Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania & the Americas

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.

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.

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.

In southern Africa, there has been a long-standing but unsubstantiated assumption that
the site of Khami evolved out of Great Zimbabwe’s demise around ad 1450. The study of
local ceramics from the two sites indicate that the respective ceramic traditions are clearly
different across the entire sequence, pointing towards different cultural affiliations in their
origins. Furthermore, there are tangible typological differences between and within their
related dry-stone architecture. Finally, absolute and relative chronologies of the two sites
suggest that Khami flourished as a major centre from the late fourteenth/early fifteenth century,
long before Great Zimbabwe’s decline. Great Zimbabwe also continued to be occupied
into the late seventeenth and perhaps eighteenth centuries, after the decline of Khami. Consequently,
the combined significance of these observations contradicts the parent-offspring
relationship implied in traditional frameworks. Instead, as chronologically overlapping entities,
the relationship between Khami and Great Zimbabwe, was heterarchical. However,
within the individual polities, malleable hierarchies of control and situational heterarchies
were a common feature. This is in tune with historically documented political relations in
related pre-colonial southern Zambezian states, and motivates for contextual approaches to
imagining power relations in pre-colonial African contexts.

Advocates of traditional, agriculture-based models of sociopolitical evolution argue that the adoption of domesticates is requisite for developments such as sedentism, village life, ascribed status, hereditary leadership, and other features that underpin institutionalized political complexity. We counter in this essay with a well-documented suite of politically complex hunter-gatherer (CHG) societies that exhibit these same features, thereby demonstrating that reliance on agriculture per se—or any other specific food regime such as fishing—should be excised from explanations of emergent political complexity. Despite the failure of the agricentric model to account for a significant number of cases of institutionalized complexity, some of its architects remain entrenched in their disbelief and rigidly ignore the implications of CHG studies. By continuing to situate farming as foundational to everything complex, they perpetuate not only a story of human cultural evolution over the last 10,000 years that is incomplete but also a narrative that is incorrect. We reject subsistence (domesticates) as the central organizing principle and introduce here a new forum for thinking about how societies operate and evolve. We propose a model consisting of integrated platforms of societal dynamics that are inclusive (encourage discourse of all societies), nonprogressive, and serve as an organizational structure to discuss cultural evolution in any comparative or singular ethnographic context. The platforms are nonhierarchical and not fixed in order or importance. They are (1) agency and authority, (2) social differentiation, (3) participation in communal events, (4) organization of production, (5) labor obligations, (6) articulation of ecology and subsistence, and (7) territoriality and ownership. All sociopolitical cases and all topics can be productively discussed on these platforms, from bands to the largest empires, comparatively or diachronically. In the present article, we use the platforms to examine political evolution. We assemble considerable evidence that a variety of dietary regimes are associated with the emergence of institutionalized political complexity. Rather than diet, it is the ways people integrate and use labor that demands our attention.