Moving Histories: Bantu Language Expansions, Eclectic Economies, and Mobilities

Abstract

This essay interprets a classification of Africa's Bantu languages which used statistical tools guided by assumptions about farming and its chronology to analyze fresh vocabulary evidence. It shows a peeling movement from Cameroon's grassfields, into southern Cameroon, then along a savanna corridor through West Central Africa's rainforests, into the Savannahs, then to Southern Africa, the Great Lakes, and Indian Ocean coast. The clear sequence of movement masks methodological and historical factors. Language death, multilingualism, and the limits of vocabulary evidence restrain the classification's authority. ‘Transformations’ from food collecting to food producing or from no metals to full engagement with metals were mutable, unfolded at different speeds, and involved interactions with firstcomers. In Central Africa, Bantu speakers were often the first farmers and metal-users in the region but elsewhere they were commonly neither. Their arrivals did not immediately displace firstcomers. Computational methods can accommodate many of these issues.

Pikunda-Munda and Batalimo-Maluba: Archaeological Investigations of the Iron Age Settlement History of the Western and Northern Congo Basin

“…A defining paradigm when working with pottery finds from Central Africa concerns the imposed link between this category of material culture and languages. The prevailing model of the spread of sedentary lifestyle proposes a 'migration' of Bantu-speech communities through the rainforest, often identified by the presence of pottery finds (Currie et al 2013;Bostoen et al 2015;Grollemund et al 2015;Koile et al 2022;Grollemund et al 2023). At the core of an intense academic debate surrounding the term 'Bantu ' (cf.…”

“…An unfortunate but common practice in order to 'date' nodes in historical linguistic reconstructions of modern Bantu languages is 'calibrating' them using archaeological data, claiming that changes in material culture can be equated with changes in languages (see Bostoen et al 2015;Grollemund et al 2015Grollemund et al , 2023Koile et al 2022). This false assumption perpetuated the trope that early Bantu-speakers can be equated with the earliest pottery production in a given region (Bostoen et al 2015, 355, 362, 364).…”

“…It further suffers from disregarding the (dis-)continuities of a single facet of material culture in a given region and their relations to any historically identifiable human society. In a nutshell, the procedure of adopting opportune archaeological results for underpinning historical linguistic reconstructions by Grollemund et al (2015) and Bostoen et al (2015), which was subsequently adopted by Koile et al (2022, SI) without any critical review, and reiterated by Grollemund et al (2023) represents another facet of a long-standing tradition in circular reasoning (Ehret 1973;Phillipson 1976aPhillipson ,b, 1977Heine et al 1977) that has been reviewed in detail by Eggert (2005Eggert ( , 2016. Such approaches induce 'procedural puzzles' and fail at linking linguistics with "the authentic material evidence of archaeology" (Eggert 2016, 88).…”

“…This region is critical as prevailing models of the spread of sedentary lifestyle in sub-Saharan Africa, regularly derived from linguistic reconstructions of modern languages, propose it as the route for substantial migrations (Bostoen 2018(Bostoen , 2020. Relying on phylogenetic modeling and coupling their results with evolutionary genetic research, historical linguists favor rapid expansion, driven by demic diffusion, into and through the equatorial rainforests (Currie et al 2013;Bostoen et al 2015;Grollemund et al 2015;Koile et al 2022;Grollemund et al 2023). Regularly, these findings are coupled with an intensification of archaeological remains yielding ceramics in the second half of the 1st millennium BCE (de Saulieu et al 2021;.…”

“…While the key objective of the research summarized here, was to reconstruct the settlement history of the northern and western Congo Basin, by establishing a chrono-typological framework of pottery development (Seidensticker 2021), this paper addresses three additional research questions: it gives a critical review of the "Sangha River Interval" (SRI) Hypothesis including the archaeological ground-truths, i.e. the missing signature of hypothesized migrations along the Sangha river valley during the 1st millennium BCE (Currie et al 2013;Bostoen et al 2015;Grollemund et al 2015;Koile et al 2022;Grollemund et al 2023). Furthermore, this paper addresses the decline in archaeological finds between the end of the Early Iron Age in the 5th to 6th century CE and the onset of the Late Iron Age in the 10th century CE, specifically a so far overlooked potential recess in human activity in the Congo Basin.…”