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Archaeo-linguistic perspectives on Bantu language and population dynamics in the Lower Congo region of Central-Africa| old_uid | 15795 |
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| title | Archaeo-linguistic perspectives on Bantu language and population dynamics in the Lower Congo region of Central-Africa |
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| start_date | 2015/06/12 |
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| schedule | 11h-12h15 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The wider Lower Congo region of Central-Africa is home to the so-called ‘Kikongo language cluster (KLC)’, a disparate continuum of closely related Bantu languages that spread over large parts of four neighbouring countries, i.e. Angola including Cabinda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Republic of the Congo and Gabon. Recent phylogenetic research has corroborated that this vast language group constitutes a discrete clade within Western Bantu and that its centre of expansion is most likely situated to the north-east of the Lower Congo region (de Schryver et al. 2015 (forthcoming)). A recent interdisciplinary review of evidence from biogeography, palynology, geology, historical linguistics and archaeology has in its turn pointed out that a climate-induced opening of the Central-African forest block around 2500 BP – and not agriculture as is widely believed – was probably responsible for the rapid southward expansion of Bantu speech communities across the Equator (Bostoen et al. 2015). It favoured, among other things, the introduction of Bantu languages into the area north of the Malebo Pool on the Congo River in the approximate vicinity of the Batéké plateau, from where speakers of the KLC’s most common recent ancestor may have started to spread further west.
This tentative location of the KLC homeland to the north-east of the Lower Congo region is difficult to test archaeologically due to the paucity of excavations in that specific area. Moreover, it seems at odds with the currently available archaeological evidence within the Lower Congo area itself. In this paper, we have a closer look at the matches and mismatches between the linguistics and archaeology and what they tell on the expansion of early Bantu speech communities in the Lower Congo region.
We also consider how the earliest ceramic traditions relate to subsequent ceramic traditions and to which extent this can be correlated with evolution of language in the Lower Congo region. While no other language group than the KLC is present in the Lower Congo region, its ceramic sequence since 2700 BP clearly testifies to several clear-cut ruptures. If not with the spread of Bantu languages or the settlement of new Bantu speech communities, it remains to be established with which kind of historical developments these significant innovations in the ceramic production of the Lower Congo region can be linked. Phenomena such as political centralization, elite formation and economic integration certainly had an impact on the evolution of both language and material culture in this area which hosted the emblematic kingdom of the Kongo as well as several closely related polities and was pivotal in both regional and international trade networks. This makes the Lower Congo region a challenging area for archaeo-linguistic studies, such as those carried out by the KongoKing research group (see http://www.kongoking.org). |
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| responsibles | Coupé |
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