Photo: Nicolas Nikis

Louis Champion is a tropical archaeobotanist and archaeologist. He has been working in West Africa (Benin, Mali, Ghana and Senegal), East Africa (Uganda, Madagascar, Zanzibar, and Comoros), Central Africa (DR Congo and PR Congo) and in Asia (Myanmar, Bangladesh and Thailand). He has recently completed a PhD, at the institute of archaeology at University College of London (UCL), on archaeobotanical remains along the Niger River Basin, with a strong focus on ethnobotanical and ethnoarchaeological understanding. He has also been working on millets more widely in Africa and beyond. His research examines the evolution of the agricultural and food economies that supported the communities that gave rise to complex societies in West Africa, as well as the agricultural systems that sustained the succeeding polities around the Niger River Valley. One of the major goals of his researches is to reconstruct the evolution of food and beer systems, including both production and consumption. This aim goes beyond simply documenting the arrival of new practices or new crop taxa. It also addresses the consumption practices that these crops gave rise to, and how they became embedded in the social, economic, political and environmental history of past African societies. Currently he is a researcher (Post-Doc) on the Nok Project at the Department of Pre- and Proto-historical Archaeology, Institute of Archaeological Sciences at Goethe University. He is also associate researchers at the Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren in Belgium and external collaborator in Anthropology and ethno-archeology at the Department of Genetics & Evolution, university of Biology, Geneva Switzerland.