In the second talk of the 2025-26 Anthropology Speaker Series, Dr. Matthew Pawlowicz discusses the findings from his NEH and NSF-funded multidisciplinary project in central Zambia. That project explores the Bantu Expansions, the spread of Bantu languages across central, eastern and southern Africa over the last 4,000 years, through a microhistory approach focused on a region of Zambia whose past the team has come to know very well by combining archaeological, linguistic, and environmental datasets.  Dr. Pawlowicz will discuss new discoveries from that work, showing that the story of the Bantu Expansions is as much about what happens after Bantu speakers or languages arrive in place, as when they got there.  Here, the evidence shows that as Bantu-speakers became sedentary and rooted in this part of central Zambia, they developed new patterns of mobility that further spread Bantu languages and ensured their communities' success.