Category: Lectures

Mandela Kaumba Mazanga defends her PhD thesis on Kongo pottery

On 6 September 2022, Mandela Kaumba Mazanga successfully defended in Brussels her PhD thesis titled Production et circulation de la céramique des trois derniers siècles dans l’aire kongo : une approche combinée des données ethnographiques, muséales et archéologiques. Her joint UGent-ULB PhD project co-supervised by Koen Bostoen (BantUGent), Pierre de Maret (ULB) and Olivier Gosselain (ULB) started as part of the ERC-funded KongoKing project, the predecessor of BantuFirst. Following her successful defense, Mandela Kaumba Mazanga resumed her professional activities at the Department of Historical Sciences of Lubumbashi University (DRC).

Peter Coutros in Kinshasa to study BantuFirst archaeological data

Peter Coutros (BantuFirst) is in Kinshasa from March 21 to April 11 2022 to examine the archaeological data excavated as part of our project during three successive fieldwork campaigns in 2019, 2020, and 2021. This post-excavation analysis is done in close collaboration with Prof. Igor Matonda (UNIKIN) and Isidore Nkanu.

Stemmen van Afrika reports on BantuFirst research in the DRC

Following the short documentary film which Peter Coutros produced on the archaeological BantuFirst fieldwork he did in the Congo last summer together with Prof. Igor Matonda (UNIKIN), the editorial board of the Dutch web magazine Stemmen van Afrika invited Koen Bostoen to write up a short article in Dutch to provide some scientific background information to explain the goals of that linguistically inspired archaeological research in layman’s terms. The post is available here.

Jessamy Doman joins the BantuFirst team

On January 1, 2022, Jessamy Doman has joined the BantuFirst team as a post-doctoral researcher in African environmental archaeology. Her research will focus on reconstructing the diets and environments of the first Bantu-speakers south of the equatorial rainforest. She obtained her PhD from the Department of Anthropology, Yale University, in 2017. She led several expeditions in Kenya with the Baringo Palaeontological Research Project (BPRP), resulting in a new understanding of the environmental context of early human evolution and developing novel methods in palaeoecological reconstruction, including analysis of a late Miocene fossilized forest, as well as isotopic and skeletal indicators of dietary preference within the associated faunal communities. Her past research projects include Miocene-Pliocene faunal and human evolution in Africa and its climatic backdrop; extinction and replacement across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary; social and environmental transitions in Holocene West Africa as evidenced by archaeological faunal assemblages.

Sara Pacchiarotti, Lorenzo Maselli & Koen Bostoen publish on the historical evolution of vowels in Ngwi

In a new article based on fieldwork data collected in 2019 in Idiofa (DRC) as part of the BantuFirst project, Sara Pacchiarotti, Lorenzo Maselli & Koen Bostoen  offer in a new article published in the open access journal Papers in Historical Phonology a phonetic and phonological documentation of two phonemic ‘interior’ vowels and heterosyllabic vowel sequences as well as a historical account of their development in the West-Coastal Bantu language Ngwi. The article is available here.