Material Knowledges, Thermodynamic Spaces and the Moloko Sequence of the Late Iron Age (AD 1300-1840) in Southern Africa 9781407309798, 9781407339573

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BAR S2387 2012 FREDRIKSEN MATERIAL KNOWLEDGES, THERMODYNAMIC SPACES

B A R

Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 80 Series Editors: Laurence Smith and Timothy Insoll

Material Knowledges, Thermodynamic Spaces and the Moloko Sequence of the Late Iron Age (AD 1300-1840) in Southern Africa Per Ditlef Fredriksen

BAR International Series 2387 2012

Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 80 Series Editors: Laurence Smith and Timothy Insoll

Material Knowledges, Thermodynamic Spaces and the Moloko Sequence of the Late Iron Age (AD 1300-1840) in Southern Africa Per Ditlef Fredriksen

BAR International Series 2387 2012

ISBN 9781407309798 paperback ISBN 9781407339573 e-format DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9781407309798 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

BAR

PUBLISHING

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work is a reformatted and slightly modified version of my PhD thesis, submitted in June 2009 and defended at University of Bergen (UiB) in December the same year. I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisor Randi Haaland at Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion (AHKR), UiB. She was a constant source of encouragement and positive academic challenge during the writing process. Her knowledge about African archaeology and sixth sense of when support is needed has been important. The generosity shown in introducing me into her vast network is a lesson learnt for life. Her network extends to Cape Town, and the discussions with Simon Hall, University of Cape Town (UCT) have been invaluable to this project. I was kindly included in the Historical Tswana Towns Project, and have been fortunate to repeatedly enjoy the welcoming atmosphere at Department of Archaeology at UCT. During the writing process a number of people have been important. Tore Sætersdal at Unifob Global, UiB, allowed me to do fieldwork in Manica as part of the project Archaeological Research and Cultural Heritage in Mozambique. The discussions with Tore and his wife Eva have been influential, not only to the fieldwork but also to my research project as a whole. At Unifob Global I would like to thank Kristin Holst Paulsen and Ove Stoknes for their help and support, and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen for stimulating anthropological discussions. Gavin Whitelaw at Natal Museum arranged for me to meet Juliet Armstrong at University of KwaZulu-Natal. Juliet introduced me to the potters in Pongola, and I am most grateful for her help with the field studies. Cynthia Mooketsi and Phenyo Thebe were very helpful during my visit to University of Botswana. Terje Oestigaard at Unifob Global and Shadreck Chirikure at UCT have read and commented on individual chapters. I have enjoyed the discussions with Terje and Shadreck throughout the course of this project. Tim Maggs generously shared insights and ideas about the Bokoni settlements with me. Critical comments by Tom Huffman, University of the Witwatersrand, on some of my earlier interpretations of the Moloko sequence have been very helpful by requiring a thorough re-evaluation of my arguments. I spent the first half of 2008 as a lecturer in archaeology at Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History (IAKH), University of Oslo. While given the opportunity to engage with a wide range of theoretical aspects, I was introduced to Toril Moi’s reading of Simone de Beauvoir by Ingrid Fuglestvedt. I am grateful to Ingrid for the many fruitful exchanges of ideas, and I also wish to thank Kristin Armstrong Oma for insightful discussions of various aspects of archaeological theory. In Bergen the continual dialogue with Tor-Arne Waraas, Ørjan Engedal and my fellow PhD students at Unifob Global and AHKR have been encouraging. My good friend Laila Sjo was patient with my English writing. This project would have been impossible without the close collaboration with interpreters and potters. I wish to thank the interpreters Leah Mwedziwendira, Wim Biemond, Phatsimo Mokgalo, Buhlebenkosi Zondi and Ntohbenlhe Gladys Dlamini for the cooperation. And my sincerest thanks go to the potters for allowing us into their lives: Emma Maocha, Marieta Nerio, Susanna Vasco, Ana Madziwanzira, Leonor José, Rosina Taunde, Sophia Dinga, Maria John, Mmamontshonyana Ditshekiso, Gabaratiwe Piti, Mapula Jonas, Gaotame Lebonetse, Peni Gumbi, Gulaphi Buthelezi and Zaziena Masondo. I thank the two opponents, Diane Lyons at University of Calgary and Paul Lane at University of York, for their insightful and critical reading of the original PhD thesis. Ida Wankel generously devoted time to help with the formatting of the manuscript. Last but not least, I thank my parents, family and friends for their patience and support. A special thanks to Hege for reminding me what is most important in life.

