¹ Apart from Sanga, only two other sites from the Iron Age have been excavated, Katoto in 1959 and Kingabwa in 1949; Hiernaux, J., Maquet, E. and De Buyst, J., ‘Le cimetière protohistorique de Katoto (vallée du Lualaba, Congo—Kinshasa)’ in Hugo, H. J. (ed.), Sixième congrès panafricain de préhistoire, Dakar 1967 (Chambéry, 1972), 148–58Google Scholar; van Moorsel, H., Atlas de préhistoire de la plaine de Kinshasa (Kinshasa, 1968), 224–77.Google Scholar

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³ Vansina, J., Kingdoms of the Savanna (Madison, 1966).Google Scholar

⁴ See, among others, Oliver, R., ‘The Problem of the Bantu Expansion’, J. Afr. Hist., vii, 3 (1966), 361–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, J. D., ‘African prehistory: Opportunities for collaboration between archaeologists, ethnographers and linguists’, in Dalby, D. (ed.), Language and History in Africa (London, 1970), 1–19Google Scholar; Phillipson, D. W., ‘The Early Iron Age in Zambia—regional variants and some tentative conclusions’, J. Afr. Hist. ix, 2 (1968), 191–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ Following Dalby, this should now be called ‘Proto-Bantu 2’: Dalby, D., ‘The pre-historical implications of Guthrie's Comparative Bantu. Part I. Problems of internal relationship’, J. Afr. Hist. xvi, 4 (1975), 481–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁷ Ibid. 200–1.

⁸ Hiernaux, J., de Longrée, E., De Buyst, J., Fouilles archéologiques dans la vallée du Haut-Lualaba—I. Sanga, 1958 (Tervuren, 1971).Google Scholar

⁹ Ibid. 7–8.

¹⁰ These ingots were probably used very soon as ‘money’; see Bisson, M. S., ‘Copper currency in central Africa: the archaeological evidence’, World Archaeology, vi, 3 (1975), 276–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹² Brabant, H., Contribution odontologique à l'étude des ossements trouvés dans la nécropole protohistorique de Sanga, République du Congo (Tervuren, 1965).Google Scholar

¹³ Nenquin, J., ‘Two radiocarbon dates for the Kisalian’, Antiquity, xxv, 140 (12 1961), 312CrossRefGoogle Scholar; strangely enough, this author's subsequent dates always appeared ten years older when expressed in ‘ad’. See also, Nenquin, J., ‘Notes on some early pottery cultures in Northern Katanga’, J. Afr. Hist. iv, 1 (1963), 19–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Nenquin, , Sanga, 200.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Ibid. 61 and 200.

¹⁵ Some other vessels found in the graves were also ascribed to this type (IIa), by Nenquin, , Sanga, 28Google Scholar (Grave 2, pottery 8), 85 (Grave 26, pottery 2), as well as by Hiernaux, , Fouilles, 11Google Scholar (Grave 106, pottery 8), even though they do not have the same characteristics; this comes from some inconsistency in the types of pottery defined by Nenquin in Nenquin, J., ‘Une collection de céramique kisalienne au Musée royal du Congo beige’, Bulletin de la Société Royale Belge d'Anthropologie et de Préhistoire, lxix (1958), 151–210.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Nenquin, , Sanga, 63.Google Scholar

¹⁷ See n. i.

¹⁸ The full excavation report will be published soon by the Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale at Tervuren. I acknowledge a special debt to the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaïre and especially the staff of the Musée de Lubumbashi, whose help has been invaluable.

¹⁹ The new nomenclature comes from Lake Kabamba on the shores of which lies Mulongo, just as the Kisalian comes from Lake Kisale. There was a certain incoherence in naming the three traditions, one after a lake, the other after a village called Mulongo, and the third after a technique (red slip); a technique which appears also on the Mulongo pottery, although worn away on the Kisalian pottery, as Hiernaux, already observed, Fouilles, 7Google Scholar; the Mulongo and Red Slip pottery are found, moreover, rather frequently in association in the graves. This modification in the terminology is in keeping with the recommendations made in 1965 by the Wenner-Grensymposium: ‘Systematic Investigation of the African Later Tertiary and Quaternary’ in Bishop, W. W. and Clark, J. D. (eds.). Background to Evolution in Africa (Chicago, 1967), 879–901.Google Scholar

²⁰ These dates are provided according to the usual conventions and the presentation as proposed in Antiquity, xlvi, 184 (Dec. 1972), 265Google Scholar. The tables and curves of dendro-chronological corrections becoming more and more numerous, these eight dates alone would have provided enough discussion to write a complete article! We have limited ourselves to the corrected calendar dates calculated by the laboratory, which appear in the extreme right column.

