ABSTRACT
This chapter presents newly conducted fieldwork at Mukila in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The site is located near the top of a steep hill at the eastern edge of the valley of the Wamba River and had previously been excavated in the early 1950s. This previous research suggested ceramics and lithics being present in the same stratigraphy but not overlapping chronologically. Lacking detailed analysis and publication since the 1950s, the site's re-investigation and the 2018 excavations provide an exact sequence of these different cultural markers. A trench that was meticulously excavated up to a depth of 3.6 m is particularly important. The distribution of finds and associated radiocarbon dates illustrate multiple occupations by Stone Age communities throughout the Late Pleistocene and the entire Holocene. As one of the few intact archaeological sequences in western Central Africa, spanning the last 40,000 years, Mukila addressed several pressing research questions in the region.