Oslo, January 2011

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ABSTRACT The two key themes in this work are 1) the meeting between knowledges about the material world, and 2) the intimate relationships between people and their material surroundings we find in the social dynamics of households. The approach consists of three comparative field studies of present-day contexts conducted among eastern Bantu-speakers in Mozambique, Botswana and South Africa, in addition to an archaeological synthesis of the sequence known as Moloko, belonging to the Late Iron Age (AD 1300-1840) in southern Africa. While located within the discipline of archaeology, the approach draws on insights from anthropology, history, sociology and philosophy. Focusing on the relationship between clay, ceramic containers and social interaction in household spaces which follow rationales that may be associated with a sub-Saharan ‘thermodynamic philosophy’, the main objective is to arrive at an understanding of the relevant social dynamics involved in the developments of the Moloko ceramic sequence and the spatial and material changes to associated settlements. Particular attention is given to the introduction of stone walling; a transition which runs at the very core of the debate over the application of ethnographically derived models for understanding the cultural logic of southern African settlement space in the past. In order to obtain the main objective, the work is divided into three main parts. The first presents the archaeological research status of the Moloko sequence and provides an overview of the main theoretical strands in the discourse, while also setting out to clear the epistemological and ontological ground for my subsequent analyses. The second part seeks to accommodate the theoretical framework into an approach for studying clay practice, a methodology which is implemented for the following three field studies. The third part consists of an archaeological synthesis which draws on the insights from the previous two parts. Three specific research questions are sought answered. These relate to 1) diachronic variation in social meanings of fire and hearths, 2) changes to the social dynamics of living members of households and their ancestral links, and 3) the relationship between the microscale changes and regional social transformations towards the terminal Iron Age in southern Africa, with a particular emphasis on the implications for women’s personhood. The final chapter offers some concluding reflections on knowledge by recapturing the fourth research question of this work: What do we learn from such a comparative approach to the meeting and interaction between different material knowledges? As a science, archaeology is inextricably linked to modernity, and its practices are grounded in Western ways of knowing. Are we willing to allow the discipline to change through our engagements with other ways of knowing the material world?

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CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................................ I ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................................... II CONTENTS ...................................................................................................................................................... III LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................................... VI LIST OF TABLES ...........................................................................................................................................VII 1.

INTRODUCING THEMES......................................................................................................................1 1.1

BETWEEN EARTH AND WATER .................................................................................................................2 Entering Molepolole ....................................................................................................................................4 1.2 THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SEQUENCE .........................................................................................................5 Moloko emerging.........................................................................................................................................5 Moloko and LIA social transformations ......................................................................................................9 1.3 AIMS AND STRUCTURE ............................................................................................................................9 PART I ................................................................................................................................................................10 2.

RESEARCH STATUS ............................................................................................................................11 2.1

WHEN ARCHAEOLOGY MEETS ETHNOGRAPHY AND HISTORY ................................................................11 The CCP and the ‘direct historical approach’ ..........................................................................................11 Critique of the CCP ...................................................................................................................................11 Ceramic style and social dynamics ...........................................................................................................13 2.2 THE MOLOKO SEQUENCE: PRESENT RESEARCH STATUS ........................................................................14 Regionality in the Iron Age’ ......................................................................................................................14 Recent reinterpretations ............................................................................................................................17 Ceramic style as more than surface ..........................................................................................................17 Summary of present research status ..........................................................................................................18 2.3 THE SCALE OF THINGS: UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL CHANGE ...................................................................19 The environmental and the social..............................................................................................................19 Gender dynamics, labour and the house as social institution ...................................................................19 The relevance of intimacy..........................................................................................................................20 Concluding remarks ..................................................................................................................................21 3.

