Kabondo Kumbo and the Early Iron Age in Victoria Falls Region

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Abstract
The author spent some years investigating the Iron Age of southern Zambia, while employed as Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum. He has recently been appointed Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northern Illinois University. The Early Iron Age village site at Kabondo Kumbo represents a subsistence settlement of the late first millennium A.D. In addition to a relatively rich material culture and ceramic inventory, excavation uncovered a series of hut sites, one of which retained sufficient of the wall posts to allow description of a sub-rectangular poler-and-daga structure, two metres square. Abundant evidence of iron-smelting was discovered and there may have been an open bowl bloomery furnace. Kabondo Kumbo fits well into the sequence of Early Iron Age villages known from the Victoria Falls region and it is possible to reconstruct a fairly complete picture of the related culture-history for this part of Zambia. A material culture based upon a simple technology in mixed-agricultural subsistence settlements is posited. Much of the associated culture is not available to archaeology and even much of the material culture and daily activities must be inferred from scant evidence. Nevertheless, a reasonable idea of the way of life in the first millennium A.D. in Central Africa may be reconstructed on the basis of finds from the Victoria Falls region.

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