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In this article, we present the first quantitative study of what we call multiple unconditioned reflexes (MUR) in Bantu, more specifically of Proto-Bantu velar stops *k and *g in the West-Coastal Bantu (WCB) branch of the Bantu language family. MUR, also known as “doubles reflexes” in Bantu studies, represent a situation where one and the same proto-sound has two or more reflexes in a given language which cannot be accounted for by phonological conditioning and/or lexical borrowing. This diachronic irregularity has been explained in Bantu historical linguistics, and Niger-Congo studies more broadly, by reconstructing either an additional series of consonants (phonemic merger) or a latent conditioning that went lost (phonemic split). We show that MUR should not be explained, but rather taken as an indicator of the same pervasive irregularity of sound change reported in other parts of the world that are highly multilingual and lack a neat overlap between distinct languages and communities. Along with widespread multilingualism, we assess lexical diffusion, substrate influence, and spread-over-spread events in Bantu language history as complementary explanations for the rise of MUR in WCB.

With the largest genomic dataset to date of Bantu-speaking populations, including newly generated data of modern-day and ancient DNA from previously unsampled regions in Africa, we shed fresh light on the expansion of peoples speaking Bantu languages that started ∼4000 years ago in western Africa. We have genotyped 1,740 participants, including 1,487 Bantu speakers from 143 populations across 14 African countries, and generated whole-genome sequences from 12 Late Iron Age individuals. Our results show that Bantu speakers received significant gene-flow from local groups in regions they expanded into. We show for the first time that genetic diversity amongst Bantu-speaking populations declines with distance from western Africa, with current-day Zambia and the DRC as possible crossroads of interaction. Using spatially explicit methods and correlating genetic, linguistic and geographical data, we provide cross-disciplinary support for a serial founder migration model. Finally, we discuss the utility of our dataset as an exhaustive modern-day African comparative dataset for ancient DNA studies. These new findings and data will be important to a wide range of disciplines from science and humanities as well as to the medical sector studying human genetic variation and health in African and African-descendant populations.One-sentence summaryA comprehensive genetic analysis of the expansion of people speaking Bantu languages reveals a complex history of serial founder events, variable levels of contact with local groups, and spread-over-spread events.

In this paper we present a new, lexicon-based phylogeny of 34 Southern Bantu languages, and combine it with previous insights from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to study the history of Southern Bantu languages and their speakers. Our phylogeny shows all Southern Bantu languages to derive from a single, direct ancestor, which contrasts with archaeological evidence indicating separate migrations of Bantu speakers into southern Africa. This suggests that the Bantu languages spoken by the first migrants became extinct, and the ancestor of present-day Southern Bantu languages only emerged in southern Africa during the second millennium CE. We also map the distribution of previously established or suspected Khoisan-derived linguistic features in Southern Bantu languages onto this phylogeny. Evidence for intensive contact with speakers of Khoisan languages also comes from population genetics, which shows that Khoisan linguistic influence is mainly seen in languages spoken by populations displaying a higher degree of genetic admixture.

Lexical data has been key in attempts to reconstruct the early history of the banana (Musa sp.) in Africa. Previous language-based approaches to the introduction and dispersal of this staple crop of Asian origin have suffered from the absence of well-established genealogical classifications and inadequate historical-linguistic analysis. We therefore focus in this article on West-Coastal Bantu (WCB), one specific branch within the Bantu family whose genealogy and diachronic phonology are well established. We reconstruct three distinct banana terms to Proto-West-Coastal Bantu (PWCB), i.e. *dɪ‑ŋkondo/*ma‑ŋkondo ‘plantain’, *dɪ‑ŋko/*ma‑ŋko ‘plantain’ and *kɪ‑tuka/*bi‑tuka ‘bunch of bananas’. From this new historical-linguistic evidence we infer that AAB Plantains, one of Africa’s two major cultivar subgroups, already played a key role in the subsistence economy of the first Bantu speakers who assumedly migrated south of the rainforest around 2500 years ago. We furthermore analyze four innovations that emerged after WCB started to spread from its interior homeland in the Kasai-Kamtsha region of Congo-Kinshasa towards the Atlantic coast, i.e. dɪ‑konde ‘plantain’, kɪ‑tebe ‘starchy banana’, banga ‘False Horn plantain’, and dɪ‑toto ‘sweet banana’. Finally, we assess the historical implications of these lexical retentions and innovations both within and beyond WCB and sketch some perspectives for future lexicon-based banana research. Note: Changes were made to the title of this article after publication, on 9/20/2021.

