02 · CONTEXT · ARCHAEOLINGUISTICS

Routes under debate

How routes of expansion are investigated

Linguistic models propose different routes and branches; they do not describe the journey of a single group.

Museum documentation · free public access, no account required.

Three overlaid maps with linguistic tree, savanna corridor and forest route as uncertainty bands — **EDITORIAL VISUALISATION DECLARED · AI-GENERATED IMAGE · TRACEKEEPERS**
Editorial visualisation · Contextual correspondence
Declared editorial visualisation, based on the cartography and sources of the fact sheet; it is not an exact historical frontier.

History and context

Models locate an early focus on the Nigeria-Cameroon border and propose branches through savannas, forests, rivers and the Great Lakes.

Linguistic extinction, multilingualism, borrowing and statistical assumptions alter the outcome. The visitor compares models in uncertainty bands, never a single arrow.

Evidence and interpretation

Robust hypothesis: shared innovations allow language classification. Debated: date, pace and exact geography of each branch.

Catalogue facts

Narrative date: Modelled beginnings c. 6000–4000 years ago
Location: Nigeria-Cameroon border towards central, eastern and southern Africa
Material: Compared vocabulary, phylogenies and spatial models
Context: Separate linguistic tree from observed human displacement
Curatorial reading: The documented fact and its interpretation appear separately in the evidence block.
Dossier axis: context
Research record: BANTU · bantu-ctx-route-models
Documentary coverage: 3 museum, heritage, primary corpus or research sources for this stop.

A closer look

About 1 min to read · 1 section. Further reading and sources · free access. Editorial review recorded: September 5, 2026.

Designing a test beyond known areas

BantuFirst proposed investigating the earliest settlements south of the rainforest through joint work in underexplored archaeological areas of Angola, Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its programme combines excavation with plant remains and reconstruction of subsistence and land-use vocabulary. The methodological contribution is concrete: seek samples where the map has gaps, rather than merely interpolating between famous sites. The project design distinguishes the questions —when, where and with what subsistence— from the results that only fieldwork can establish.

Research · Ghent University · BantuFirst, project objectives and methodsAccess recorded: September 5, 2026.

Sources and references

Expand this information and consult its sources

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