WHEN KNOWLEDGES MEET ...........................................................................................................22 3.1

ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE MESSINESS OF THE PRESENT ..........................................................................22 The South African context .........................................................................................................................22 An epistemological point of departure ......................................................................................................23 3.2 COMBINING TWO CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ............................................................................................23 Situated knowledge ....................................................................................................................................23 Contextualizing Western philosophy .........................................................................................................24 The Western knowledge archive ................................................................................................................25 Three problematic legacies of the archive ................................................................................................25 3.3 A THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE...............................................................................................................26 Embodied social practice ..........................................................................................................................26 Lived experience and the body as situation ...............................................................................................28 Humans and their surroundings: an ontology ...........................................................................................28 Concluding remarks ..................................................................................................................................29 PART II ..............................................................................................................................................................30 4.

APPROACHING HOUSEHOLD INTIMACY ....................................................................................31 4.1

THE MUTUAL BECOMING OF PEOPLE AND THINGS .................................................................................31 Knowledge systems and material-culture studies ......................................................................................32 Understanding technology ........................................................................................................................33 4.2 HOUSEHOLD SUBSTANCES AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS ...............................................................................34 Houses and households .............................................................................................................................34 Personhood and substance ........................................................................................................................34 Hearths and heat transformations .............................................................................................................35 iii

4.3

5.

APPROACHING HUMAN/NONHUMAN INTERACTION................................................................................35 A thermodynamic philosophy ....................................................................................................................36 Weighted spaces and spheres of experience ..............................................................................................36 A reflexive methodology ............................................................................................................................36 Summary and concluding remarks ............................................................................................................38 THE HEAT OF INTIMACY AND FUSION ........................................................................................39

5.1

CLAY AND THERMODYNAMIC SPACES ...................................................................................................39 Transmission of clay knowledge ................................................................................................................39 Marriage and ancestors: ethnographic insights........................................................................................41 Jacobson-Widding’s description of the cooking hut ..................................................................................42 Dangers of transitory states and fusion .....................................................................................................44 The shambakodzi and the ladle .................................................................................................................45 5.2 LIFE HISTORY STAGES AND SPATIAL PROBLEM-SOLVING ......................................................................45 Collecting and transporting clay ...............................................................................................................45 Shaping and decoration.............................................................................................................................46 Storage and drying ....................................................................................................................................47 Firing ...................................................................................................................................................48 Spatiality of finished vessels ......................................................................................................................48 Concluding remarks ..................................................................................................................................52 6.

TWO POTENTIAL DANGERS ............................................................................................................53 6.1

CLAY CONTAINERS AND HEAT...............................................................................................................53 Environmental and social context .............................................................................................................53 Clay knowledge and ancestors ..................................................................................................................55 Heat and previous ethnoarchaeological research .....................................................................................56 6.2 LIFE HISTORY STAGES AND THEIR SPATIALITY ......................................................................................56 Collecting clay...........................................................................................................................................57 Storage, shaping, decoration, and drying .................................................................................................58 Firing ...................................................................................................................................................62 Spatiality of finished pots: a comparative example ...................................................................................62 Concluding remarks ..................................................................................................................................62 7.

CLAY AND THE OUTSIDER WIFE ...................................................................................................63 7.1

HOUSEHOLD SPACES AND DANGEROUS WOMEN ....................................................................................63 Household spaces and ancestors ...............................................................................................................64 Clay knowledge and marriage...................................................................................................................66 Sour milk and fire: ethnographic observations and our own ....................................................................67 7.2 LIFE HISTORY STAGES AND THEIR SPATIALITY ......................................................................................67 Collecting and transporting clay ...............................................................................................................67 Storage, shaping, decoration, and drying .................................................................................................68 Firing ...................................................................................................................................................68 The spatiality of four vessels and their contents........................................................................................68 A sphere of experience ..............................................................................................................................69 Comparing the three studies......................................................................................................................69 PART III.............................................................................................................................................................71 8.

A CHANGE OF HEARTHS...................................................................................................................72 8.1 8.2

THE AMBIVALENCE OF FIRE ..................................................................................................................72 MOLOKO HOUSEHOLDS AND THE SPATIALITY OF FIRE ...........................................................................72 The sites and their households ..................................................................................................................73 Preliminary interpretations .......................................................................................................................74 New questions............................................................................................................................................77 8.3 A CHRONOLOGY OF FIRE PRACTICE .......................................................................................................77 From sunken clay to elevated stone...........................................................................................................77 A change of flames ....................................................................................................................................77 8.4 CHANGING HEARTHS – CHANGING MEANINGS.......................................................................................78 A shift in hearth-centred activities ............................................................................................................79 Social fires and weighted spaces ...............................................................................................................79 Fire and sexuality ......................................................................................................................................80 Big roaring flames and perpetual fires......................................................................................................80 iv

8.5 9.