²¹ The other grave dated by a sample of charcoal (Hv 6610) is Grave 153, the level 95–105 of the trench II Wi of Katongo was also dated by charcoal; all the other dates were determined by the collagen corning from the skeleton.

²² We will use this terminology inspired by Nenquin and Hiernaux (Ancient Kisalian+Classic = Nenquin's Kisalian; Kabambian = Mulongo + Nenquin's Red Slip) until the full study is completed when we may propose a subdivision for the Iron Age in the depression of Upemba, which will be divided into industries, phases and aspects in keeping with the resolutions of the Wenner-Gren Symposium of 1965; cf. n. 19.

²³ Nenquin, , Sanga, 21.Google Scholar

²⁴ Mills, E. A. C. and Filmer, N. T., ‘Chondwe Iron Age Site, Ndola, Zambia’, Azania, vii (1972), 129–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Phillipson, D. W., ‘Early Iron Age Sites on the Zambian Copperbelt’ Azania, vii (1972), 93–128CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It would also be very interesting to see what the relations are between our finds, the Chondwe ware, and pottery from Kansanshi, on the Zambia-Zaïre border; see Bisson, M. S., ‘Prehistoric copper mining in northwestern Zambia’, Archaeology, xxvii, 4 (1974), 242–7Google Scholar. In this connexion, and from a purely Zambian point of view, we must ask ourselves if there is a reason to continue to distinguish between the Chondwe and the Kapwirimbwe groups as does Phillipson, D. W., ‘Iron Age history and archaeology in Zambia’, J. Afr. Hist. xv, 1 (1974), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; is not the distinction between these two groups a direct result of the different stages of research?

²⁵ Hiernaux, et al. , ‘Katoto’.Google Scholar

²⁶ See above, p. 321.

²⁷ Coupez, A., Evrard, E. and Vansina, J., ‘Classification d'un échantillon de langues bantoues d'après la lexicostatistique’, Africana Linguistica, vi (Tervuren, 1975), 131–58.Google Scholar

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²⁹ These languages correspond to the ‘ngombe’ and ‘kongo’ groups of Coupez, Evrard and Vansina; even though they are not included in the study of Coupez et al., it is probable that the Zone A and the rest of the Zone B come directly from Proto-Bantu 1, as Dalby concluded (see reference cited in n. 5).

³⁰ Heine, B., ‘Zur genetischen Gliederung der Bantu-Sprachen’, Afrika und Ubersee, lvi (1972–1973), 164–85Google Scholar; Henrici, A., ‘Numerical classification of Bantu languages’, African Language Studies, xiv (1973), 82–104.Google Scholar

³¹ If this is the case, it appears paradoxical that there are no longer any Bantu-speaking populations in these savannas; the border between these languages and the non-Bantu languages corresponds closely, in this part of the continent, to the limit between the savanna and the forest. One can obviously hypothesize that the nucleus of Bantu, at the time it was circling the forest, did not give birth to the Bantu languages in this region or that if it did, these Bantu-speaking populations were all pushed further back into the forest by the arrival later on of new populations.

³² A. Coupez, personal communication; see Johnston, H., A Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages (Oxford, 1922), II, map XII.Google Scholar

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³⁴ It is, moreover, noteworthy that the regions where a ‘neolithic’ was supposed to be (Lower Zaïre, Ubangui, Uele, Kenya) correspond to the zones that, according to the hypothesis of Coupez et al., must have been occupied by the first waves of migration.

³⁵ This new hypothesis contains numerous contradictions and uncertainties which we will not attempt to discuss here in detail, our goal being to present an alternative to the classic theory of Guthrie, which is also not exempt from contradiction; see, for example, Van Noten, F. L., Cahen, D. and de Maret, P., ‘L'Afrique centrale’ in Histoire générale de l'Afrique (UNESCO), vol. 2, forthcoming.Google Scholar

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⁴¹ The current Luba pottery is itself different from the pottery of one or two generations ago. According to the pottery-makers we questioned, the change came about due to a change in fashion.

⁴² Cf. Phillipson, , ‘Iron Age History and Archaeology in Zambia’, 9, 24.Google Scholar

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⁴⁴ Personal inspection by the author.

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