Ricquier Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2018

At a Crossroads of Bantu Expansions: Present and Past Riverside Communities in the Congo Basin, from an Integrated Linguistic, Anthropological and Archaeological Perspective

The “Bantu Expansion”, a research theme within the precolonial history of Central Africa, unites scholars of different disciplines. Much research is focused on the initial expansions of Bantu subgroups, which are explained as farmers ever looking for new lands and therefore avoiding the rainforest, also in the recent research on the “Savannah Corridor”. We want to study a crossroads of different Bantu expansions in the very heart of the Central-African rainforest, namely the eastern part of the Congo Basin (the Congo River and its tributaries up- and downstream of Kisangani until Bumba and Kindu). The region hosts multiple language groups from Bantu and other origin, complex ethnic…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.