UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

Ancient Civilizations of Africa
is one reason for associating the early iron age archaeological sites, dating
from the early and middle parts of the first millennium of our era, in many
districts of eastern and south-central Africa with the Bantu colonization.
But a more compelling reason for confidently identifying these sites as
those of the early Bantu is simply that their distribution agrees so nicely
with that of present Bantu peoples. There are no sensible grounds for
theorizing that a quite different population covered this same broad region
only to disappear completely no more than a thousand years ago.
The most frequent and diagnostic objects found on these early Bantu
sites are not iron tools and weapons (for these were usually too valuable
to be discarded and even if they had been, would normally have corroded
completely), but the broken pieces of earthenware pots. These were referred
to above. From the very beginning these pottery wares were by no means
identical region by region throughout the enormous span of Bantu
settlement. New types are being recognized continually by archaeologists.
Perhaps the best known are the dimple-based (or Urewa) wares found
around Lake Victoria and further west, extending moreover to the northern
end of Lake Tanganyika and the woodlands south of the forest in Zaïre.
Besides the dimples on the bases of some of these vessels, many have
elaborately shaped rims and remarkable decoration in scrolls and other
patterns. To the south and east of the dimple-based zone, the early iron
age wares fall into two main groupings. In north-eastern Tanzania and
south-eastern Kenya, that is beyond the great Kushitic bulge, Kwale ware,
as it is called, occurs from the highland edges down to the coastal plain.
At the southern end of Lake Tanganyika, and in the countries farther
south, a whole plethora of regional wares has been identified. (These include
those in Zambia previously known as channelled.)
What is not disputed is that all these wares have a general family
relationship; and there has been considerable discussion of what might
be deduced from this about the directions of the Bantu expansion. It is
not the average or most typical pots which are likely to be the most revealing,
but the extreme and more peculiar features. And, in glancing at a range
of early iron age pottery collections from sites scattered between the equator
and the borders of South Africa, the immediate impression is that the
northerly wares, especially the dimple-based from around and west of Lake
Victoria, have a stamp of originality which becomes less striking the further
south one scans. It is as though the northern potters consciously signed
their wares 'Bantu', whereas the southerly ones, separated from the
mainstream of tradition, took this point for granted so that a progressive
simplification of the original Bantu shapes, rims and decorative patterns
set in. This was natural enough anywhere from central Tanzania southward
where potting seems to have been a new art introduced by the first Bantu
settlers: any pot was automatically 'Bantu' here. But in the Kenya highlands
and around Lake Victoria other peoples had long been making their own
pottery. Therefore the Kwale ware of the east, though perhaps less original
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