Category: Conferences

BantuFirst at the 2024 World Neolithic Congress in Şanlıurfa

From November 4 to 8 the 2024 World Neolithic Congress in Şanlıurfa (Türkiye) united  specialists from around the world to discuss  diverse Neolithic formations that took place across different geographical locations in different time-frames following diverse cultural and socio-economic trajectories. BantUGent was also present. Koen Bostoen was invited to talk on the Bantu Expansion in a panel titled  “Foraging to Food Production and The Consequences: A Global Review” organized by Peter Bellwood and Hsiao-Chun Hung. He presented a joint talk with Peter Coutros & Jessamy Doman on the “The Bantu Expansion and low-level food production in Central Africa“, which combined a review of existent research with recent insights from the BantuFirst project in the Kwilu-Kasai area of the DRC.

 

BantuFirst at “The Language of Extreme Events” Conference in Jena

Koen Bostoen (BantUGent), Peter Coutros (BantUGent), Jessamy Doman (BantUGent), Cesar Fortes-Lima (Johns Hopkins University), Sara Pacchiarotti (BantUGent) and Carina Schlebusch (Uppsala University) presented BantuFirst research on “Climate change, population collapse and early settlement of Bantu speakers south of the Congo Forest” at the “The Language of Extreme Events” conference at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena  (April 22-23, 2024). The entire program is available here. The book of abstracts can be consulted here.

Conference: The language of Extreme Events

BantuFirst at the 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Heidelberg

The BantuFirst team gave two talks at the jubilee 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 50 years after the first ICHL conference, which was held from 4 to 8 September 2023 at the University of Heidelberg.

 

The first one was part of the workshop “Interactions at the dawn of history: Methods and results in prehistoric contact linguistics” organized by Rasmus G. Bjørn (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena) and Marwan Kilani (University of Basel – Swiss National Science Foundation), the second part of a general session on “Reconstruction and periodization”.

 

1. “Pre-Bantu substrate in Batwa Bantu languages of the Congo rainforest: A comparative study of nasal-oral stop cluster reduction” by Koen Bostoen, Jean-Pierre Donzo, Guy Kouarata, Lorenzo Maselli, & Sara Pacchiarotti;

2. “Uncovering lost paths in the Congo rainforest: A new, comprehensive phylogeny of West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu” by Sara Pacchiarotti, Natalia Chousou-Polydouri, Jean-Pierre Donzo, Guy Kouarata, Lorenzo Maselli & Koen Bostoen.

 

Due to a technical issue causing delay in generating of phylogeny of West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu, the second talk was eventually replaced last minute by the following talk:

3. “Word-final reduction of Proto-Bantu *ng as a diagnostic feature for successive divergence and convergence in West-Coastal Bantu” by Sara Pacchiarotti, Guy Kouarata & Koen Bostoen.

 

 

 

 

BantuFirst at the 26th Biennial SAFA Meeting at Rice University

The BantuFirst project presented several papers at the 26th Biennial Meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists which took place at Rice University (Houston), June 1-6, 2023.

  1. Igor Matonda, Peter Coutros, Jessamy Doman & Koen Bostoen, Mapping the Archaeological Landscape of the Kwilu-Kasaï River Network, DRC;
  2. Koen Bostoen, Peter Coutros & Carina Schlebusch, Interdisciplinary Approach to the Origins of the Niger-Congo Phylum: Genes, Languages, and Stuff;

  3. Sara Pacchiarotti, Peter Coutros, Jessamy Doman, Guy Kouarata, Igor Matonda, & Koen Bostoen Were they really the first Bantu speakers south of the Congo rainforest?

 

 

Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen present BantuFirst research at ILCAA-BantUGent workshop in Tokyo

On March 5-6, 2023 the closing workshop of the ILCAA-BantUGent Joint Research Project “The Past and Present of Bantu Languages: Integrating Micro-Typology, Historical-Comparative Linguistics and Lexicography” was held at the Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen presented three talks pertaining to linguistic and interdisciplinary research within the BantuFirst project.

Koen Bostoen (BantUGent): “A historical-comparative exploration of causative/inchoative verb alternations in Bantu”

Sara Pacchiarotti (BantUGent) & Heidi Goes (BantUGent):  “The reconstruction of Proto-WCB independent and possessive pronouns for speech act participants: does morphological evidence align with lexicon-based phylogenetic groupings?”

Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) “The Bantu Expansion or how West Africans transformed Africaʼs linguistic, cultural and biological landscapes”

For more info, check here.

 

 

Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen talk on Bantu Expansion at ISP-Gombe in Kinshasa

On August 29, 2022, Sara Pacchiarotti (BantUGent) and Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) were invited at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de la Gombe in Kinshasa to talk about BantUGent research on the Bantu Expansion. Their talk was titled “L’occupation ancienne de l’Afrique centrale par les Bantouphones: recherches linguistiques et archéologiques“. Prof. Jean-Pierre Donzo (ISP-Gombe & BantUGent associate) animated the talk and the lively debate that followed.

 

Koen, Jean-Pierre & Sara

 

Venue at the central library of ISP-Gombe
Sara & Koen meeting with the Director-General Prof. Gertrude Ekombe Ekofo
Announcement of the talk

Koen Bostoen, Peter Coutros & Carina Schlebusch at MPI-Jena workshop on “Archaeology and Language”

Martine Robbeets, Mark Hudson and the Archaeolinguistic Research Group of the Max Planck Institute of the Science of Human History in Jena (Germany) organize a three-day online workshop (November 16-18, 2021) on “Archaeology and Language” involving all the  contributors to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language, which they co-edit.

 

On November 18 (11.30-11.55 am CET), Koen Bostoen (BantUGent), Peter Coutros (BantUGent) & Carina Schlebusch (Department of Evolutionary Biology, Uppsala University) will present a concept paper on the interdisciplinary “Niger-Congo including Bantu” chapter, which they were invited to write for the handbook.

Koen Bostoen talks on the history of Bantu languages [Dutch] at Ghent Centre for Historical Languages

When? November 18, 2021, 8 pm

Where? Monasterium PoortAckere, Oude Houtlei 56, 9000 Gent

The Bantu languages are the largest African language family, both in terms of number of languages and speakers and geographical distribution. About 350 million or about one in three Africans speak one or more of the 500 or so Bantu languages, which stretch from above the equator to South Africa. Swahili, Lingala, Kongo, Luba, Rwanda, Rundi, Ganda, Zulu, Xhosa, and Shona are just some of the best-known Bantu languages. Proto-Bantu is about 5000 years old and is said to have been born in the border area between Nigeria and Cameroon. This lecture is about the reconstruction of this hypothetical ancestral language, about the exceptionally rapid and large-scale diffusion of its daughter languages and about the history and future of the study area.

https://www.historischetalen.be/cursus/twaalf-smaakmakers/