Professor Shadreck Chirikure has been awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant (EU’s Horizon Europe programme).

Congratulations to Professor Shadreck Chirikure who has been awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant (part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme). The funding is amongst the EU’s most prestigious and competitive, providing leading senior researchers with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.

As part of Professor Chirikure’s project, fieldwork will be conducted across eight countries – Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – to expand existing data sets, while high-resolution scientific analyses will be applied to well-dated metals, pottery, seeds, and bones, in order to improve our understanding of the spread of Bantu speakers across southern Africa between c. 300 BCE and 1500 CE. 

His focus will be the Bantu people, who today represent a large ethnolinguistic group spread over a large area of Africa. Current theory holds that, between 5,000-1,000 years ago, farming caused a population expansion, prompting a rapid north-to-south settlement of a third of Africa by Bantu farmers. However, the exact nature of this mass movement is poorly understood.