Heritage Cases

This project builds on of existing research published in Killick et al. (2020), Molofsky et al. (2014), Rademakers et al. (2019), and Stephens et al. (2020) which show that Southern Africa is an ideal place to apply lead isotopic and trace elemental analyses to source archaeological copper. For archaeological purposes, this material is significant as copper metal was widely consumed and traded through internal networks and functioned as an identity marker or store of wealth. Thus, copper is an excellent marker of the internal dynamics within southern Africa and their role in the indigenous forms of statecraft, identity formation, and learned technological practices. Over the course of these and forthcoming studies associated with a large NSF funded research project (1852598), researchers have highlighted the highly interconnected nature of archaeological communities, sometimes even over great distances, and have identified copper originating from South African copper deposits at archaeological sites in Botswana and Zimbabwe, as well tin from Rooiberg to produce the alloy Bronze as far north as northern Zimbabwe. Despite the distribution of these South African resources further north and west, we currently have a poor understanding of how archaeological communities within South Africa were interacting with this network. This is particularly important with the spread of copper metallurgy into South Africa during the Early Iron Age as well as after the formation of the first states in the region after 1200 CE. We propose to fill this gap by conducting an archaeological provenance study of copper and bronze objects at sites in South Africa near known precolonial copper sources, and will apply lead isotopic and trace element ICP-MS analyses to provide a more complete picture of regional interaction and to assess how patterns of copper consumption and production in South Africa compared to those further toward the north and west at this time (see Stephens et al. 2020 and Rademakers et al. 2019). Samples associated with this proposal are housed at the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand, and were documented by Jay Stephens in 2019 in preparation for this proposal.