Co-investigator for the Democratic Republic of Congo
Alexandre was trained at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium (ULB) holding degrees in both Archaeology and the History of Art (1990) and History (1987). Following on from this, he conducted research on pre-dynastic Egyptian pottery at the Research Laboratory for History of Art and Archaeology at Oxford University as part of a 2 year Wiener-Grant Foundation project. In 2001 he completed his PhD at ULB on pottery manufacturing processes in sub-Saharan Africa and their reconstruction in archaeological contexts.
Since 2008 he has been head of research at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA). He has fieldwork experience acquired in various international research projects on, for example, the Kongo Kingdom in Central Africa, the West African Medieval Empires in Northern Benin and Southern Niger, the production and distribution of copper in South-East Central Africa, and the roads of slavery in Central Africa (particularly at the opening of the Congo river and around the settlement of Kasongo – Tongoni, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC).
With expertise in impact assessments and rescue excavations, Alexandre was involved in impact and mitigation archaeological surveys in the Tadrart Accacus and Mezzak Setafet in southern Libya on the behalf of Sorbonne University, Paris, and in Ituri and Katanga (DRC) on behalf of the RMCA.
He has a longstanding interest in the study of material culture, specifically pottery. To reconstruct the past, he and his colleagues start in the present, interviewing lore keepers and studying material culture, before taking part in any excavations. He is currently working on the history of Riverine people in the North-Eastern Congo Bend (between Kirundu and Basoko on the Congo River) and on the mapping of colonial exploration tracks as an index of precolonial trade networks. He is also developing a research network dedicated to the impact of climate and people on past, present and future ecosystems in an area of Chad called the Ennedi.