The Demographics of Pre-History: South Central Africa Through Archaeology and Linguistics

FAIN: RZ-260900-18

Rice University (Houston, TX 77005-1827)
Jeffrey Barnet Fleisher (Project Director: December 2017 to April 2025)
Kathryn M. de Luna (Co Project Director: January 2018 to April 2025)
Matthew C. Pawlowicz (Co Project Director: January 2018 to April 2025)

Archaeological and linguistic research leading to a study of migration patterns in central Africa, 500-1500 CE.

The proposed project reconstructs the cultural history of mobility in south central Africa between the 6th and 16th centuries. Language shift and human migration have long served as explanations for the expansions of language families and populations. This project will be the first to study human mobility in such demographic histories as a historical problem in its own right, capturing the motives and contingencies that shaped changing forms of and ideas about mobility and, as a result, actually changed the pace and path of the larger expansion process. Such research on human mobility is only feasible with the creation of an interdisciplinary archive linking archaeological, ecological, ethnohistorical, and historical linguistic data. Each dataset will be developed at research sites in Zambia, a place lacking the traditional archives of humanistic research. The project illuminates the material, political, and cognitive lives of people who shaped the demographic history in this region.

Associated Products

Capturing People on the Move: Spatial Analysis and Remote Sensing in the Bantu Mobility Project, Basanga, Zambia (Article)
Title: Capturing People on the Move: Spatial Analysis and Remote Sensing in the Bantu Mobility Project, Basanga, Zambia
Author: Matthew Pawlowicz
Author: Kathryn de Luna
Author: Jeffrey Fleisher
Abstract: From its inception in 2014, the interdisciplinary Bantu Mobility Project has sought to refocus research on the Bantu Expansions away from the macroscale towards a “writ small” approach within a welldefined region with well-understood episodes of language expansion, namely, the middle Kafue and middle Zambezi catchments of southern Zambia. This tighter focus enables the project to capture the human agency shaping movements of people, animals, material goods, and languages, and to consider the productive tension between mobility and rootedness as Bantu-speaking populations became settled in particular regions between the sixth and sixteenth centuries AD. From an archaeological standpoint, careful study of the spatial contexts of recovered artifacts—and of the various human activities that left them behind—captures different forms and scales of mobility that existed alongside the rootedness of mounded settlements occupied over generations. This paper shows how a better understanding of those spatial contexts, and the settlement patterns and land use they encode, is being achieved around Basanga, Zambia, by combining systematic archaeological survey with data derived from satellite imagery using analytical techniques available through GIS, such as spatial interpolation and linear regression modeling. Ultimately, the project will aim to integrate the insights of that geospatial analysis with other archaeological, linguistic, historical, and environmental datasets to capture the stories of the people whose ideas, practices, and forms of mobility and rootedness constituted the local experience of the Bantu Expansions.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-020-09363-0
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: African Archaeological Review
Publisher: Springer

Lessons for Modern Environmental and Climate Policy from Iron Age South Central Africa (Book Section)
Title: Lessons for Modern Environmental and Climate Policy from Iron Age South Central Africa
Author: Kathryn de Luna
Author: Matthew Pawlowicz
Author: Jeffrey Fleisher
Editor: Adam Izdebski
Editor: John Haldon
Editor: Piotr Filipkowski
Abstract: How do we develop effective environmental and climate policy for regions of the world with few—if any—relevant paleoclimate, vegetation, and hydrological reconstructions and, therefore, impoverished models of the environmental and human impacts of future climate change? What if such regions are in countries with limited financial, institutional, or instrumental infrastructure to generate those records? Research in historical disciplines offer direct and indirect evidence of the relationships between societal change and past environmental and climate change, without resorting to bald instrumentalism, but, as this study shows, we need to broaden our historical toolkit if we are to develop such work in regions of the world where oral cultures and less monumental, less permanent material cultural traditions prevailed.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-94137-6_13
Access Model: open access
Publisher: Springer
Book Title: Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises

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