Interview Els Cornelissen France 2020: "We have both extremes in our collections".

Archaeological or ethnographic, the collections of the AfricaMuseum hold no secrets for the archaeologist who has worked there for thirty-five years. Considering its two ends, the archaeological fund goes from the Acheulean to the collections of 2018, she explains. In this interview with Le Courrier de Kinshasa in the old section of art and archeology, she returns in particular to the history of excavations carried out in the DRC starting from the oldest carried out in Kinshasa in 1920.

Le Courrier de Kinshasa (L.C.K.): Could you help us introduce yourself to our readers?

Els Cornelissen (E.C.): I am Els Cornelissen, archaeologist specializing in the Middle Late Stone Age in Central Africa. At the museum, I am head of the humanities department (history and cultural anthropology), head of the heritage service, responsible for the central library and I also coordinate and manage the collections of the archives.

Interview Els Cornelissen France 2020

L.C.K. : What heritage are you dealing with here at the Museum of Tervuren?

E.C.: In the service of heritage, I mainly do scientific research in art history on ethnographic and archaeological collections which cover 300,000 years until fairly recently. Rather, it’s the work my colleague Alexandre Livingstone Smith does. We also have collections from anthropology, technology, it's using the present to understand the past as much as we use the past to understand the present, it goes both ways. Since we work mainly in archeology with material culture, it also allows us to understand how this material culture was made by the society from which it came. One of the materials that is very strong in archeology is pottery. Alexandre works with potters to understand where they go to get the clay, what all the treatments he undergoes before moving on to making pottery. How the pots are set up, what techniques are used to decorate and cook them and then, of course, what to do with them: under what circumstances are they used. To understand this better, we buy a certain production from the craftswomen because they have devoted time to it, to show how they do it. These collections are here, we are working on them trying to restore the gestures that we have observed in the matter so as to be able to understand the pottery that we analyze in archeology. However, most of the objects in the old collections bearing the inventory numbers of the Belgian State are above all prehistoric and cut stone. They have not always been the subject of archaeological excavations but are often fortuitous finds of people who collected them during geological research or mining activities or even just by digging the ground. Working in the earth is what archeology has in common with diggers. The objects collected are those which have undergone human action. When you start to cut stone, the goal is obviously to produce a tool. And during this process, there is debris, waste that is more difficult to recognize than the tool and cannot be collected. These collections are already a selection from a selection. This is how we have very little data to date them, especially since our preferred method of dating, the radiocarbon, dates from the 1950s. This technique was in its infancy at that time, so all which was found before could not be dated. Besides, it has its limits, it does not exceed 40,000 years. We can compare certain objects found in Katanga but also at Gombe, in Kinshasa, on the basis of types of tools. This suggests that there are industries of the Acheulean type which elsewhere are dated up to 300,000 years, even 1.7 million years ago, but which cannot be dated in the Congo. However, it is only by comparing them with dated sites in East Africa, South and North Africa that we can give an approximate dating. These are the two extremes that we have in our collections. This ranges from Acheulean to collections from 2010, 2017 and 2018.

L.C.K. : Are excavations organized in the DRC for what purpose?

E.C.: It's already been "A Long History", as expressed in the museum hall that bears this name. Alexandre was the curator of this room based on the collections that we can show. This story is obviously partial because it is conditioned by the objects that we can display. The oldest excavations in the DRC date back to 1920 in Kinshasa itself, a period before we have at our disposal the dating techniques. The Upemba depression is a typical example of other systematic excavations carried out in the years 1957-1959, which were repeated in the years 1964-1965. And the last time anyone went there was in 1988. It’s a streak that goes back to before the sixth century AD. It shows a certain continuity and discontinuity in the occupation or the history of the population of this region. These are two examples, but recently there was the Boyekoli Ebale ya Congo (Study of the Congo River) expedition organized in 2010 with the University of Kisangani and three Belgian institutions. Above all, this team had to inventory diversity, but there was also room for linguists and archaeologists. We wanted to understand the dynamics of the populations within the equatorial forest but also the Bantu migrations which is a phenomenon to which we pay a lot of attention when working in Central Africa. In the summer of 2019, Alexandre Livingstone and Noémie Arazi of Groundworks were in a project carried out in collaboration with the universities of Kinshasa, Lubumbashi and the Institute of National Museums of Congo. They observed the physical traces of the presence of Tippo Tip and Arabo-Swahili in eastern Congo, more specifically in the city of Kasongo. The themes are quite large and varied with relatively recent periods. I was not myself on the ground but I think of the material collected on the shores of Lake Tumba with this idea of ​​occupying the equatorial forest again. But how do you find traces and interpret them in a region where there are very few stones available? Where did people get the material from, what did they invest in? These are my concerns at the moment.

L.C.K. : What was the crux of this research carried out in the equatorial forest?

E.C.: For a very long time, one wondered if people had lived in the equatorial forest for a very long time or if their presence was relatively recent. Know how far it goes? Also, since in the colonial period more attention was paid to prehistory than to recent history, archaeological maps contained huge gaps in the equatorial forest. It was in the 1970s and 1980s that a large German team used the rivers as access to the equatorial forest. And it is by prospecting in the rivers, through surveys in the villages, limited excavations, etc., that they have been able to reconstruct an occupation of the places which dates back at least until 2,500 years ago thanks to different types of pottery. It was precisely their success that inspired us to participate in the 2010 expedition. Again, there was nothing, no archaeological site. On the spot, taking the trouble to go up rivers not very far that we came back with the same results: an occupation which goes back up to 2200 years in our case, a little more recent of three hundred years than the previous ones . But there are so many challenges in the regions regarding archaeological coverings because there are so many voids! They are not explained by a lack of occupation or history but simply by a lack of research. We know that if we go we will make discoveries, but we have to go!