Households, Community, and Crafting at Kanono: The Creation of an Early 2nd Millennium Village in Western Zambia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Machile River in Western Zambia formed a significant locus of Iron Age life in Zambia and served as a conduit for the localized movements of people, things, and ideas in south-central Africa for much of the last two millennia. Within this dynamic corridor, the early second millennium Kanono site represents a relatively short-lived but well-defined Middle/Late Iron Age farming community that integrated local crafting practices with global and regional orientations during a period of dramatic political and economic changes across southern, central, and eastern Africa. Combining high resolution geophysical survey and the results of targeted excavations at Kanono, this paper traces the emergence, growth, and abandonment of the village between the mid-thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries CE. It is argued that changes seen in the village relate to the formation of a bounded co-residential community built around unilineal descent, who may have leveraged prestige in iron working into other forms of prestige – namely wealth in people and access to exotic goods. Approaching the archaeological record at Kanono from the perspective of household archaeology and daily life allows for an evocative ‘peopling’ of south-central African political economies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39527.0