New Bantu Mosaics Project
The New Bantu Mosaics project brings together researchers in the UK and Africa, combining innovative materials analysis, bioarchaeology and an understanding of the Bantu people’s own worldview, to provide new
perspectives on Bantu expansions and developments in southern Africa.
Modern day Bantu people 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, which precipitated the rapid north-to-south settlement of a third of Africa by Bantu farmers. This expansion is often envisioned as one-way mobility, where the Bantu who moved south were isolated from those who remained in the north, but that is an assumption built on coarse
chronologies and outdated assumptions. Instead, preliminary materials analyses hint at multi-node networks where resources and people circulated in first and second millennia CE southern Africa. This raises the transformative possibility that people, food, materials, and values moved in ways more complicated than a simple group migration and ‘package’ model would hold.
We will conduct fieldwork in eight countries to expand existing data sets, then apply high-resolution scientific analyses to well-dated assemblages (metals, pottery, seeds, bones) to explore movements and interactions from initial Bantu settlements up to 1500 CE.
The major gains of the project will be in four areas:
(1) New and dynamic ways of thinking about back-and forth interactions, along frontiers, which moved people and resources, causing Bantu expansions.
(2) Novel methods of studying the material and agricultural basis of societies will be developed.
(3) to achieve a fuller understanding of Bantu expansions including their relations with pre-existing populations.
(4) Histories of interaction identifying shared roots and population admixture will help to confront contemporary challenges
with migration and xenophobia in current-day African communities.
