Project description
Insights to model the spread of the Bantu people
The Bantu people played a crucial role in the spread of farming practices throughout Central Africa, originating from Cameroun. Evidence from plant remains reveals their use of arboriculture, including oil palm and Canarium, as well as savannah crops such as cowpea and pearl millet, and sorghum, chickens and cattle. Despite these early agricultural practices, today’s dominant foods in Central Africa come from southeast Asian forest crops such as bananas, sugarcane, yams and taro. The EU-funded BantuAdapts project will examine the ancient economy of the Central African Republic and Uganda. By analysing sediment from archaeological sites along migration routes, the project aims to piece together the prehistoric subsistence practices through the study of plant microremains.
Objective
The Bantu Expansion was a transformative human migration identified with linguistics that spread farming over much of Africa. There are competing theories to explain how Bantu people spread agriculture from their origin in Cameroun across one of the largest continental masses on Earth into regions inhospitable for farming, such as the Congolian forests and the Zambezian savannahs. Bantu people are thought to have adopted agriculture in the Sahel before undertaking a series of migrations through forest or savannah corridors, east of the Atlantic coastal forest and possibly along the coast, gradually bringing a stock-raising and crops to the entirety of Central Africa. Plant remains show the use of arboriculture (oil palm, Canarium), and savannah crops (cowpea and pearl millet), while later migrations incorporated sorghum, chicken, and cattle. However, forest crops such as banana, sugarcane, yams and taro (that came from southeast Asia) are the dominant foods in Central Africa today. However, it is unknown if these crops powered the Bantu Expansion. Africa was a heterogeneous landscape of forager-farmer-pastoralists interactions and some Bantu adaptations to the humid environments might be from pre-Bantu agriculturists, for example, use of southeast Asian crops. This project will investigate the prehistoric economy in two poorly explored areas of Central Africa, through reconstructing subsistence with plant microremains (phytoliths and starch) using sediment from archaeological sites along the envisaged migration routes in Central African Republic and Uganda. The resulting data will be combined with archaeological data, demographic parameters and geography to model these expansions and test hypothesised routes against linguistically inferred routes in savannah corridors and forest. These results will provide the first reconstruction of the early food producer economy, while modelling will assess the pathways of this transformative event.
Fields of science
- humanitieslanguages and literaturelinguistics
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologyethnoarchaeology
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturehorticulturearboriculture
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy sciencedomestic animalsanimal husbandry
- social sciencessociologydemographyhuman migrations
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
MSCA-PF - MSCA-PFCoordinator
08002 Barcelona
Spain