Changing spheres of experience ................................................................................................................81 AN UNINTENTIONAL OUTCOME .............................................................................................................82 Concluding remarks ..................................................................................................................................82 TRANSFORMATIONS IN CLAY ........................................................................................................84

9.1 9.2 9.3

METAPHORS IN CLAY ............................................................................................................................84 MOLOKO CERAMICS AND SPHERES OF EXPERIENCE ...............................................................................85 POTS, PEOPLE AND ANCESTORS .............................................................................................................85 Maleness and the ancestral presence ........................................................................................................86 The female body and ceramic colour symbolism .......................................................................................87 Meeting bodies – meeting ancestors..........................................................................................................87 9.4 POLLUTION IDEAS AND CLAY SYMBOLISM ............................................................................................88 Comparing pollution ideas ........................................................................................................................89 The importance of heat and drought .........................................................................................................89 The relative presence of the dangerous female body.................................................................................90 Two directions ...........................................................................................................................................90 9.5 THE SPATIALITY OF CLAY AND FIRE ......................................................................................................91 The containers and the contained..............................................................................................................92 10.

ENGAGING THE LANDSCAPE ..........................................................................................................93 10.1 NEW LANDSCAPE – NEW MEANING ..................................................................................................93 A change of landscape ...............................................................................................................................93 Institutions in stone ...................................................................................................................................94 10.2 A CHANGE OF SCALE ........................................................................................................................94 Politics, trade and the space of cattle........................................................................................................94 Interaction, abandonment and relocation .................................................................................................95 Agricultural change...................................................................................................................................97 10.3 FEMALE BODILY EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION ........................................................98 Cultivation and female work .....................................................................................................................98 New landscape – new meanings to clay containers...................................................................................99 The maize debate .....................................................................................................................................100 10.4 A COMPARATIVE EXAMPLE ............................................................................................................101 Three unique stone features ....................................................................................................................105 Bokoni household space ..........................................................................................................................107 10.5 POLITICS IN STONE .........................................................................................................................108 Implications of terracing .........................................................................................................................108 Comparing the two examples ..................................................................................................................109 Concluding remarks ................................................................................................................................109

11.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS ........................................................................110

LIST OF REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................113