The North-Angolan Bantu language Kisikongo has a present tense (O-Rang- a; R=root) that is morphologically more marked than the future tense (O-R-a). We reconstruct how this typologically uncommon tense-marking feature came about by drawing on both historical and comparative evidence. Our diachronic corpus covers four centuries that can be subdivided in three periods, viz. (1) mid-17th, (2) late-19th/early-20th, and (3) late-20th/ early-21st centuries. The comparative data stem from several present-day languages of the “Kikongo Language Cluster.” We show that mid-17th century Kisikongo had three distinct constructions: O-R-a (with present progressive, habitual and generic meaning), O-R-ang-a (with present habitual meaning), and ku-R-a (with future meaning). By the end of the 19th century the last construction is no longer attested, and both present and future time reference are expressed by a segmentally identical construction, namely O- R-a. We argue that two seemingly independent but possibly interacting diachronic evolutions conspired towards such present-future isomorphism: (1) the semantic extension of an original present-tense construction from present to future leading to polysemy, and (2) the loss of the future prefix ku-, as part of a broader phenomenon of prefix reduction, inducing homonymy. To resolve the ambiguity, the O-R-ang-a construction evolved into the main present-tense construction.

The North-Angolan Bantu language Kisikongo has a present tense (Ø-R-ang-a; R = root) that is morphologically more marked than the future tense (Ø-R-a). We reconstruct how this typologically uncommon tense-marking feature came about by drawing on both historical and comparative evidence. Our diachronic corpus covers four centuries that can be subdivided in three periods, viz. (1) mid-17th, (2) late-19th/early-20th, and (3) late-20th/​early-21st centuries. The comparative data stem from several present-day languages of the “Kikongo Language Cluster.” We show that mid-17th century Kisikongo had three distinct constructions: Ø-R-a (with present progressive, habitual and generic meaning), Ø-R-ang-a (with present habitual meaning), and ku-R-a (with future meaning). By the end of the 19th century the last construction is no longer attested, and both present and future time reference are expressed by a segmentally identical construction, namely Ø-R-a. We argue that two seemingly independent but possibly interacting diachronic evolutions conspired towards such present-future isomorphism: (1) the semantic extension of an original present-tense construction from present to future leading to polysemy, and (2) the loss of the future prefix ku-, as part of a broader phenomenon of prefix reduction, inducing homonymy. To resolve the ambiguity, the Ø-R-ang-a construction evolved into the main present-tense construction.

This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction.

This chapter introduces the notion of suffixal phrasemes to designate the semantically non-compositional complexes of suffixes which emerged across time and space in Bantu to renew morphology in several verbal derivation categories. It is shown that such verb derivational phrasemes can be reconstructed to different ancestral stages as far back as Proto-Bantu (PB) and possibly beyond. The oldest instance of such a suffixal phraseme in Bantu is the causative *-ɪdi, which is reconstructed to PB as the phraseologisation of applicative *-ɪd and the short causative *-i, in addition to the previously reconstructed simplex PB causative suffixes *-i and *-ic. The Bantu ancestral language that emerged after the North-Western Bantu branches had split off created a new causative marker, i.e. *-ɪki, through the non-compositional reanalysis of neuter *-ɪk and short causative *-i. Around the same stage, the long passive suffix *-ɪbʊ rose as an aggregation of the middle suffix *-Vb, well-attested in North-Western Bantu, and the short PB passive suffix *-ʊ. Much younger but still of considerable time-depth are reciprocal phrasemes produced out of a complex of PB associative/reciprocal *-an preceded by either causative *-ɪdi (i.e. *-ɪzyan) or intensive *-ang/*-ag/*-ak (most often *-angan). These causative, passive and reciprocal suffixes are all built on a final element that goes back to at least PB and whose semantics and syntax it copied. Other suffixal phrasemes rather adopted the role of their initial element, while stills others developed idiosyncratic functions in which the input of their historical components can only be inferred.

