Integrating archaeological riverine and forestry survey methods for assessing human occupation in Central African forests.

Summary

Heavy vegetation cover presents obvious difficulties in conducting archaeological survey in the Central African rainforests. Survey conducted in 2010 and 2013 along the Congo River and its tributaries, between Bumba and Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo, centered on using rivers as a means of access into dense forests.The results indicated that the region's archaeological record consists primarily of pottery finds associated with old soil horizons or pottery arranged in pit-structures, with lithic assemblages being relatively rare. This approach offered, for the first time, an assessment of the past 2,000 years of human occupation in a region that for long represented a blank on the archaeological map. However, a river-based approach does not overcome the lack of access to areas of terra firma forests away from water courses. Here, we explore the feasibility of combining forestry inventories with systematic archaeological sampling as a means of elucidating anthropogenic influence in the inter-fluvial portions in dense rainforest. We place particular focus on the link between light-demanding, long-lived tree species in large forest patches and past human disturbance. Preliminary results indicate that this multidisciplinary methodology offers the potential to gather information regarding human rainforest life-ways beyond more accessible riverine survey datasets.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Forests of Plenty: Ethnographic and Archaeological Rainforests as Hotspots of Human Activity

Keywords

Spatial Coverage