Shadreck Chirikure

Language is the most important conveyor of meaning and culture, elements which are often lost in translation, especially when such translation is across languages from distant cultural zones. For example, translations of indigenous African languages into English and French, particularly during the colonial period, frequently distorted the meaning of local words and cultural practices. Such a generalisation directly applies to an aspect of Shona religion known as mukwerera/kukumbira mvura (asking for rain), which was – and is still – being carried out by intermediaries through ancestor supplication. Interestingly, the first translations of this category of practice from Shona into English erroneously labelled the ceremony 'rainmaking', presided over by rain-doctors. Amongst the Shona, however, nobody except the Mwari (God), or Musikavanhu (the Creator), has the power to give or withhold rain. As intermediaries, officials who presided over rain-imploring ceremonies never controlled rain, but petitioned God, via the ancestors on behalf of the community. Rain control was a very dangerous act, only practised by witches and magicians (varoyi) to manipulate lightning (mheni) to harm others. This contribution melds strands of evidence from Shona linguistics with ethnographic, religious, historical, and archaeological observations to argue that the term 'rainmaking' is a misnomer which ascribes undue agency and power to masvikiro who presided over rain imploring. The misnomer derives from the

The World Heritage Site of Great Zimbabwe is one of the most iconic and largest archaeological settlements in Africa. It was the hub of direct and indirect trade which internally connected various areas of southern Africa, and externally linked them with East Africa and the Near and Far East. Archaeologists believe that at its peak, Great Zimbabwe had a fully urban population of 20,000 people concentrated in approximately 2.9 square kilometres (40 percent of 720 ha). This translates to a population density of 6,897, which is comparable with that of some of the most populous regions of the world in the 21 st century. Here, we combine archaeological, ethnographic and historical evidence with ecological and statistical modelling to demonstrate that the total population estimate for the site's nearly 800-year occupational duration (CE1000–1800), after factoring in generational succession, is unlikely to have exceeded 10,000 people. This conclusion is strongly firmed up by the absence of megamiddens at the site, the chronological differences between several key areas of the settlement traditionally assumed to be coeval, and the historically documented low populations recorded for the sub-continent between CE1600 and 1950.

For 400 years before the onset of British colonisation, northern Zimbabwe witnessed increased interaction between the locals and several Europeans. The most powerful local player was the Mutapa state, while the mercantilism-fuelled Portuguese were the dominant foreign players. These foils were brought together by the lucrative Indian Ocean trade network. The available historical evidence posits that in this trading system, northern Zimbabwe supplied gold, iron, ivory and other local commodities, while the Portuguese brought cloth, glass beads and porcelain. The historical data are, however, silent on the processes, technical or otherwise, associated with craft production in the Mutapa state. Very little is known about the processes of metal production and working, and it also remains unclear whether these centuries of interaction with the Portuguese influenced developments in indigenous African metallurgy. Recent archaeometallurgical analyses of iron production remains and copper based artefacts from Mutapa and related Afro-Portuguese archaeological sites has thrown up insights into the little-understood processes of iron smelting and copper object fabrication. The study of metal objects highlighted that in addition to classic imports such as glass beads and porcelain, northern Zimbabwe also imported brass and high tin bronzes from the Portuguese agents, suggesting that the circulation of goods in the Indian Ocean trade system was more complicated than is currently believed. This demonstrates the potential of materials science-based approaches not only in understanding between group interactions,
but also in transcending some of the silences in the oral and written sources of the Mutapa state.

This paper reports on the typological and archaeometallurgical studies of an assemblage of long forgotten but often misidentified metallurgical crucibles and moulds from Great Zimbabwe's century old archive. It exposes that specialised crucibles, non-specialised crucibles (common pottery), as well as an eclectic assortment of moulds, were primarily used to hold the melt and to form ingots during non-ferrous metallurgical operations, throughout the site's occupation history (1000–1700 CE). The moulds appear in different types, some elongated but others more circular as if they were used to produce small gold 'buttons'. Available records indicate that the various types of metallurgical ceramics were often found in the same stratigraphic contexts as domestic debris. The characterisation of the crucible fabrics and attached slags suggest that while the two types of crucibles were made using local granitic clays, they were also used to process similar metals and alloys, but sometimes representing different stages in the chaîne operatoire. This raises significant questions relating to the techno-cultural choices behind the typological variation, if the intention of their producers and users, was to work the same metals and alloys.

Mining and metallurgy have previously been cited as the sole activities that encouraged the permanent occupation of the agropastorally marginal region conventionally known as the northern Lowveld of South Africa prior to the nineteenth century. Archaeologists have previously documented more than 50 second-millennium AD settlements, associated with extensive evidence of metal production, around Phalaborwa in this region. Archaeometallurgical research was carried out at Shankare Hill, one of these Iron Age settlements with remarkable evidence of metal production, in order to reconstruct the extractive metallurgical activities represented at the site. To achieve this standard archaeological fieldwork procedures together with post-fieldwork laboratory studies were employed. This paper presents both the archaeological and archaeometric results that enabled the reconstruction, in great detail, of the various metal production activities from ore beneficiation to primary smelting and subsequent metal refining processes that took place at Shankare. Iron smelting debris, which significantly differed both microscopically and chemically from copper smelting slags, was documented at middens with exclusive metal production debris, whilst copper production debris, which included mostly crushed furnace slag and secondary refining ceramic crucible fragments, was confined to low density scatters and domestic middens. The Palabora Igneous Complex, whose unique ore signature is well documented in the geological literature, was identified as the source of both the copper and iron ores smelted at Shankare. Beyond the technological reconstruction, the results are used to discuss the role of metal production and exchange within the wider southern African archaeological context.

