Boundaries, Frontiers, and Conduits in the Middle to Late Holocene Archaeology and Palaeoecology of the Inner Congo Basin
Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the framework of Priority Programme "Entangled Africa: Intra-African connections between Rainforest and Mediterranean (ca. 6000 to 500 BP)" (SPP 2143)
Duration: 2019–2025
Directed by: Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Wotzka / Christopher A. Kiahtipes PhD (co-PI)
Summary
Some of the most significant and debated interactions in African prehistory revolve around the timing and nature of human transgression of the boundary between savanna and rainforest biomes. Inter-regional entanglements and the dramatic cultural and climatic upheavals that appear during the middle to late Holocene are the subject of much scholarly speculation, but archaeological evidence documenting shifting cultural or ecological boundaries is largely absent. This is especially true where it relates to reorganisations of the forest-savanna boundary and the conditions under which widespread settlement of the tropical forest zone by agriculturalists took place. Furthermore, entanglement with broader tropical Africa has significant implications for subsequent developments associated with the establishment and intensification of inter-regional social, technological, and ecological interdependencies from the earliest Iron Age (ca. 400 cal BC) through the Colonial Era (post 1850 AD).
Linguistic and molecular biological studies of modern African populations provide convincing arguments for a widespread and complex Holocene settlement of the forest zone by subsets of a larger population who spoke an ancestral form of Bantu and were familiar with a range of domesticated root crops and cereals. However, basic aspects of African rainforest archaeology such as the routes of human dispersal, subsistence practices, and mobility patterns of these settlers remain unresolved. Equally problematic is that the number of palaeoecological records from the tropical forest zone is insufficient to resolve questions about the degree of forest fragmentation during millennial-scale arid intervals that characterise the Late Holocene or the timing and intensity of anthropogenic disturbance of forests throughout the Middle to Late Holocene.
This project seeks to address two fundamental questions regarding the processes by which the Inner Congo Basin (ICB) became entangled in cultural and ecological changes in broader tropical Africa, particularly as it relates to changing cultural and ecological boundaries. First, where are the boundaries between the major cultural complexes identified in the ICB and when do they appear? This will require exploring the geographic origins of the Imbonga pottery tradition, which is associated with the earliest appearance of Iron Age societies in the ICB. Second, how does the amplitude and timing of vegetation response to climatic change across the Holocene record compare with the timing of human settlement? This will require reconstructing palaeovegetation and palaeo-hydrological records across a network of records distributed over the Congo River catchment.
The proposed research will require spending 24 weeks over a three-year period in the provinces of Kinshasa, Mai-Ndombe, Équateur, Mongala, and Tshopo of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Fieldwork is envisioned to focus on archaeological reconnaissance, survey, and excavations in addition to palaeoecological sampling of sedimentary records along two stretches of the Congo River which connect extant project areas established by previous DFG-funded research in the 1970-1980s, and 2015 until present (no. 259660494) as well as project areas established by contemporary cutting-edge research projects by the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium. New excavations and the collection of sedimentary palaeoenvironmental records will resolve important questions about the boundaries, frontiers, and conduits of entanglement across the ICB as well as the environmental contexts and consequences of these developments.