributes to reexaminations of the forager category and its role in reconstructions of African and, by extension, human history.