Early bananas in Africa: the state of the art
By K. Neumann, E. Hildebrand. 2009
102 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Because the genus Musa is not indigenous to Africa, remains of bananas in African archaeological or geological contexts indicate cultivation of domesticated forms. During the past 10 years, at least two claims have been made for discovery of banana phytoliths in middle to late Holocene African contexts (Lejju et al . 2005, 2006, Mbida et al . 2000, 2001, 2006). These finds have not met with universal acceptance (cf. Mbida et al . 2005, Vansina 2003), in part because application of phytolith studies to African archaeology is just beginning. In this paper, we examine current evidence for bananas in Africa, and discuss its implications for African prehistory. We first consider how various scenarios for the arrival of bananas in Africa relate to broader questions about prehistoric social and economic change. We then explore requirements for archaeological identification of bananas in light of evolutionary, morphological and environmental relations between Musa and its sister taxon Ensete , which grows wild in Africa. Finally, we evaluate existing evidence for Musa in prehistoric African contexts and suggest ways in which future research might help consolidate current claims.
Subfields: Forestry, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7981c7b0453169e38a2f944577713c6724ea35fa
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Citations in the corpus
- Combining Biological Approaches to Shed Light on the Evolution of Edible Bananas (2009, background): “The contentious archaeological results at Munsa, north of Lake Victoria and dated to 5000 years B.P. (Lejju et al. 2006), could also invert the previously accepted chronology (see Neumann & Hildebrand 2009).”
- Why Bananas Matter: An introduction to the history of banana domestication (2009, background): “…the leaf phytoliths (Vrydaghs et al. 2009), seed phytoliths (Lentfer 2009a) and starch granules (Lentfer 2009b) of subspecies (principally among M. acuminata ssp.), species and sections (different Musa spp.) and genera (Musa versus Ensete), as well as potential problems (Neumann & Hildebrand 2009).”
- Subsistence mosaics, forager-farmer interactions, and the transition to food production in eastern Africa (2017, background): “Again, these early finds are problematized by issues of stratigraphic integrity and replicability (Neumann and Hildebrand, 2009).”