The legacy of vandalism and almost a century of continuous focus on drystone wall masonry is that little is known about metal craft production and consumption activities at Great Zimba-bwe. Within these limitations, this paper attempts to explore the metallurgy of Great Zimba-bwe, guided by the framework of archival, chronological and fieldwork-and laboratory-based studies. The paper contends that residents of various components of Great Zimbabwe worked and processed their own metal, pointing to homestead-level production and consumption. Metal from local and regional sources sustained long-distance trade with the Indian Ocean rim.

Until the last two decades, the archaeological study of urbanism in pre-colonial Africa 1 has mired in racial prejudice. There was a well-rooted perception within the colonial mindset that Africa was quintessentially rural in character. This situation was nurtured by a Eurocentric conceptualization of urbanism. Such perceptions naturally discounted many pre-colonial centres in Africa as urban in character or origin. In situations where African towns and cities conformed to European traits, these were attributed to foreign colonization or external trade with the outside world. 2 There has also been increasing concern on the archaeological identity of African urbanism given that the baseline GHHQLWLRQVV ZHUHH :HVWHUQQ GHULYHG 3 0DSXQJXEZHH DQGG *UHDWW =LPEDEZH WKHH UVWW PDMRUU towns in pre-European southern Africa, have not escaped these prejudices, 4 as they

While pioneers of archaeology in any given region have established the foundations of the discipline, their views have not remained unchanged in places such as Europe, North America and Australasia. In these regions, successive generations of researchers changed the direction of their work based not just on new observations but also in light of new methods and theories.

Abstract: A study of the composition and phase distribution of the corrosion layers on three ferrous objects, excavated at K2 (Bambandyanalo), an archaeological site in South Africa, was conducted. The objective of the study was to obtain information that can contribute to conservation procedures to be performed on the iron artefacts from this site. Examination of cross sections by means of energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy coupled to a scanning electron microscope (SEM–EDX), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), and micro-Raman ...

AIM: Estimating physical stability as well as revealing signs of fabrication in metal artefacts via two complementary nondestructive methods, neutron-and X-ray tomography were the main goals of this study. ABSTRACT: To aid conservation management of metal artefacts improved knowledge of the internal structure and degree of corrosion therein is highly desired. In this study, neutron-and X-ray tomography were chosen as two complementary noninvasive visualization techniques to study internal structure and corrosion of five ...

ABSTRACT The Southern Waterberg in Limpopo Province is archaeologically rich, especially when it comes to evidence of pre-colonial mining and metal working. Geologically, the area hosts important mineral resources such as copper, tin and iron which were smelted by agriculturalists in the pre-colonial period. In this region however, tin seems to be the major attraction given that Rooiberg is still the only source of cassiterite in southern Africa to have provided evidence of mining before European colonization. This paper reports the results of archaeological and archaeometallurgical work which was carried out in order to reconstruct the technology of metalworking as well as the cultural interaction in the study area and beyond. The ceramic evidence shows that from the Eiland Phase (1000-1300 AD) onwards there was cross borrowing of characteristic decorative traits amongst extant groups that later on culminated in the creation of a new ceramic group known as Rooiberg. In terms of mining and metal working, XRF and SEM analyses, when coupled with optical microscopy, indicate the use of indigenous bloomery techniques that are widespread in pre-colonial southern Africa. Tin and bronze production was also represented and their production remains also pin down this metallurgy to particular sites and excludes the possibility of importing of finished tin and bronze objects into this area.

The world renowned site of Great Zimbabwe is one of the most globally significant archaeological sites in Africa. Ironically, this importance is not matched by the little amount of information that is known about such an iconic site. The heritage of this regrettable situation was birthed by the destructive activities of late nineteenth and early twentieth century antiquarians who vandalised tons of evidence without record. Throughout the twentieth century, however, professional archaeologists made interventions that rescued information from various parts of the site but most of which was never published. A moratorium imposed on archaeological excavations at the site in the early 1990s failed to stimulate an active engagement with material that was archived since the first professional excavations began. Motivated by the need to understand the site in new ways, research was initiated to revisit the site's patchy and scattered archives and to supplement them with field surveys. This paper discusses the re-mapping of the site which, for the first time, comprehensively produced themed layers of spatial, chronological and material culture distribution. The main outcome is that most existing maps ignored a large number of terraces on the hill and omitted evidence of occupation in key areas. When combined with excavation profiles that expose the massive rebuilding of the site by original residents, it becomes clear that settlement ebbed and flowed during the more than six centuries of occupation at the site.