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LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1.1: SOUTHERN AFRICA’S TERRESTRIAL BIOMES................................................................................ 7  FIGURE 1.2: MOLOKO POTTERY CLASSES FROM BEFORE AD 1700 ................................................................. 8  FIGURE 1.3: POST-AD 1700 MOLOKO POTTERY .................................................................................................... 8  FIGURE 2.1: THE CENTRAL CATTLE PATTERN ................................................................................................... 12  FIGURE 2.2: THE THREE SECOND-PHASE FACIES OF THE MOLOKO SEQUENCE........................................ 15  FIGURE 2.3: TWO EXAMPLES OF THIRD-PHASE MOLOKO POTTERY ............................................................ 15  FIGURE 2.4: MOLOKWANE WALLING: OLIFANTSPOORT 20/71 ....................................................................... 16  FIGURE 2.5: UIKOMST POTTERY ............................................................................................................................ 17  FIGURE 5.1: LOCATION OF THE HOMESTEADS OF THE EIGHT POTTERS LIVING IN MANICA ................ 40  FIGURE 5.2: INSIDE EMMA MAOCHA’S COOKING HUT .................................................................................... 43  FIGURE 5.3: WORKING THE CLAY.......................................................................................................................... 47  FIGURE 5.4: LEONOR JOSÉ AND HER PLACE FOR FIRING POTTERY ............................................................. 48  FIGURE 5.5: EXAMPLES OF CHIPFUKO AND PFUKO VESSELS ........................................................................ 51  FIGURE 5.6: A SHAMBAKODZI POT IN THE MAKING ........................................................................................ 51  FIGURE 6.1: LOCATION OF MANALEDI IN THE TSWAPONG HILLS ................................................................ 54  FIGURE 6.2: THE HUT USED BY GABARATIWE PITI WHEN MAKING POTTERY .......................................... 58  FIGURE 6.3: STORAGE OF CLAY IN A METAL DRUM BEHIND THE MAIN HOUSE ...................................... 59  FIGURE 6.4: RED CLAY AND WHITE QUARTZ BROUGHT TOGETHER ........................................................... 59  FIGURE 6.5: TWO NGWANA VESSELS ................................................................................................................... 60  FIGURE 6.6: EXAMPLES OF HOUSEHOLD SPATIALITY AT GABANE 1 .......................................................... 61  FIGURE 7.1: LOCATION OF THE PHONDWANE AREA ........................................................................................ 64  FIGURE 7.2: THE TYPICAL ZULU HOMESTEAD ................................................................................................... 65  FIGURE 7.3: THE FIREPLACE AND THE BACK PART IN THE INDLUNKULU ................................................. 68  FIGURE 8.1: EXAMPLE OF A HUT FLOOR FROM OLIFANTSPOORT 29/72 ...................................................... 73  FIGURE 8.2: OLIFANSPOORT 29/72 HOMESTEAD AND EARLY MOLOKO HUT FLOOR ............................... 75  FIGURE 8.3: THE OLIFANTSPOORT 20/71 SETTLEMENT AND A LATE MOLOKO HOUSEHOLD ................ 76  FIGURE 8.4: A STONE-PEBBLED FIREPLACE IN A COOKING HUT .................................................................. 78  FIGURE 8.5: THE BODIKA LODGE AND THE THITHIPE FIRE ............................................................................ 82  FIGURE 9.1: DISTRIBUTION OF POTTERY AROUND THE FIREBOWL IN HOUSE 4, SITE 2724CB14.. ........ 86  FIGURE 10.1: SITES AND THE VEGETATION TYPES IN THE MAGALIESBERG REGION ............................. 96  FIGURE 10.2: THE DISTRIBUTION OF BOKONI SETTLEMENTS ..................................................................... 102  FIGURE 10.3: VEGETATION TYPES ALONG THE MPUMALANGA ESCARPMENT ...................................... 103  FIGURE 10.4: A BOKONI HOMESTEAD WITH BADFONTEIN WALLING ...................................................... 105  FIGURE 10.5: SKETCH PLAN OF A TYPICAL LARGER BOKONI HOMESTEAD ............................................ 106  FIGURE 11.1: AT A LATE STAGE. A PFUKO POT REUSED AS A WASHING BASIN ..................................... 112 

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LIST OF TABLES TABLE 2.1: HUFFMAN’S TABLE OF THE MOLOKO SEQUENCE FROM 2002................................................... 16  TABLE 2.2: PRESENT RESEARCH STATUS FOR THE MOLOKO CERAMIC SEQUENCE ................................ 18  TABLE 5.1: VESSEL TYPES ENCOUNTERED IN MANICA ................................................................................... 50  TABLE 8.1: SUMMARY OF MAIN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE THREE CASE STUDIES ........................... 80  TABLE 9.1: OVERVIEW OF POLLUTION IDEAS FROM THE THREE CASE STUDIES ..................................... 90 

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1.

INTRODUCING THEMES

We are equipped conceptually within the world to experience it and describe it. Or are we? How well does the modern condition equip us to interpret the conceptual past? This is a pertinent question, for it can be suggested that rather than assuming conceptual similarity between past and present, we do in fact need to question it (Insoll 2007a:11)

imminent and obtained through emotive experience and being-in-the-world. Consequently, remains of ancestors, material culture and places, for instance, are the material or sacred manifestations of knowledge. Archaeologists, conversely, seek knowledge through science. Although the concept of science is heavily debated, most agree that knowledge is in some way or another unearthed: it is obtained by confronting, testing or comparing our ideas with observations about the world. Here, remains of ancestors, material culture and places are sources of knowledge because they are what scientists must observe in order to obtain insight. However, aspects of modernity and power and questions of property continually crosscut the distinctions between the differing ways of knowing, and the character of knowledge is always defined by its complexity (see also Insoll 2004:97-145).

