"The expansion of Bantu speaking people is one of the longest periods of premodern human migration. Despite a century of research on their expansion into Central Africa, little is known about how Bantu speaking groups successfully traversed the varied landscapes of the Congo River Basin especially amid the cultural and environmental shifts that characterize the 1st millennium B.C. This study addresses the fundamental question of how and why was Bantu Expansion into Central Africa during the Early Iron Age successful? To answer this research question, I examined published and unpublished archaeological accounts of sites located across Central Africa from western Cameroon to southwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo. I then categorized the presences and absences of the archaeological material from each site to map when and where artifacts emerged during the Early Iron Age, ca 1000 B.C. to 200 A.D. Then I developed a framework for examining premodern African Diasporas which prioritizes massive, long term dispersal and the interregional connections such dispersals produce. Through analyzing an interregional network of shared cultural knowledge throughout the Equatorial Forest between 1000 B.C. and 200 A.D. I illustrate that Early Iron Age Bantu speakers were actively constructing connections to their homeland via the trade, technological, settlement, and aesthetic choices. The similarities and dissimilarities reveal an intentional pattern of interregional connection, previously thought to be discontinuous and disjointed. This research ultimately reveals that the patterning of behaviors strengthened their common local and regional identities and thus gave way for continuous reconnection and cultivation of the Bantu homeland. Chapter One introduces the Bantu Phenomenon, the major models that illustrate cultural change, and the research questions that shape this dissertation. Chapter Two situates the research within major theories of cultural change in pre-historic Africa and outlines the pre-modern African Diaspora framework to explore mechanisms of interregional change given the duration and magnitude of the expansion of Bantu speakers during the period. Chapter Three explains the use of the existing published record of archaeological materials as the primary source of information for the dissertation. Chapter Four then discusses the development of the Early Iron Age package in the Bamenda Grasslands and the Northern Plateau of south western Cameroon. Chapter Five reports on the archaeological materials recovered from the Forest interior and Lower Congo serving as illustrations of the dispersion of the Early Iron Age package throughout the Congo River Basin. Chapter 6 presents the analysis of when and where behaviors arrived across these sites and the inter and intraregional patterns that emerge between the cases. Chapter 7 concludes the dissertation with a re-construction of Bantu expansion as a premodern African Diaspora. This re-construction reveals the connections between the Northern Plateau, namely Obobogo and the rest of the basin as indicators for the establishment of the Bantu Diaspora that would persist for the next two millennia. Lastly, I suggest that future research would benefit from paying attention to both the continuities and discontinuities of assemblages at the regional level and how those connections change across space and time. This research contributes to the scholarly engagement with the origins of the Bantu Phenomenon and how it endured across the variety of environmental, cultural, and technological conditions of the Central African Early Iron Age."--Pages ii-iii.
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