In this article, we offer a historical account of the development of two phonemic ‘interior’ vowels, [ə] and [ɤ], and heterosyllabic vowel sequences in Ngwi, a virtually undescribed West-Coastal Bantu language spoken in the western part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While interior vowels phonologized due to the loss of their conditioning environment, most heterosyllabic vowel sequences come from the fission of an erstwhile palatal on-glide diphthong, itself originating in a long [–high] vowel. This origin is exactly the opposite of what has been reported for other language families such as Romance, where certain heterosyllabic vowel sequences of the *iV type evolved into diphthongs. The Ngwi data also show that phonemic interior vowels exist in languages of the Niger-Congo phylum where they had not been reported before. The historical development of heterosyllabic vowel sequences in Ngwi might have parallels in several other Bantu languages from the wider Congo rainforest area, where phonetic and phonological documentation is still embryonic.

This article reports on the analysis of three major markers of necessity in Luganda, i.e. the modal auxiliaries -téekw- and -lina and the verbal prefix -andi-. On the basis a 4-million-word corpus it is argued that, overall, the auxiliary -téekw- is more established as a necessity marker, as it is involved in the expression of all necessity subcategories except participant-inherent dynamic necessity. The auxiliary -lina is less semantically diversified, expressing only participant-imposed, situational and deontic necessity, while the verbal prefix -andi- expresses only deontic necessity. A comparison of corpus data with data from older literature on Luganda further shows that the objective category of participant-inherent dynamic necessity, which is not associated with any of the three markers described, is perhaps expressed by less-grammaticalised forms. These forms are also, together with other grammaticalised forms that have increasingly become rare, assumed to be part of the devices that could have been responsible for expressing necessity in earlier stages of the language, given that the three markers described in this research have only begun to meaningfully express necessity since the second half of the 20th century.

In this paper we offer a first systematic account of the noun class system of Ngwi, a West-Coastal Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. First, we describe the synchronic system of noun class prefixes and the agreement patterns they trigger on constituents of the noun phrase and the verb. Second, we provide a diachronic analysis of the innovations the synchronic Ngwi noun class system underwent with respect to the noun class system reconstructed for the most recent common ancestor of all Narrow Bantu languages. Finally, we compare the morphological innovations found in the Ngwi noun class system with those identified in the noun class systems of other West-Coastal Bantu varieties and assess whether some of these could be diagnostic for internal classification within this western Bantu branch.

South Eastern Bantu-speaking (SEB) groups constitute more than 80% of the population in South Africa. Despite clear linguistic and geographic diversity, the genetic differences between these groups have not been systematically investigated. Based on genome-wide data of over 5000 individuals, representing eight major SEB groups, we provide strong evidence for fine-scale population structure that broadly aligns with geographic distribution and is also congruent with linguistic phylogeny (separation of Nguni, Sotho-Tswana and Tsonga speakers). Although differential Khoe-San admixture plays a key role, the structure persists after Khoe-San ancestry-masking. The timing of admixture, levels of sex-biased gene flow and population size dynamics also highlight differences in the demographic histories of individual groups. The comparisons with five Iron Age farmer genomes further support genetic continuity over ~400 years in certain regions of the country. Simulated trait genome-wide association studies further show that the observed population structure could have major implications for biomedical genomics research in South Africa., Despite linguistic and geographic diversity in South Eastern Bantu-speaking (SEB) groups of South Africa, genetic variation in these groups has not been investigated in depth. Here, the authors analyse genome-wide data from 5056 individuals, providing insights into demographic history across SEB groups.

The objective of this work is to establish a list of species of edible fungi consumed by the Lamba and Bemba people of Haut-Katanga (DR Congo). This study contributes to the valorization of edible fungi gathered in the miombo woodlands of Haut-Katanga. A survey was conducted among Lamba and Bemba people of the peri-urban area of Lubumbashi. The first author conducted structured and semi-structured surveys among 331 people, mostly women aged 30-50. The results show the existence of thirty-eight edible species belonging to 9 genera and 8 families. The majority is ectomycorrhizal (66%) followed by Termitomyces (21%), while only a few are saprotrophic (13%). Lamba and Bemba people consume all taxa. Twenty-three local names have been recorded in their respective languages, i.e., Kilamba and Kibemba, two closely related Bantu languages belonging to the family’s Eastern clade. The Lamba and Bemba do not consume species of the genera Russula (Russulaceae) and Boletus (Boletaceae). We succeeded in reconstructing the conceptualization underlying the creation of several Kibemba and Kilamba mushroom names. Popular and scientific taxonomies rarely overlap: one and the same species may have different names in Kilamba and Kibemba, while one and the same name in Kilamba and/or Kibemba is often used for several congeneric species. Species considered toxic and not consumed do not have a Kilamba or Kibemba name of their own. Instead, they are collectively referred to by a term fyana fya bene, literally meaning “big (dangerous) children of them” and signaling that local consumers reject those species.