A key theme in this work is the meeting between different knowledges about the material world. Timothy Insoll formulates an important point about the modern condition and the conceptual challenges archaeologists face in the efforts to understand past societies. This critical and enquiring attitude will be adopted here. In addition, it should be emphasized that the point also can be taken to include the challenges to understanding knowledges in the present that are beyond the realm of modernity. As recently argued by Alfredo GonzalezRuibal (2006a:110-11), a reason that students of the material need to work among non-industrial societies is because one may learn lessons about alternative understandings that will not be received elsewhere. Most of them have never established the fundamental divisions and asymmetries that contribute to define the modern condition, such as nature/culture, things/humans and present/past. By recognizing the possibility that such divisions are constructs of the relatively recent past, unacknowledged links to the researcher’s own emotional, intellectual and philosophical tradition may be questioned. Acknowledging one’s limitations is a point of departure from which to engage with archaeological evidence in various potentially beneficial ways (Insoll 2007a:9).

Paul Sillitoe (2002:110-14) observes for present development contexts that it is not uncommon to find two-column tables listing comparable traits, thereby contrasting indigenous knowledge on the one side and science on the other. The result of this is a polarization: an effective/destructive science stands in contrast to ineffective/benign local practices, where the preferred adjective depends on whether one accounts superiority to science or not. Bassey W. Andah (1995) drew attention to a central problem of such contrasting of knowledge from an African perspective. Since the Western-trained researcher may often occupy the driver’s seat rather than that of the learner’s, when concept of culture, time or history differs from those of African ‘informants’, the Western scholar usually determines what is valid and what should be discarded. Having the privilege to come from a ‘scientific’ culture, the researcher is qualified to separate ‘real and precise’ facts from ‘vague and confused’ local traditions. In this manner, Andah (1995:59) wrote, “the principles underlying indigenous customs are pressed into categories derived from Western social reality”. As Paul Lane (2006a:71-72) points out, there is a continual negotiation that leads to the question of whether a distinction should be drawn between the knowledge systems used in ‘general scientific procedure’ and those employed in other social and cultural contexts, particularly the non-Western world, often referred to as ‘indigenous knowledge systems’. The very contrast between scientific and indigenous implies that both categories are closed and static systems rather than being open-ended and continually subject to change (cf. Agrawal 1995; see also Green 2008:150).

Since the late 1990s it has been emphasized that archaeology is inextricably linked to the modernist project (e.g. Olsen 2001:43; Thomas 2004:34-35; Gonzalez-Ruibal 2006b:176), both from an epistemological and an ontological point of view (see 3.1). The question of how to engage with the understanding of the past and present Other constructed as part of interpretation is a primary focus of attention throughout this work, and will be discussed in particular in chapters 3, 4 and 11. However, a clarifying remark about the concept of the ‘Western’ and the ‘modern’ should be made from the beginning. Although the objections to the use of the terms are well known (see Gosden 2004), academics and researchers cannot avoid ‘the West’ or anxieties about modernity because “our very activity, in thinking and writing, is underpinned by a belief in the absolute worth of disciplined, rational inquiry” (Ingold 2000:6). Since archaeology is based on the values of Western cultures, the practices within the discipline are solidly grounded in Western ways of knowing the world (Smith and Wobst 2005:5). Randall McGuire (2004:388-90) writes that differing worldviews or rationales are usually found opposed as spiritual ways to knowledge on the one hand and scientific ones on the other. In examples of the first, knowledge is typically passed on through elders and religious practice, and does not require study but is

The geographical focus of this work is in southern Africa. Lane (2006a:70) notes that the production of archaeological knowledge in and about sub-Saharan 1

Material Knowledges cycles and rhythms” (Ingold 2000:214; see Insoll 2007a:25-26).

Africa is now increasingly in the hands of Africans who, while trained in the idiom of Western archaeology, can still be regarded as ‘indigenous’. This development has taken place within the last two or three decades (Abungu 2006:152), and combined with the relatively long tradition in African history for employing oral tradition, there is the potential, as Charlotte Damm (2006:75) formulates it, for placing “studies of the African past in the forefront of a more culturally sensitive research”. An important challenge in this regard is that the scientific/indigenous contrast can imply a ranking of knowledge which sees indigenous knowledge systems as being contextually specific and having only limited geographical applicability. They are thus often categorized as ‘local’ and used to provide a contrast with more comparative, generalizing and ‘global’ scientific theories (Lane 2006a:72).

