New Archaeological Research on the Earliest Remains of Sedentary Groups South of the Central-African Rainforest

The archaeological part of the BantuFirst project, an interdisciplinary research program funded by the European Research Council (Consolidator’s Grant n° 724275), focuses on the earliest remains of sedentary and pottery-producing groups south of the Central African rainforest and on these communities’ subsistence, natural habitat and patterns of interaction with autochthonous foragers. The project has started to conduct archaeological fieldwork aiming at the first settlements south of the equatorial rainforest, roughly dating back to between 500 calBC and 500 calAD, in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Republic of Congo (RC) and the Republic of Angola. The first archaeological field mission, carried out by Dirk Seidensticker and Katharina Jungnickel, in close collaboration with Clement Mambu, Jeanine Yogolelo and Roger Kidebua (IMNC) during the summer of 2018, covered the western half of the former Bandundu province (currently Kwango, Kwilu and Mai-Ndombe provinces) of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an area largely unexplored by archaeologists (1).