Capturing People on the Move: Spatial Analysis and Remote Sensing in the Bantu Mobility Project, Basanga, Zambia

Summary

From its inception in 2014, the Bantu Mobility Project has sought to recover the various mobilities that made up peoples’ experience of the Bantu Expansions, the spread of over 500 related languages across nearly half the African continent. We have sought to refocus research on the Bantu Expansions away from the macro-scale and onto the specific movements of people, animals, and material goods at various spatial and temporal scales. From an archaeological standpoint this effort necessitates careful study of the spatial contexts of recovered artifacts – and of the human activities that left them behind – to capture different forms of mobility. Analysis of spatial data from archaeological and geoarchaeological surveys using GIS has already illustrated important relationships between different kinds of sites in the region around Basanga, Zambia, with implications for the kinds of daily, seasonal, and long-term movements that connected the people living and working in those places. Similarly, using GIS to combine such data with that available from satellite imagery has enabled the creation of a predictive model for the location of other sites, and which concerns from a mobile, Bantu-speaking community might have driven those selections, that can be evaluated through remote sensing and further survey.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 19985