Descrizione del progetto
Informazioni approfondite per creare modelli della diffusione del popolo bantu
Il popolo bantu ha svolto un ruolo cruciale nella diffusione delle pratiche agricole in tutta l’Africa centrale, a partire dal Camerun. I reperti provenienti dai resti vegetali svelano il suo uso dell’arboricoltura, che comprendeva il ricorso all’olio di palma e al Canarium, nonché colture della savana quali il fagiolo dall’occhio e il miglio perlato, oltre a sorgo, pollame e bovini. Nonostante queste pratiche agricole precoci, i principali alimenti nell’Africa centrale provengono dalle colture silvicole del Sud-est asiatico quali banane, zucchero di canna, igname e taro. Il progetto BantuAdapts, finanziato dall’UE, esaminerà l’economia della Repubblica centrafricana e dell’Uganda. Mediante l’analisi di sedimenti provenienti dai siti archeologici lungo le rotte migratorie, il progetto si propone di ricomporre il quadro delle pratiche di sussistenza preistoriche attraverso lo studio dei micro-resti vegetali.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
- humanitieslanguages and literaturelinguistics
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologyethnoarchaeology
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturehorticulturearboriculture
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy sciencedomestic animalsanimal husbandry
- social sciencessociologydemographyhuman migrations
Programma(i)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Meccanismo di finanziamento
MSCA-PF - MSCA-PFCoordinatore
08002 Barcelona
Spagna