South Eastern Bantu-speaking (SEB) groups constitute more than 80% of the population in South Africa. Despite clear linguistic and geographic diversity, the genetic differences between these groups have not been systematically investigated. Based on genome-wide data of over 5000 individuals, representing eight major SEB groups, we provide strong evidence for fine-scale population structure that broadly aligns with geographic distribution and is also congruent with linguistic phylogeny (separation of Nguni, Sotho-Tswana and Tsonga speakers). Although differential Khoe-San admixture plays a key role, the structure persists after Khoe-San ancestry-masking. The timing of admixture, levels of sex-biased gene flow and population size dynamics also highlight differences in the demographic histories of individual groups. The comparisons with five Iron Age farmer genomes further support genetic continuity over ∼400 years in certain regions of the country. Simulated trait genome-wide association studies further show that the observed population structure could have major implications for biomedical genomics research in South Africa.

The Bantu Expansion, the foremost linguistic, cultural, and demographic event in Late Holocene Africa, has sparked a fervent interdisciplinary debate, especially regarding its driving forces. As is often the case with hotly debated issues, certain ‘factoids’ bearing little relation to factual evidence emerge. Two such factoids are that (1) the Bantu Expansion would have been a single migratory macro-event and (2) it would have been driven by agriculture. These two widely held beliefs are critically assessed here. Regarding (1), the chapter argues that the Bantu Expansion did involve the actual migration of Bantu speakers but that backward and forward migration occurred after the initial spread and that Bantu languages also expanded through adoption by autochthonous hunter-gatherers. As for (2), the chapter argues that the earliest Bantu speakers had their own archeologically visible culture, but they were not farmers. Therefore, the Bantu Expansion is not a textbook example of a farming/language dispersal.

New ancient genomes from Africa provide details of the spread of food production across sub-Saharan Africa., Africa hosts the greatest human genetic diversity globally, but legacies of ancient population interactions and dispersals across the continent remain understudied. Here, we report genome-wide data from 20 ancient sub-Saharan African individuals, including the first reported ancient DNA from the DRC, Uganda, and Botswana. These data demonstrate the contraction of diverse, once contiguous hunter-gatherer populations, and suggest the resistance to interaction with incoming pastoralists of delayed-return foragers in aquatic environments. We refine models for the spread of food producers into eastern and southern Africa, demonstrating more complex trajectories of admixture than previously suggested. In Botswana, we show that Bantu ancestry post-dates admixture between pastoralists and foragers, suggesting an earlier spread of pastoralism than farming to southern Africa. Our findings demonstrate how processes of migration and admixture have markedly reshaped the genetic map of sub-Saharan Africa in the past few millennia and highlight the utility of combined archaeological and archaeogenetic approaches.

Archaeology and historical linguistics have been crucial for the reconstruction of pre-colonial African history, as these two disciplines offer complementary approaches to societies of the past. Despite being fundamentally distinct, they do in fact share a number of key principles and concepts, such as stratigraphy, seriation, geographic distribution, and time-depth. This chapter offers an outline of these shared principles and their interpretation with reference to the Bantu Expansion, which was the main linguistic, cultural, and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. The chapter also provides some thoughts on what a judicious interdisciplinary archaeo-linguistic approach to the African past might look like.

