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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Early plant cultivation in the Central African rain forest: first millennium BC pearl millet from South Cameroon
Authors:Kahlheber, StefanieISNI
Bostoen, KoenISNI
Neumann, KatharinaISNI
Year:2009
Periodical:Journal of African Archaeology
Volume:7
Issue:2
Pages:253-272
Language:English
Geographic term:Cameroon
Subjects:archaeology
arable farming
agricultural history
Bantu-speaking peoples
migration
Iron Age
millet
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/43135485
Abstract:The Bantu expansion, a major topic in African archaeology and history, is widely assumed to correlate with the spread of farming, but archaeological data on the subsistence of these putative early Bantu speakers are very sparse. However, finds of domesticated pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) in southern Cameroonian archaeological sites, dated between 400 and 200 BC, open new perspectives on the history of agriculture in the Central African rain forest. Linguistic evidence suggests that pearl millet was part of early agricultural traditions of Bantu speakers, and has to a great extent been distributed during the course of their expansion over large parts of western Bantu-speaking Africa, possibly even originally from their homeland in the Nigerian-Cameroonian borderland. In combining archaeobotanical, palaeoenvironmental and linguistic data, the authors put forward the hypothesis that an agricultural system with pearl millet was brought into the rain forest during the first millennium BC, and that its spread across Central Africa coincided with the dispersal of certain Bantu language subgroups. Bibliogr., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract]
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