According to Damm (2006:76), a first important step towards what she terms a ‘glocal’ view must be to acknowledge that both Western science and any other knowledge system are culturally and historically constituted, and consequently continually negotiated. As Ian Hacking (2000) has observed, today everybody is affected by the capitalist world order to varying degrees, but the adaptation to this system is new only in that it seems to be homogenizing. This point resonates with Marshall Sahlins’ (1993) note about ethnographic research: to consider time and social transformation is in itself a distinct way of knowing, and carries with it the potential of changing the way culture is thought of. Sahlins thereby underscores that the days of ethnographic fieldwork with ‘unspoiled’ peoples are over and, furthermore, that the thought of any people in isolation has been but a fantasy anyway. Consequently, the challenge is to understand how webs of cultural ideas and social practices interact with earlier ideas and practices (see Hacking 2000:207-23).

Alison Wylie (2000) emphasizes that the quest for global, unifying ways of understanding science has run aground, and there is thus not one single authoritative way to define what counts as science: What science critics contest and science advocates defend is the very idea that there is such a thing as “science”: a unified enterprise defined by a set of shared attributes that uniquely determine what it is for a discipline to be scientific, that set real science apart from other (lesser) epistemic enterprises, and that trump any non-scientific interests or knowledge claims that might challenge the epistemic authority of science (Wylie 2000:229)

The emphasis on interaction between knowledges is of importance to the consideration of the other key theme in this work, namely the relationship between people and their immediate material surroundings: social dynamics which include the material culture and built environment of households.

1.1

Between earth and water

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (2003) offers an interesting illustration of certain challenges one faces when knowledge systems and rationalities meet. Contemplating the differences between typical Western thought and that of the Mbuti of Congo, Appiah writes that Westerners think of their general beliefs to be justified, and if others challenge them, they are inclined to seek evidence and reasons for their position and to challenge the Other’s reasons and evidence in response. Intellectual disputes often become, in Appiah’s words, “like our legal disputes, trading evidence and argument in a vigorous exchange, like adversaries on a field of intellectual battle” (Appiah 2003:342). A concrete example of an alternative conceptual framework is how the Mbuti think of the forest: it is a person that will take care of them. If bad luck in hunting occurs, they suppose that the forest has lost interest in them, and not that it is trying to harm them. It has ‘gone to sleep’. When this happens, they try to wake the forest by singing: if their songs please the forest their luck will turn. As Appiah observes, most Westerners are likely to find this unreasonable. And, furthermore, this sense would likely grow even stronger when told that the Mbuti know perfectly well that neighbouring people, with whom they have complex social relationships, believe quite different things. The fact that the Mbuti know that other people believe different things, and that this does not seem to concern them, marks their way of thinking off from that

She urges a sceptical attitude towards claims about the scientific status of archaeological practices that depend on appeals to unifying features of science. Instead of merely searching globally, Wylie proposes to think globally about the ways in which archaeological inquiry is embedded in networks and relationships with other fields of study, and not only scientific ones. Thus, the case of credibility and authority of archaeological practice should be made locally: it is the relations between fields and their efficacy in solving specific archaeological problems that count (Wylie 2000:229, 234). Similarly, Insoll (2007a:26) argues that what should perhaps be sought achieved is a view of “the local through the prism of the global”. In attempting to acquire such a view, where the local and the global are sought combined and knowledge systems are seen as open-ended and continually changing, the theoretical standpoint in the following discussions will be grounded in Ingold’s (2000) ‘dwelling perspective’ (see also chapters 3 and 10). Ingold makes the important point about global versus local perspectives that what occurs in a globalized environment is the privileging of the global ontology of detachment over the local ontology of engagement (Ingold 2000:216) and that one ceases fully to appreciate a sense of belonging in the world in that one becomes slightly divorced through “neither partaking of its essence nor resonating to its 2

Introducing themes A Western-trained researcher observing a ceramic process may convey to the rural potter an explanation for a clay ending up cracking during firing in terms of geological composition of the clay or the firing temperature, and this is likely to be accepted without much discussion. But, as is the case for material knowledges discussed in the fieldwork chapters; this explanation simply does not cover enough conceptual ground. The scientific explanation is perfectly understood, but it only remains a partial explanation. This is because it merely opens for another question: who or what made the clay so that the pots cracked? As you have probably already guessed, the answer is found among ancestral and other spiritual beings that are often linked to places associated with either earth or water. In order for members of the spirit world to be content, it is therefore more important to resolve this ambivalence of clay than the geological composition behind a failed technological process. In other words, as Appiah’s example so vividly illustrates, scientific knowledge may be accommodated into non-Western knowledge systems without much difficulty, while not changing what people finds important to know about the material world. Explanations in terms of the geological composition or temperature reached during firing confirm what the Western-trained researcher often has set out to learn more about, but in many cases very little about what the potter finds most relevant.

