gems, ancient history, ancient technology, iron working

This book is the result of a week-long Vacation Course held at Makerere University College, Uganda, in 1962, organized by the British Institute of History and Archaeology in East Africa. Its editor, who was then the Institute’s Assistant Director and is now Director of African Studies at Makerere, compiled the contributions from the course, which was attended by participants from Uganda and across East and Central Africa. The course aimed to introduce and contextualize the study of East Africa’s pre-European history and archaeology. The collected papers span from the Stone Age to the early medieval coastal city ports that facilitated trade between East Africa and Arabia, Persia, India, and China, and onward to the first Portuguese settlements. The core of the volume covers over twelve centuries of East Africa’s Iron Age, a period now being examined using modern archaeological methods. This era is especially significant for understanding the roots of contemporary tribal society in East Africa. The British Institute, which sponsored the course, was founded in 1959 under the British Academy, which provides its primary funding. The Institute owes much to Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Secretary of the British Academy and a noted archaeologist, who recognized the vast potential East Africa offered for historical and archaeological research. Agriculture and iron-working transformed Stone Age Africa and laid the material foundations of modern African society. With recent advances in palaeobotanical research now informing historical and archaeological studies, new speculations have emerged regarding the origins of Africa’s staple foodstuffs. In present-day southern Africa, south of a line from the Niger’s source to the Kenyan coast, the majority of inhabitants are Bantu-speaking agriculturalists who use iron, with hunters and food-gatherers representing less than one percent of the population. These three traits—language, agriculture, and iron use—developed broadly over the last two thousand years and appear to have had contemporaneous origins. Today’s agricultural staples in the region originate from three continents: bananas, coco-yams (colocasia), and yams from Southeast Asia; certain millets, wheat, and barley from Southwest Asia; and groundnuts, sweet potatoes, cassava, and maize from the Americas. The latter group arrived after the fifteenth century with the discovery of the New World and only became significant in recent history. Some crops, however, appear to have African origins, including sorghum, pearl or bulrush millet (pennisetum), eleusine (finger millet), fonio (digitaria or “hungry grass”), and African rice (notably Oryza glaberrima). The major unresolved questions are whether agriculture originated independently in Africa, when non-native crops were introduced, and how those introductions influenced or displaced native botanical ancestors of modern staple foods.