Since 2003 a joint research project of the universities of Frankfurt and Tübingen has been exploring the changing interrelationship of environment and culture in the forest-savanna regions of West and Central Africa. The project, in which archaeologists, archaeobotanists and geographers cooperate, is sponsored by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and concentrates on the first millennium BC. (extracted from Eggert et al. 2006)
The here presented part of the unit focusses on the interrelationship of climatic changes and the consequential vegetational alteration, as well as the settlement of the evergreen rainforest of Central Africa. Our aim, as archaeologists, is to investigate the intrusion and the gradual exploitation of the equatorial rainforest by ceramic producing, agricultural populations.
