East African Archaeology: Foragers, Potters, Smiths, and Traders

11. East African Archaeology: A South African Perspective

11 East African Archaeology: A Southern African Perspective Peter Mitchell When in 1947 the First Pan-African Congress on Prehistory met in Nairobi it initiated a series of meetings that continue to bring together archaeologists and others involved in the reconstruction of Africa’s past. In that immediate postwar period a particularly close linkage was perceived between the prehistories of southern and East Africa: Stone Age cultural assemblages from East Africa were, for example, described as “Wilton,” after the typesite of southern Africa’s own Holocene microlithic tradition (L. Leakey 1931). Furthermore, the basic chronostratigraphic frameworks for the Quaternary of both regions had been tied together by Van Riet Lowe’s (1929) and Smuts’s (1932) southward extension of L.Leakey’s (1929) pluvial hypothesis, which correlated presumed periods of higher rainfall in Africa with periods of glacial advance in the northern hemisphere.The discrediting of this pluvial scheme (Flint 1959) was followed by the 1965 BurgWaterstein conference (Bishop and Clark 1967), which encouraged the development of more regionally focused cultural taxonomies that, though much needed, have perhaps impeded longer distance comparisons. While the institutionalization of apartheid in South Africa and Namibia after 1948 and Southern Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 contributed to the isolation of those working in southern Africa, more positively the proliferation of research increasingly directed archaeologists’ attention to the complexities of the data and theoretical problems of their own areas.Research contributions from different parts of the continent have been brought together in successive conference proceedings and edited volumes (e.g., Clark and Brandt 1984; Shaw et al. 1993; Sutton [ed.] 1994/95; Pwiti and Soper 1996; Connah 1998; S. McIntosh 1999; van der Veen 1999; Blench and MacDonald 2000), as well as in the Cambridge and UNESCO histories of Africa, but only a few archaeologists have recently felt comfortable enough with the archaeological records of both regions to essay either a general synthesis (e.g., Phillipson 1977, 1994) or more specific comparisons (e.g., Connah 2001). It is thus with some trepidation, and conscious of my own limited firsthand acquaintance with the archaeological record of East Africa, that I offer here a southern African perspective on recent research in Kenya,Tanzania, and Uganda. As I comment on the individual chapters, I attempt to isolate some of the themes that run through and between the individual contributions , themes which, I believe, speak to the present and future practice of archaeology north and south of the Zambezi. Beginning with S. B. Kusimba and C. M. Kusimba’s investigation in Chapter 1 of hunter-gatherer mobility strategies, I consider studies of technological organization and the relationship between Later Stone Age (LSA) archaeology (including rock art) and hunter-gatherer ethnography (cf. Mabulla, Chapter 3 this volume). KaregaMunene ’s discussion of pastoralism in Chapter 2 not only invites comparison with the rapidly developing subject of pastoralist origins in southern Africa, but, like Wandibba’s chapter (4) on the ethnoarchaeology of pottery, raises the issue of how far ethnicity may be evident in material culture, an issue that goes to the heart of both Iron Age research in southern Africa and studies there of the relations between foragers and pastoralists. The embeddedness of artifact production within a matrix of social and ideological relations is something stressed not only by Wandibba,but also by Mapunda (Chapter 5) and by Kusimba and Killick (Chapter 7) in their respective contributions on iron technology.Though less investigated from an ethnoarchaeological standpoint south of the Zambezi, the connections between ironworking and Iron Age worldviews have been explored by several authors (e.g., Collett 1993; Whitelaw 1994/95), while D. Miller (1996) has undertaken extensive metallurgical analyses of Iron Age metal artifacts that provide a comparison with Kusimba and Killick’s study. The significance of iron production as a basis for political power is stressed both by Mapunda and by Kusimba and Killick,while Kessy (Chapter 8) identifies local trade as an important factor in urban and state development on the East African coast. Brought within the purview of Blanton et al.’s (1996) general model for state formation by Robertshaw in Chapter 10, comparisons can be sought with the relative importance in southern Africa of indigenous factors and external Indian Ocean coast–oriented trade in the rise of such states as Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe. East African Archaeology: Foragers, Potters, Smiths, and Traders 168 Running through many of the preceding chapters...