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Title The reconstruction of subsistence-related vocabulary in Proto-West Coastal Bantu
Full text https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8509216; http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-8509216
Date 2016
Author(s) Bostoen, Koen; Koni Muluwa, Joseph
Abstract The so-called 'West-Coastal Bantu' languages are spoken in the southern part of the Congo and Gabon as well as in the Bandundu and Lower Congo regions of the DRC and Northern Angola (Vansina 1995). Recent phylogenetic research based on basic vocabulary has corroborated that these languages constitute one of the major clades of the Narrow Bantu family (Grollemund et al. 2015) and that the Kikongo Language Cluster is one of its discrete sub-clades (de Schryver et al. 2015). Bostoen et al. (2015) argue that the West-Coastal Bantu homeland was approximately situated in between the Batéké Plateau and the Bandundu region, i.e. around 3°S and between about 14°E and 17°E, and that its implantation there resulted from the rapid southward expansion of Bantu speech communities across the Equator which was possible thanks to a climate-induced opening of the Central African forest block around the middle of the third millennium before present. In contrast to what is commonly assumed (Diamond & Bellwood 2003), the initial phases of the Bantu Expansion were not a typical language/farming dispersal. Both archaeological and linguistic evidence concur not to consider early migrating Bantu speakers as full-fledged agricultural communities (Neumann et al. 2012; Bostoen et al. 2013; Bostoen 2014). As Neumann (2005: 249) points out, '[a] dualistic concept of hunter-gathers and food producers as opposite and exclusive is not appropriate for Africa. In diachronic as well as synchronic perspective, Africa presents numerous examples of the 'middle ground', the large transitional zone in the continuum between hunter-gatherers on the one hand and agriculturalists largely depending on domesticated crops on the other (…)'. In order to come to a better understanding of how that 'middle ground' looked like in early Bantu speech communities and how it evolved through time, a joint archaeological and historical linguistic approach is recommended. Archaeologists can focus on the plants and animals which have left archaeologically retrievable remains in the Central African soils, while historical linguists can reconstruct, in addition, vocabulary for those means of subsistence which remain archaeologically invisible. In this paper we attempt to reconstruct new subsistence-related vocabulary in Proto-West-Coastal Bantu in order to get a better understanding of the subsistence economy of its speakers and to assess whether by that time food production had gained in importance with regard to the start of the Bantu Expansion. References Bostoen, K. 2014. Wild trees in the subsistence economy of early Bantu speech communities: a historical-linguistic approach. In D.Q. Fuller & M.A. Murray (eds.), African Flora, Past Cultures and Archaeobotany. Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop for African Archaeobotany, London, 3'5 July, 2006., 129-140. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Bostoen, K., B. Clist, C. Doumenge, R. Grollemund, J.-M. Hombert, J. Koni Muluwa and J. Maley. 2015. Middle to Late Holocene Paleoclimatic Change and the Early Bantu Expansion in the Rain Forests of West Central-Africa. Current Anthropology 56: 354-384. Bostoen, K., R. Grollemund and J. Koni Muluwa. 2013. Climate-induced Vegetation Dynamics and the Bantu Expansion: Evidence from Bantu Names for Pioneer Trees (Elaeis guineensis, Canarium schweinfurthii and Musanga cecropioides). Comptes Rendus Geoscience 345: 336-349. de Schryver, G.-M., R. Grollemund, S. Branford and K. Bostoen. 2015. Introducing a state-of-the-art phylogenetic classification of the Kikongo Language Cluster. Africana Linguistica 21: 87-162. Diamond, J. and P. Bellwood. 2003. Farmers and their languages: The first expansions. Science 300: 597-603. Grollemund, R., S. Branford, K. Bostoen, A. Meade, C. Venditti and M. Pagel. 2015. Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: 10.1073/pnas.1503793112. Neumann, K. 2005. The romance of farming: Plant cultivation and domestication in Africa In A.B. Stahl (ed.), African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction, 249-275. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Neumann, K., K. Bostoen, A. Höhn, S. Kahlheber, A. Ngomanda and B. Tchiengué. 2012. First farmers in the Central African rainforest: A view from southern Cameroon. Quaternary International 249: 53 - 62. Vansina, J. 1995. New Linguistic Evidence and the Bantu Expansion. Journal of African History 36: 173-195.
Subject(s) Languages and Literatures; History and Archaeology; Bantu Expansion; farming; subsistence; lexical reconstruction; Bantu historical linguistics
Language eng
Type of publication conference; info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject
Repository Gent - University of Gent
Added to C-A: 2020-11-12;11:20:14