Tracing the Histories of Bantu Civilization through Material Culture : A Museological Approach

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This project was to trace historical process of Bantu expansion through comparative study of material culture by combining fieldwork and detailed research on museum collections. One of the main points of the project was to share the results in the form of digitized database, or cyber-museum. Because of the aim and the method, it was indispensable to carry out the project jointly with museums in relevant countries.Many museums in central and southern Africa have got a lot of archaeological and ethnographic specimens with regard to Bantu peoples, but information of these objects has scarcely been shared internationally. By networking the pieces of information, we envisaged to get clearer views concerning Bantu expansion.First of all, research on the basic vocabularies of Bantu languages was carried out, and we got an overview of glottochronological relationship among Bantu languages. Being based on the result of the research, we went on to conduct comparative study of material culture am … More ong Bantu peoples with special reference to iron manufacturing, architecture, weaving, traditional medicine and related ritual activities. As for traditional iron manufacturing, which has been considered to be the crucial index of Bantu civilization but disappeared some decades ago, we made experiments both in Japan and in Cameroon where we could find some elders who had actual experience.Through these various activities, we are now able to trace more clearly the history of Bantu expansion on a concrete basis. In addition, through this 4 years project, we constructed "Cyber-musum of African Civilization", that is a database of ethnographic and archaeological materials owned by 13 museums of 8 countries. Although the "Cyber-musum" is not yet a comprehensive database of Bantu related collections in the world, it must be a good start to integrate existing information concerning Bantu civilization. We also believe that this projects is useful to establish a common identity among peoples inc Central and Southern Africa. Less