On November 27, 2018, on-going research of the BantuFirst team was presented in Tervuren at the 18th Meeting of Partners of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership, which focused on the environmental dynamics of the Congo Basin.
Dirk Seidensticker and Katharina Jungnickel presented a poster titled “New Archaeological Research on the Earliest Remains of Sedentary Groups South of the Central-African Rainforest”, which highlighted the preliminary results of the project’s first fieldwork conducted during the summer of 2018. The study area, which has received very little attention from archaeologists so far, is situated in between the Congo Basin and the Lower Congo region. The chrono-cultural sequences of these two areas are impossible to link on the basis of existing collections.
A second poster titled “Historical-Linguistic Approach to the Subsistence of the First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: The Banana Case” was presented by Sifra Van Acker and co-authored by Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen. This poster presented preliminary results of Sifra’s ongoing PhD research on the reconstruction of subsistence-related vocabulary in Proto-West-Coastal-Bantu as part of the project’s wider historical-comparative linguistic research. The banana case is highly relevant because it is still not clear when, how and by whom bananas were introduced in Africa and which role they played in the diet of early Bantu speakers and in the expansion of their languages through Central Africa.