In this article, we assess the genealogical validity of West‑Coastal Bantu (WCB) as a major subclade of the Bantu family by means of the Comparative Method. Based on a comparative dataset of 66 different cognate series, we demonstrate that languages previously classified as WCB according to lexicon‑based quantitative methods share at least one common phonological innovation: the phonemic merger of the Proto‑Bantu velar stops *g and *k due to the devoicing of *g when not preceded by a nasal. We show that the velar merger is a unique phonological innovation distinguishing WCB from other Bantu phylogenetic groups such as South‑Western and Eastern. It probably also separates WCB from North‑Western and Central‑Western Bantu, where *g did devoice, but not always before *k became zero. However, at this stage, there is not enough empirical evidence and especially not sufficient systematic historical‑comparative linguistic research to further test this hypothesis. In any event, building on Möhlig (1981), we speculate that the recurrent devoicing of *g in several ancestral Bantu languages of the rainforest could be diagnostic of a pre‑Bantu hunter‑gatherer substrate. Dans cet article, nous évaluons, par la méthode comparative, la validité généalogique du bantu de la côte occidentale (WCB, West-Coastal Bantu) en tant que sous‑groupe principal de la famille bantu. Tout en nous basant sur 66 séries de cognats, nous démontrons que les langues classifiées comme WCB selon les méthodes quantitatives lexicales partagent au moins une innovation phonologique : la fusion des occlusives vélaires *g et *k du proto‑bantu, suite au dévoisement du *g qui se produit lorsque celui-ci n’est pas précédé d’une nasale. Nous montrons que la fusion des occlusives vélaires est une innovation phonologique tout à fait unique distinguant le WCB des autres groupes phylogénétiques bantu tels que celui du sud‑ouest et celui de l’est. Il sépare probablement aussi le WCB des langues bantu du nord-ouest et du centre-ouest, où le *g s’est dévoisé, mais pas toujours avant que *k ne soit réduit à zéro. Cependant, à ce stade, les preuves empiriques manquent, et spécialement les recherches historico-comparatives systématiques, pour nous permettre de poursuivre la vérification de cette hypothèse. Quoi qu’il en soit, tout en nous fondant sur Möhlig (1981), nous conjecturons que le dévoisement récurrent de *g que l’on retrouve dans plusieurs langues bantu ancestrales de la forêt équatoriale pourrait signaler un substrat pré-bantu de chasseurs-cueilleurs.

Gisamba (ISO 639-3: smx) is a nearly undocumented and undescribed as well as highly endangered Bantu language spoken in the Kwilu and Kwango provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It belongs to the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC), a discrete subclade of the West-Coastal Bantu (WCB) branch of the Bantu language family. Within the KLC, Gisamba forms a distinct subgroup called “Kikongoid” together with Kiyaka, Kisuku and Kihungan, which are also spoken in the Kwilu and Kwango provinces of the DRC. In this article, we show how both divergence as part of WCB and the KLC and convergence through contact with neighboring WCB and South-West Bantu (SWB) languages contributed to the genesis of Gisamba as spoken today. For this purpose, we provide a synchronic and diachronic account of the phonology of Gisamba. Data used in this article stem from original fieldwork which the first author conducted in 2017 in the village of Kimafu. Some of the diachronic sound changes confirm Gisamba’s affiliation to WCB, the KLC and Kikongoid. Others show that Gisamba’s synchronic phonology cannot be accounted for as being only the result of vertical transmission through inheritance, but must be the outcome of horizontal transmission through space. This is well in line with the fact that Gisamba is currently endangered and that, historically speaking, its speech communities have been scattered in the Kwilu and Kwango provinces of the DRC where they are surrounded by much larger WCB and SWB speech communities. Le gisamba (ISO 639-3 : smx) est une langue bantoue pratiquement non documentée ou décrite, particulièrement menacée, parlée dans les provinces du Kwilu et du Kwango en République démocratique du Congo (RDC). Elle appartient au groupe kikongo (GK), un sous-ensemble spécifique de la branche dite « bantou de la côte occidentale » (BCO) de la famille des langues bantoues. Au sein du GK, le gisamba forme un sous-groupe distinct appelé « kikongoïde » avec le kiyaka, le kisuku et le kihungan, également parlés dans les provinces du Kwilu et du Kwango en RDC. Dans cet article, nous montrons en quoi les divergences au sein du BCO et du GK aussi bien que les convergences issues des contacts avec les langues voisines du BCO et du bantou du sud-ouest (BSO) ont contribué à la genèse du gisamba tel qu’il est parlé aujourd’hui. Pour ce faire, nous proposons un traitement synchronique et diachronique de la phonologie du gisamba. Les données utilisées dans cet article proviennent d’un travail de terrain spécifique que le premier auteur a mené en 2017 dans le village de Kimafu. Certains des changements sonores diachroniques confirment l’affiliation du gisamba au BCO, au GK et au kikongoïde. D’autres montrent que la phonologie synchronique du gisamba ne peut être considérée comme étant uniquement due à une transmission verticale par héritage, mais qu’elle doit résulter d’une transmission horizontale à travers l’espace. Ceci s’accorde bien avec le fait que le gisamba est actuellement en danger et que, historiquement parlant, ses communautés de locuteurs ont été dispersées dans les provinces du Kwilu et du Kwango en RDC, où elles sont entourées par des communautés beaucoup plus importantes de locuteurs du BCO et du BSO.

