Science news
June 2024On 30 May, the federal citizen science community met at the Royal Meteorological Institute to discuss the role of local communities in scientific research. To engage these communities, scientists need to figure out smart and empathetic approaches – a task that forces researchers to rethink their methods all the time. Six concrete projects showed us different ways that research teams rose to the challenge.
May 2024Today we celebrate the International Day for Biodiversity! Africa is home to an enormous variety of species and ecosystems of global importance. To further knowledge of African biodiversity, we study the structure and function of wood, as well as the role of trees and fauna in various African ecosystems.
May 2024The Royal Museum for Central Africa has been organizing true fly (Diptera) training courses for more than 15 years. Initially, these trainings took place in Tervuren, Belgium with a focus on pest fruit fly species (Tephritidae). In the last decade the trainings took place in Africa and also covered trainings on fly families with an important role in pollination, such as hoverflies (Syrphidae), nose flies (Rhiniidae), and tangle-veined flies (Nemestrinidae).
April 2024The Colonial Sources (CoSo) project aims to develop a digital platform as a gateway to archives and knowledge about the shared Belgian, Burundian, Congolese and Rwandan colonial past. The CoSo portal will, for the first time, bring together existing but still fragmented collections and information on the Belgian colonial period. It will also offer educational tools based on often asked questions about Belgian colonialism. The platform targets both researchers and a broad public.
April 2024Maarten Couttenier’s latest book, Anthropology and Race in Belgium and Congo (1839-1922), was published by Routledge earlier this year. It examines the history of physical anthropology in Belgium throughout the 19th century and shows how the notion of ‘race’ shaped various forms of European nationalism as well as imperialism in earlier and later Belgian (attempts at) colonization.
March 2024On this special day, we are highlighting our dear colleague and researcher Caroline Michelier, from the Earth Sciences Department.
February 2024AfricaMuseum was one of seven partners of HOME, a research project on human remains in Belgian collections. This article presents the contributions of the AfricaMuseum as well as the conclusions drawn within the framework of the HOME project.
January 2024A pioneering study in the Kongo Central province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has underscored the critical role of Nature-based solutions in mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss.
October 2023Provenance research on collections from the Global South in Europe is now unavoidable in the fields of museum studies and cultural policy, yet no scholarly work has scrutinized the collections of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium) as a whole.
July 2023‘Cahiers africains’ is the successor to the ‘Cahiers du CEDAF’ series (1971-1992) and has been released on a regular basis since 1993 as a joint publication of the Royal Museum for Central Africa and L’Harmattan (Paris). The 100th volume, which coincides with the 30th anniversary of the series, focuses on wedding celebrations in Africa.