Pikunda-Munda and Batalimo-Maluba: Archaeological Investigations of the Iron Age Settlement History of the Western and Northern Congo Basin

The spread of pottery-producing communities into the Congo rainforest is commonly linked to demic diffusion, driven by the so-called ‘Bantu Expansion’. It is considered the primary linguistic, cultural, and demographic process in Holocene sub-Saharan Africa. A key region in reconstructions of this process is the western Congo Basin. This paper presents, for the first time, a coherent picture of the archaeological settlement history in the western and northern Congo Basin, uncovered by fieldwork of the late 1980s along the rivers Ngoko, Sangha, Likwala-aux-Herbes, Ubangi, and Lua. Archaeological research of the River Reconnaissance Project, directed by Manfred K. H. Eggert from 1977 to 1987, produced a pottery sequence for the region. Archaeological features and findings uncovered during the project’s field campaigns in the northern and western Congo Basin have only recently been studied in detail. The present analysis provides the only reliable source for the a reconstruction of the cultural dynamics within the region due to lack of subsequent archaeological fieldwork. Archaeological data and the sequence of pottery styles within the western Congo Basin, along the Sangha river, cannot support the claim that this region, due to a climate-induced extension of savannas, played a unique role as a ‘corridor’ within the expansion of putatively ‘Bantu’ speaking groups during the latter half of the 1st millennium BCE.