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The Early Iron Age in Zambia—Regional Variants and some Tentative Conclusions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

D. W. Phillipson
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Extract

The Early Iron Age people appear to have been responsible for the introduction into Zambia of pot-making, metallurgy and, less certainly, food production. Recent research has greatly increased the known number of Early Iron Age sites in Zambia and a number of regional variants have been defined, based largely on the typology of the associated pottery. Radiocarbon dates suggest that these groups are all to be dated to the first millennium a.d. and that they are contemporary with, and related to, the earliest known Iron Age in Rhodesia and some East African sites. It is suggested that the Early Iron Age people slowly spread into eastern Africa from an area west of Lake Tanganyika during the first few centuries a.d. Some related sites are known from this westerly region. This hypothesis can be compared with Oliver's interpretation of Guthrie's linguistic evidence; but the use of archaeological and linguistic arguments together is impossible until proof is available that the Early Iron Age people spoke Bantu languages.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , April 1968 , pp. 191 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1968

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References

1 I am most grateful to all those who have discovered and reported sites and who have helped with the excavations described in this paper. My own research was financed by the National Monuments Commission of Zambia. All the Zambian antiquities here described are preserved in the Livingstone Museum, Livingstone, Zambia.

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40 A word of caution, which has been frequently repeated but even more frequently ignored, must here be inserted concerning the interpretation of radiocarbon dates. The standard error is an integral part of the date: it is never, and least of all in comparatively recent Iron Age studies where a chronology must necessarily be highly detailed, an irrelevant appendage which can be ignored or discarded at will by the archaeologist or the historian. To say that the Situmpa site is dated to A.D. 96 by date C-829 is highly misleading. This date has a standard error of ± 212 years which means that, assuming total lack of contamination and a perfect association of the charcoal sample with the artifacts, the analytical data alone suggest that there are 2 chances in 3 that the site dates to between 116 B.C. and A.D. 308, and 19 chances in 20 that the true date falls between 328 B.C. and A.D. 520. A single radiocarbon date can generally only give a broad indication of probable age. Groups of two or more age determinations for an occupation, a site, or a group of related sites, are needed before we can estimate their age between acceptably narrow limits.

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