Projects
BantuFirst
The First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Human Migration, Language Spread, Climate Change and Early Farming in Late Holocene Central Africa
Vegetation around the settlements of the first Bantu-speakers south of the rainforest
Intimately related to the question of the subsistence economy of the first Bantu speech communities
south of the rainforest is that of their natural environment. One of the big debates about Holocene
Central African vegetation dynamics is whether they are mainly driven by climate change or by
human impact (Schwartz 1992; Brncic et al. 2009; Bayon et al. 2012; Maley et al. 2012; Neumann et
al. 2012b). The relationship between human populations and their environment is still very poorly
understood (Pinçon 1990; Clist 2006c; Neumann et al. 2012a).
Given the ancient and prominent role of forests, trees and wood in the daily lives of local
communities, charcoal fragments are abundant in archaeological layers in Central Africa (Pinçon
1990; Lavachery 2001; Eggert et al. 2006; Picornell-Gelabert et al. 2011). Despite their abundance,
charcoal archives have only rarely been studied in Central Africa, mainly because charcoal
identification in tropical environments is complicated by species richness, synonymy, and the scarcity
of digitized databases. However, Hubau et al. (2012) have tackled several of these problems and
developed a transparent semi-automatic charcoal identification procedure based on the use of
large databases and well-defined characters. Specific difficulties encountered during charcoal
examination could be resolved and a higher level of taxa identification could be obtained through the
optimal visualization of charcoal anatomy obtained through the combination of several imaging
techniques (Hubau et al. 2013a). Systematic analyses have been carried out on large charcoal samples
from both pedoanthracological and archaeological assemblages within the study area of the
proposed project, more specifically in the Mayumbe forest in the southernmost part of the Lower
Guinean rainforest complex (Hubau et al. 2013b; Hubau et al. 2014). As a result, the use of charcoal
as an archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental proxy has substantially been enhanced and our
understanding of both past firewood selection strategies (Hubau et al. 2014) and the temporal
relationships between Holocene droughts, palaeofire and vegetation change in the Lower Congo
(Hubau et al. 2015) has considerably progressed.
The potential of firewood remains with regard to human-environment relationships will be
specifically targeted in the proposed project through collaboration with the project’s main partner, i.e.
Laboratory for Wood Biology and Forest Ecology of Tropical Africa of the Royal Museum for Central
Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, led by Dr. Hans Beeckman, with whom the PI has a long history of
cooperation. Pedoanthracological assemblages give a detailed view of past fire regimes and vegetation
dynamics on an appropriately small spatial scale, but cannot fully reveal the possible role of humans
(yet). Charcoal assemblages within an archaeological context allow to address more specific
research questions on the interaction between early Bantu-speaking settlers south of the forest
and their natural environment, such as [1] from which environment they gathered firewood, [2]
whether they had any preferences with regard to firewood characteristics, and [3] whether forest
type reconstructions from an archaeological assemblage can contribute to the understanding of the
climatic conditions in which they lived. To this end, the proposed project will build on the
preliminary collaboration between archaeologists and linguists from the KongoKing team and
anthracologists that was set up for the historical interpretation of the charcoal data published in Hubau
et al. (2014). It was not only shown how firewood remains from an archaeological context can
contribute to the research questions listed above, but also how the identified wood species can be
crosschecked with historical linguistic evidence in order to shed light on how people’s firewood
preferences evolved through time and differ from those of modern communities. Since plants
playing an important role in the subsistence and daily life of people tend to have specific and timeresistant
names in their languages, the historical linguists within the project team will reconstruct the
names of useful plants, especially those of trees species identified in the sampled charcoal
assemblages, at successive ancestral stages of West-Western Bantu. Special attention will be paid to
matches and mismatches between the tree vocabulary reconstructed in Proto-West-Western
Bantu by the linguists and the tree species exploited by the first Bantu-speaking settlers south of
the rainforest as evidenced from excavated archaeological charcoal remains during the proposed
project. This crosschecking will show us how reliable both methods are for the reconstruction of
subsistence and environment-related prehistory in Central Africa.