Descripción del proyecto
Nueva información para modelizar la dispersión del pueblo bantú
El pueblo bantú, originario de Camerún, desempeñó un papel fundamental en la dispersión de prácticas agrícolas en África central. Las pruebas de restos vegetales revelan su uso de la arboricultura, cultivando especies del género «Canarium» y la palma de aceite, así como de cultivos de sabana como el caupí y el mijo perla, el sorgo, además de la cría de pollos y ganado. A pesar de estas prácticas agrícolas tempranas, los alimentos dominantes en la actualidad en África central provienen de cultivos forestales del sudeste asiático, como el plátano, la caña de azúcar, el ñame y el taro. En el proyecto BantuAdapts, financiado con fondos europeos, se examinará la antigua economía de la República Centroafricana y Uganda. Su equipo analizará sedimentos de yacimientos arqueológicos a lo largo de rutas migratorias a fin de reconstruir las prácticas de subsistencia prehistóricas por medio del estudio de microrrestos vegetales.
Objetivo
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.
Ámbito científico
- humanitieslanguages and literaturelinguistics
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologyethnoarchaeology
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturehorticulturearboriculture
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy sciencedomestic animalsanimal husbandry
- social sciencessociologydemographyhuman migrations
Programa(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Régimen de financiación
MSCA-PF - MSCA-PFCoordinador
08002 Barcelona
España