Description du projet
Des idées pour modéliser la diffusion du peuple bantou
Les Bantous, originaires du Cameroun, ont joué un rôle crucial dans la diffusion des pratiques agricoles en Afrique centrale. Des vestiges végétaux révèlent qu’ils pratiquaient l’arboriculture, notamment l’huile de palme et le Canarium, ainsi que les cultures de savane telles que le niébé et le mil à chandelle, le sorgho, les poulets et le bétail. Malgré ces pratiques agricoles précoces, les aliments qui prédominent aujourd’hui en Afrique centrale proviennent des cultures forestières d’Asie du Sud-Est, telles que la banane, la canne à sucre, l’igname et le taro. Le projet BantuAdapts, financé par l’UE, examinera l’ancienne économie de la République centrafricaine et de l’Ouganda. En analysant les sédiments provenant de sites archéologiques situés le long des routes migratoires, le projet vise à reconstituer les pratiques de subsistance préhistoriques grâce à l’étude des microrestes végétaux.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
- 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
Régime de financement
MSCA-PF - MSCA-PFCoordinateur
08002 Barcelona
Espagne