In the Bantu language Kirundi (JD62), the verbal prefix oo- has traditionally been described as either conditional or potential. In this article, we show by means of a corpus-based analysis of its uses that it is first and foremost a modal prefix, and its conditional use is only a secondary development. Dans la langue bantoue kirundi (JD62), le préfixe verbal oo‑ a été décrit comme un marqueur soit du conditionnel, soit du potentiel. Dans cet article, nous montrons à partir d’une analyse de corpus qu’il est avant tout un préfixe modal et que son usage comme marque du conditionnel n’est qu’un développement secondaire

Nous présentons l’étude anthropologique de dix individus provenant d’un cimetière situé sur la colline de Kindoki au Kongo central (RDC). Ils ont été exhumés en 2012 et 2013 dans le cadre du projet KongoKing qui consistait en une approche interdisciplinaire de l’histoire ancienne du royaume Kongo. Ce cimetière contient des inhumations datées du XVII e au XIX e siècle, très probablement celles de nobles de haut rang. Les défunts étaient accompagnés d’un mobilier funéraire (perles de verre, sabres, bijoux en or, mousquet). Les restes humains sont malheureusement très mal conservés. Certains ne sont représentés que par quelques fragments osseux ou dentaires. Parmi les dix défunts, on note la présence de deux femmes et de huit hommes. Deux individus masculins présentent des usures dentaires qui résulteraient de l’utilisation d’une pipe. Les deux femmes seraient âgées de plus de 40 ans et se caractérisent par des signes vertébraux évocateurs de DISH (diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis). Cette pathologie est actuellement associée à une alimentation riche, à l’obésité et au diabète de type II. Il n’est donc pas surprenant qu’elle touche ces individus de statut élevé. Le DISH n’avait encore jamais été décrit dans une population ancienne d’Afrique centrale. This paper presents an anthropological study of ten individuals from a cemetery situated on Kindoki Hill in the central Kongo region (DRC). They were excavated in 2012 and 2013 as part of the KongoKing project (2012– 2016), which applied an interdisciplinary approach to the ancient history of the Kingdom of Kongo. The cemetery contains graves dated to the 17th– 19th century, very probably those of high-ranking nobles. The dead were buried with various grave goods (glass beads, swords, gold jewels and muskets). The human remains were unfortunately very badly preserved. Some were represented only by a few bone fragments and/or teeth. Of the ten bodies, two were female and eight were male. Two of the men showed dental wear as a result of pipe-smoking. The two women were probably more than 40 years of age at the time of death. The vertebrae showed signs that evoke diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH), a pathological condition associated today with a rich diet, obesity and type II diabetes. It is therefore not surprising that these conditions might have affected high-status individuals. Until now, DISH had never been described in an ancient Central African population.

This article offers a synchronic and diachronic analysis of the use and meaning of the verbal prefix -andi- in the Great Lakes Bantu language Luganda (JE15). On the basis of a text corpus of 4 million tokens, we show that the prefix, commonly described as a conditional marker, is primarily involved in the expression of modal meanings, specifically deontic necessity and epistemic possibility. Our thirteen-decade diachronic corpus analysis shows that there is a relationship between the increased use of -andi- outside syntactically complex conditional constructions, i.e. those having both a protasis and an apodosis, and an increase in its expression of modal meanings. Moreover, a reduction in the use of -andi- in complex conditional constructions goes hand in hand with a reduction in its expression of conditional meanings. It is further revealed that contrary to the common cross-linguistic tendency to rely on modality as a source for conditionality, the conditional meaning of -andi- is not post-modal. Instead it was primarily a conditional marker, which subsequently developed different modal meanings.

