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 Periodical article |
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| Title: | What comparative Bantu pottery vocabulary may tell us about early human settlement in the Inner Congo Basin |
| Author: | Bostoen, Koen |
| Year: | 2006 |
| Periodical: | Afrique & histoire |
| Issue: | 5 |
| Pages: | 221-263 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Congo (Democratic Republic of) |
| Subjects: | Bantu languages pottery vocabulary archaeology |
| Abstract: | The early human settlement of the Inner Congo Basin is a historical puzzle to which may contribute scholars of different sciences. The present article approaches the problem from a linguistic point of view. It presents the results of a comparative study of the pottery vocabulary of the local Bantu languages. Being an artefact that unites an archaeological visibility and an ethnographical prominence with a fairly well documented technical vocabulary, pottery forms a privileged domain of interdisciplinary research. With respect to the Inner Congo Basin, both linguistic and archaeological data point towards a long isolated development of languages and communities. From a more general point of view, the study proposes an alternative way of using lexical data for historical reconstruction. Within the realm of African studies, not linguists, but historians were the first to rely on the historical-comparative study of cultural vocabularies and to develop the so-called 'Words-and-Things'-method. However, certain inconsistencies in their linguistic method may put in danger the soundness of the historical hypotheses they have worked out. The introduction of the article offers a methodological critique of the way some historians deal with lexical data. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract] |
