Talk by Dr Xander Antonites – 8 February 2024

FIRST MILLENNIUM VILLAGES AND EARLY INDIAN OCEAN TRADE IN SOUTH-EAST AFRICA

The Northern Branch’s programme of monthly talks for 2024 kicked off on a high note with a presentation by Dr Xander Antonites, a senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Pretoria. For the past three years he has been conducting a rescue dig with a team at an Early Iron Age site which is in danger of eroding away near the confluence of the Letaba and Olifants rivers in the central Kruger National Park. In his talk he gave us an update on research at the site, here called LE6/LE7 for convenience, and on its wider historical significance.

A year ago the Northern Branch was given an introduction to the site in a talk by Dr Annie Antonites, Curator of Archaeology at the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria. Her lecture focussed mainly on the analyses that she and other researchers have done on the bone remains found at LE6/LE7 and at other sites in the area. This work made LE6/LE7 a place of special interests for archaeologists.

In his presentation on 8 February, Xander Antonites began by giving a brief overview of previous research into the Early Iron Age of the Kruger National Park. The first archaeologists who worked in this field in the 1970s and 1980s found numerous sites like LE6/LE7. Such sites had often-extensive surface scatters of material remains of human occupation such as potsherds and fragments of bone, but seemed to have very little by way of stratified deposits that could enable cultural sequences to be established. Most of the region was hot and dry and seemed unfavourable for agriculture, and the historical prevalence of malaria and nagana suggested that it would also have been inhospitable country for humans and cattle in Iron Age times. Sites like these seemed to be of marginal archaeological significance.

The turning-point came in the last few years when archaeologists began to take a closer look at the bone remains. Unexpectedly, they found very few remains of domestic livestock: nearly all the bone material came from large herd animals that had been killed and butchered in some numbers. This led to the idea that people at sites like LE6/LE7may have been producing quantities of dried meat and animal hides for exchange in the trade with Indian Ocean merchants that was known to have been taking place between the coast and communities of what is now the Mpumalanga region from at least the seventh century CE. Closer investigation of sites like LE6/LE7 seemed to be warranted.

Xander Antonites went on to describe the material remains that he and his team have excavated in their work at this site. Among other items are stone knives that may have been used in the cutting up of carcasses in a context when iron tools were time-consuming to make and expensive to trade for. Of particular importance has been the recovery of potsherds in contexts that enable a cultural sequence for the site to be established. In brief, it seems to date to the period from about the fifth to the late eighth century CE.

The prize discovery consisted of a dozen sherds of glazed pottery that was probably made in the Basra area of what is now Iraq, sometime in the period that saw the end of the Sassanian Persian empire and the beginnings of rule by Muslim dynasties. This provides hard evidence that people at LE6/LE7 were involved, no doubt through intermediary communities, in the international Indian Ocean trade of the first millennium. It is also stimulating archaeologists to think in new ways about the development of trade networks at this time between the coast and the interior. Scholars have recognised for more than 20 years that a major trading site on the coast would have been at Chibuene near the present-day town of Vilanculos, 450 kilometres from LE6/LE7. But the coastal traders were certainly feeling out other possible trading points on the coast further south. Maybe one of them, Xander Antonites suggests, was at Xai Xai at the mouth of the Limpopo river, 300 kilometres from LE/LE7. More research may show how tentacles of trade reached widely from various sites on the coast across the interior. We look forward to hearing further updates as the work being done by Dr Antonites and his team progresses.

 

Report by John Wright, with thanks to Xander Antonites. Photographs by Michelle van Aswegen.