Bantu Arrival in Southern Mozambique: Ceramic Analysis as a Source of Information for Dating, Diversity, Technology Transfer, and Nutrition

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2016, a research cooperation between the Eduardo Mondlane University and the German Archaeological Institute was started. Since then, this cooperation performed various surveys and geomagnetic prospection and developed with Hamburg University a dedicated research project which this contribution introduces. The introduction of pottery to southern Africa is associated with the immigration of early farmers, the Bantu speakers, about 2,000 years ago. Recent research challenges this model since distinct pottery was found in archaeological contexts of hunter-gatherer or hunter-herder communities. Furthermore, the Bantu pottery in Mozambique, called Matola pottery, has been dated a few hundred years earlier, challenging the previous attribution to Early Farming Communities. The current research project aims to study the Matola pottery using archaeometric approaches to test the Bantu model and to investigate the beginning of pottery production in southern Africa regarding dating, the process, and the diversity in raw material, techniques, and use. The absolute ages will be reevaluated by radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence dating, and compound specific lipid dating. The diversity in raw material, technique, and use within the classified pottery unit will be determined using polarized light microscopy, lipid analysis, X-ray fluorescence analysis, and infrared spectroscopy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32106