Cultures of Africa: Research

This collaborative work with the University of Oslo and Georgetown University is being generously funded by the Norwegian Research Council for 12 million Norwegian Krona. The five-year project explores creative knowledge and the daily practices of artisans during periods of turbulence, social stress, and extraordinary mobility in the pre-industrial Iron Age of southern Africa (Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa). Key sites include Isamu Pati and Kumadzulo/Kamangoza sites in Zambia, Dithakong and Tavatshena in South Africa.

This is a collaborative project with the University of Cambridge under Professor Stephanie Wynne-Jones. This European Research Commission (ERC) Advanced Grant explores the archaeology of the Zambezi Valley. It begins with renewed excavations at the iconic site of Ingombe Ilede, which has not been excavated since the discovery of a remarkable set of Iron Age burials there in the 1960s. Work at Ingombe Ilede will recover details of regional networks of metal production and consumption, wealth, identity, and trade before European colonialism. Work at the site will be complemented by regional survey and excavation to put Ingombe Ilede into its broader context.

Glass beads remain the most ubiquitous proxy for exotica at southern African Iron Age sites, and their power to calibrate and be calibrated by cultural history lies in understanding and tracing their chemical recipes to source areas. Current data point to Eurasian production centers as the main suppliers of southern African Iron Age beads, but recent work confirms other non-traditional centers in parts of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. This strengthens the case for more glass bead chemistry studies in Africa. This line of inquiry is still in its infancy in southern Africa, with many sites yet to be studied and only a few site-sample sizes analyzed. Dr Bandama’s projects focus on exploring major and trace elements in the glass to pin the beads to time- and region-specific scales, while shedding light on Southern Africa's regional political economies. To date, four Zimbabwean cultural sites (Bumbusi, Kubiku, Chumnungwa and Danan’ombe) and one site in Zambia have been analyzed using LA-ICPMS at the Field Museum.

Dr Bandama’s long-term projects at Great Zimbabwe address under-researched components of metallurgical craft (typology, technology, chronology, innovation, and distribution) in metals (gold, iron, and copper) and alloys (brass and bronze). Driven by the anthropology of technology, the data samples include metal remains and associated infrastructure and debris such as crucibles, tuyeres, slags, molds, ingots, and blooms. As products of high-temperature processes, both metals and the associated production debris retain in their physical and chemical structures the partial histories they underwent. By exploring the physical and chemical properties of these materials using modern scientific techniques, one can reconstruct the technologies and histories of metals and alloys. New studies on bloomery iron technology from Kumadzulo and Kamangoza sites in Zambia, and the Oyo Empire sites of Ede Ile in Nigeria are being explored in this framework of the metallurgical technologies of Africa.

This project explores the archaeology of drylands traditionally labeled as marginal because of aridity. The general conviction in the archaeology of southern Zambezia is that drylands are marginal landscapes that only hosted short-lived and insignificant food-producing communities in the past. This ongoing collaborative work in southwestern Zimbabwe reveals that drylands are resource-rich and that communities that occupied these landscapes had the capacity to adapt and utilize these resources to their advantage.