In the framework of the inter-disciplinary KongoKing project, a set of beads from archaeological excavations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was analysed by means of a minimally invasive, multi-analytical approach based on micro-Raman spectroscopy. The full characterization of the materials, including glassy network, opacifiers and colorizers, was achieved thanks to the combination of data from handheld X-ray fluorescence, variable pressure scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry, micro-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and pyrolysis coupled to gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. The obtained chemical information was used to fill the existing gap in the chemical study of beads from Western Central Africa. The cobalt-rich blue beads were found to be of Central European origin, while the copper-rich turquoise beads were manufactured using distinct copper sources. Cadmium yellow and cadmium red are the colourants responsible for the bright colours of bead types 10 and 12, respectively. The type 12 beads were found to be composed of glass covered with a waxy layer tentatively identified as Japan wax. Prosser-moulded bead type 9 was coloured by means of a chrome–tin pigment, while a combination of Mn and Fe is responsible for the black colour of the type 47 beads. Cuprite is most likely responsible for the red hue of glass layers from type 14. The dark palm green exterior of the type 17 bead was produced by using a combination of Cu and Fe compounds; iron was the only chromophore detected in the Indian red decoration. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Click consonants are one of the hallmarks of “Khoisan” languages of southern Africa. They are also found in some Bantu languages, where they are usually assumed to have been copied from Khoisan languages. We review the southern African Bantu languages with clicks and discuss in what way they may have obtained these unusual consonants. We draw on both linguistic data and genetic results to gain insights into the sociocultural processes that may have played a role in the prehistoric contact. Our results show that the copying of clicks accompanied large-scale inmarriage of Khoisan women into Bantu-speaking communities and took place in situations where the Khoisan communities may have had relatively high prestige. In the Kavango-Zambezi transfrontier region, these events must have occurred at an early stage of the Bantu immigration, possibly because small groups of food producers entering a new territory were dependent on the autochthonous communities for local knowledge.

The systematic comparison of the different types of progressive Vowel Height Harmony (pVHH) attested within the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC) leads to the conclusion that this common Bantu process of long-distance assimilation cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Kikongo. The ‘(a)symmetric-pVHH’ and ‘back-pVHH’ patterns, the two main and structurally different kinds of pVHH within the KLC, emerged independently and relatively late within two distinct subgroups, viz. South Kikongo and North Kikongo respectively. Moreover, the ‘(a)symmetric-pVHH’ pattern further spread from a South Kikongo focal area coinciding with the heartland of the Kongo kingdom to other parts of the KLC through contact-induced dialectal diffusion. Furthermore, the historical-comparative evidence from the KLC suggests that neither symmetric nor asymmetric pVHH should be reconstructed to Proto-Bantu, the most recent common ancestor of all Bantu languages.

In 2015 the KongoKing research project team excavated the Bu, Kindu and Mantsetsi sites situated in the Kongo-Central Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). All are part of the Kay Ladio Group. This is the first detailed publication on this cultural group, to which no contemporary ones can currently be linked, either from the Atlantic coast of Congo-Brazzaville or from along the Congo River and its tributaries upstream of Kinshasa. Dated to between cal. AD 30 and 475, these settlements mark the presence of what are so far the oldest known iron-producing communities south of the Central African equatorial forest. Evidence for metallurgy is associated with remants of polished stone axes, which were perhaps being used for ritual purposes by this point in time. The charcoal remains found at the sites indicate a savanna environment that was more wooded in Kindu and Mantsetsi than in Bu.

Cuwabo has two different derivational suffixes to form passive verb stems, i.e. -iw and -uw. Unlike in many other Bantu languages, these suffixes are not phonologically conditioned allomorphs of one single morphological passive marker. They are interchangeable as productive passive markers, but -uw has a broader functional range than -iw. The suffix -uw actually is a ‘quasi-middle’ marker as defined by Dom et al.: it semantically focuses the activity expressed by the verb on one single argument, and it syntactically signals the intransitivity of a given verb stem. In this article, it is shown that -uw in Cuwabo is the regular reflex of the Proto-Bantu intransitive separative suffix *-ʊk whose semi-productive intransitivising function as part of a causative/anticausative alternation was functionally broadened to productive passivisation leading to competition with -iw, the inherited reflex of the Proto-Bantu passive suffix *-ibʊ.

info:eu-repo/semantics/published