Pottery and Charcoal

At the Gembloux laboratory we know that this difficult context - poaching, corruption, lack of human resources - does not help to restore the image of logging in European countries. That it is why it is important to boost awareness of the efforts of companies involved in sustainable management and FSC certification. In particular this involves demolishing a cliché: that of a more or less 'virgin' African forest invaded by devastating logging activities. The presence of fragments of pottery shows that, on the contrary, the forests of the whole Cameroon-Gabon area, with just a few exceptions, have been regularly occupied by man for the last two millennia. Although this occupation was not without having an impact on the current layout of the forest, it is also interesting to think about how the forestry of today could contribute to the structure of the forest that will prevail in one hundred or two hundred years.

In the hamlet of ‘Kongo’ somewhere on the road to Mindourou, a strange ballet of Cameroonian workers is taking place in the middle of the forest under the mocking eyes of noisy monkeys. Whilst some take core soil samples from the earth, others, sitting next to small pits carved out with trowels, patiently roll tiny clods of earth between the thumb and the index finger looking for pottery and charcoal debris.  Tiny bees bombard the strange team in their hundreds, buzzing in their ears and working their way into their nostrils. The work of an archaeologist? In part, yes, as it is about identifying traces of a human presence that probably goes back several centuries. But it is much more than that in reality...

In some ways Jason Vleminckx, a first year PhD student at the ULB, is having his baptism of fire under the eyes of Jean-Louis Doucet: five days of total immersion in the forest, heading up a team of local workers, far from any telecommunication relay stations. A scientific assignment done 'the hard way' which consists of collecting the material which will form the basis of his thesis. The young biologist and his team subdivide a pre-selected forest area into twenty experimental plots of 2000 square metres. In the corner of each of them, he carries out coring with a borer and analyses, in particular, the physical and chemical composition of the soil. In the centre they dig a pit and tirelessly get on with the same work: detecting tiny residues of charcoal which, after anthracological analysis conducted in the laboratory, will provide information on the species of trees that once lived here. 'Each piece of charcoal is the footprint of a human occupation,’ explains the Ph.D. student: ‘for example a cooking fire, a craft activity or indeed a portion of forest burned to practise agriculture there. Microscopic analysis will tell us about the type of trees present in the period in question'. Throughout this painstaking work, the charcoal residues, carefully distinguished from various mineral debris and sometimes from pottery fragments, are slipped into small jars destined for the laboratories of Brussels, Tervuren (Royal Museum for Central Africa) or Gembloux (Agro-bio Tech, ULg).

'The multidisciplinary aspect of this type of work is exciting, adds Jean-Louis Doucet. And rare in the scientific world when it comes to the Congo Basin! We are indeed here at the crossroads of disciplines as varied as climatology, archaeology, anthracology, botany, genetics and so on.  By analysing and dating the charcoal, the vegetal community that lived in this place in different periods can be determined according to various factors: human activity, topography, soil type, the dispersal mode of species and so on.  But this type of hypothesis is only possible if the ecology of the species in question is sufficiently understood. We already know, for example, that, although a species such as Afrormosia, which is highly sought after on the European market, has difficulty regenerating naturally, this is not due to supposed over-exploitation but because it can no longer benefit from rays of light related to the type of roaming human activity that was practised over the last two centuries (read the article Protect the African Forest: yes, but not blindly!). Paradoxically, perhaps the future of other species also depends on the type of human activities carried out in the forest...'