Across the globe, the emergence of complex societies excites intense academic debate in archaeology and allied disciplines. Not surprisingly, in southern Africa the traditional assumption that the evolution of socio-political complexity began with ideological transformations from K2 to Mapungubwe between CE1200 and 1220 is clouded in controversy. It is believed that the K2-Mapungubwe transitions crystallised class distinction and sacred leadership, thought to be the key elements of the Zimbabwe culture on Mapungubwe Hill long before they emerged anywhere else. From Mapungubwe (CE1220-1290), the Zimbabwe culture was expressed at Great Zimbabwe (CE1300-1450) and eventually Khami (CE1450-1820). However, new fieldwork at Mapela Hill, when coupled with a Bayesian chronology, offers tremendous fresh insights which refute this orthodoxy. Firstly, Mapela possesses enormous prestige stone-walled terraces whose initial construction date from the 11th century CE, almost two hundred years earli...

This paper discusses the globally significant topic of gendered participation and socio-technical improvisation
in technological systems hard set within deeply symbolic practices. The general belief in the
anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa is that metallurgy (male domain) and pottery (female domain) are
gendered technologies, regulated by strong taboos that exclude women from participating in male practices,
and vice versa. This has promoted the untested generalisation that, in conformity with these gender
dichotomies, taboos mandated that transformational stages of metallurgy such as smelting were always
carried on outside settlements, without the participation of women. These ideas were empirically tested
through a stylistic, petrographic and geochemical study of metallurgical crucibles from Mapungubwe,
which at this site resemble pottery. It emerged that pottery and crucibles are one and the same. Since
pottery was made by women, and men worked metal, the conclusion in this paper is that metallurgy
was neither hermetically sealed nor accessible exclusively to men. Furthermore, depending on context,
primary metal production was also practised within settlements. This demonstrates considerable fluidity
and improvisation, with women and men participating in each other’s technological domains, although
such participation may have been staggered so that they undertook different tasks of the same process,
at potentially different times and in different spaces.

To what extent do we need structuralist cognitive settlement models such as the Central Cattle Pattern and the Zimbabwe Pattern for future research and understanding of Iron Age social life in southern Africa? How will alternative approaches enable us to progress beyond the present status of knowledge? While the three last decades of debate have underpinned key aspects of archaeological inquiry, notably questions of social change, gender dynamics, analytical scale and the use of ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological insights, the sometimes entrenched nature of the debate has in other respects hindered development of new approaches and restrained the range of themes and topics scholars engage with. In this article, we identify the issues of analytical scale and recursiveness as key to the development
of future approaches and present an alternative framework through empirically grounded discussion of three central Iron Age themes: ceramics and the microscale, the spatiality of metal production and the temporality of stonewalled architecture.

In conventional reconstructions of southern African archaeology , the production of iron has been seen as unchanging for the last 2000 years. Significantly, this contrasts with the changes that have been noted in broader society and other classes of material culture of the same period. Despite iron being used as a chrono-stratigraphic indicator ; virtually nothing is known on the patterns of iron production within the Iron Age and whether change in technology and the socio-cultural context of production took place. From a combined archaeological and metallurgical perspective, the historical development of iron working has never been explored. For example, it is not known whether similar types of furnaces were constantly operated throughout the last two millennia. Excavations at two sites in northern Zimbabwe , one Gokomere-Ziwa (800 - 1200 cai AD) and one Zimbabwe tradition (1500 - 1700 cai AD), have shown differences in iron pyrometallurgical debris, tentatively suggesting that they represent separate metal working practices. By comparing the archaeological and metallurgical evidence from the two sites, this paper represents an initial step in delineating patterns of indigenous iron production in one region of Zimbabw

Abstract:

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?
Edited by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Overview
In the STI literature, Africa has often been regarded as a recipient of science, technology, and innovation rather than a maker of them. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines show that STI in Africa is not merely the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but the working of African knowledge. Their contributions focus on African ways of looking, meaning-making, and creating. The chapter authors see Africans as intellectual agents whose perspectives constitute authoritative knowledge and whose strategic deployment of both endogenous and inbound things represents an African-centered notion of STI. “Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere,” observes Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, the volume’s editor. Western, colonialist definitions of STI are not universalizable.

The contributors discuss topics that include the trivialization of indigenous knowledge under colonialism; the creative labor of chimurenga, the transformation of everyday surroundings into military infrastructure; the role of enslaved Africans in America as innovators and synthesizers; the African ethos of “fixing”; the constitutive appropriation that makes mobile technologies African; and an African innovation strategy that builds on domestic capacities. The contributions describe an Africa that is creative, technological, and scientific, showing that African STI is the latest iteration of a long process of accumulative, multicultural knowledge production.

Contributors
Geri Augusto, Shadreck Chirikure, Chux Daniels, Ron Eglash,
Ellen Foster, Garrick E. Louis, D. A. Masolo, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Neda Nazemi, Toluwalogo Odumosu, Katrien Pype, Scott Remer