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The Congo-Ubangi watershed :
An interdisciplinary approach to the genesis of a linguistic accretion zone in Central Africa

CongUbangi is a 5-year program (2024-2029) funded by a Starting Grant (n° 101116562) of the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, awarded to the project’s Principal Investigator, Prof. Sara Pacchiarotti (UGent). It is hosted at the UGent Centre for Bantu Studies and involves close collaboration with the Human Evolutionary History in Africa lab of the Department of Ecology and Genetics at Uppsala University (Sweden), the UGent Wood-Lab (Belgium), the Institute of Archaeological Sciences of Goethe University in Frankfurt (Germany), the Institute of National Museums of Congo (DRC), the University of Kinshasa (DRC), and the Instituts Supérieurs Pédagogiques in Gemena, Gbadolite, and Lisala (DRC), among others.

Central Africa’s Congo-Ubangi watershed spans multiple ecozones in the northern margins of the rainforest. It is a major hotbed of linguistic, cultural and human genetic diversity with deep occupation history. The aim of CongUbangi is to understand the present-day interconnections between language, material cultures and genes in the Congo-Ubangi watershed and project them as far back into the past as possible through a holistic, localized and locally-enforced interdisciplinary approach. The project team’s core scientific expertise covers linguistics, ethnoarchaeology, and archaeology. Genetic and paleoenvironmental expertise is added through inter-university collaboration. CongUbangi will realize a breakthrough in our understanding of how linguistic diversity correlates with cultural and genetic diversity and why it originated and persisted in this specific ecoregion for millennia. By untangling one of the most historically intricate areas of the continent, it will contribute to scores of theoretical and methodological issues in a large array of disciplines.