of Western cultures. As Appiah amusingly remarks: “Most Westerners would worry if they discovered that people in the next town got on very well without believing in electricity” (Appiah 2003:341). Although one should obviously be very careful not to exaggerate the differences in the way the Mbuti and most Westerners or Western-trained people ordinarily justify their beliefs, it is clearly significant that the latter are more likely to ask not just what they believe but why they believe it. A contrast between the two knowledge systems is therefore that Western people want not just an authority but some evidence or argument, whereas Mbuti people seem not to give the justification of their general beliefs much thought. When asked the question about why they believe that by singing to the trees their hunting luck will change, they would, as Appiah writes, “probably tell us, as many people in many cultures have told many anthropologists, that they believe it because it is what their ancestors taught them” (Appiah 2003:342). This example is a salient introduction to differing knowledges about the material of particular concern in the following chapters, namely clay. The question “what is clay?” is straightforward enough, and to many so is probably the answer. A loose sourcebook definition of the material is “a fine-grained earthy material that becomes plastic or malleable when moistened” (Rice 1987:36). The reason for this position between earth and water is to be found in that the material is primarily “derived from high-alumina silicate rock (Al2O3 and SiO2), particularly feldspar and mica” (H. Miller 2007:104). The composition of clay, which is crucial for the properties of the things made from it, is typically described and classified by the analyst using geological terminology. And, using petrography or chemical/physical analyses, archaeologists use composition to trace, or at least encircle, the geographic origins of the materials used to make things. Not surprisingly, however, from the perspective of workers of clay – the potter, ceramic artisan, brick maker or house-builder – it is the working quality of clay and the properties of the finished object that matters the most (Henderson 2000:112; H. Miller 2007:104).

It will be demonstrated that the problem-solving strategies employed in clay practices are closely related to variation in understanding of the earth/water ambivalence. Once the material is brought into the homestead, the use of household spaces during the various stages that clay and pots undergo during manufacture is closely connected to the bodily experience and sexual identity of the women working with clay, and to people who may potentially be a danger to the ceramic process. In sub-Saharan Africa the various problem-solving strategies are particularly directed towards avoiding the outcome of pots cracking during firing. The potential of something going wrong places an emphasis on the chains of events and actions that are set in motion, measures taken in order to make sure that this does not happen.

The insight that people’s knowledge about a material is closely tied to their differing experiences and engagements with it is not particularly new. But it serves the purpose of underscoring a crucial point. As the sourcebook definition implies, clay is somewhere between earth and water – it is simultaneously a neither/nor and a both/and. It will be demonstrated in chapters 5, 6, and 7, which discuss the fieldwork data, that cultural categorization of the material is significant since it generates specific engagements with clay sources. The qualitative judgements made, and the specific rationales that these are anchored in, are perhaps best exemplified by cases where people deal with the potential of something going wrong in the process of making.

As will be returned to in more detail in chapter 4, for sub-Saharan Africa it has been observed by several researchers that pots undergo transformation from formless matter through the use of fire, and that clay is seen to endure the same process as people do through their lifecycles and vice versa. Pots are therefore implicitly or explicitly associated with people through metaphoric associations between ceramic vessels and the human body as container – and especially the female body, since pottery on the continent is to an overwhelming degree made by women. The metaphoric experience also provides the ground for thermodynamic thinking about the hot and cool substances being contained and transformed inside the bodies and vessels. There is an ambivalent relationship between potting and human reproductivity, and potting activities take place 3

Material Knowledges however, the conclusion is that the contrast between the two cases provides a powerfully relevant demonstration of changes to women’s personhood in relation to the handcraft – and at the same time it underscores certain theoretical and methodological issues of significance to the following chapters.

within a gendered universe where the potter is at the core of a belief system that leaves nothing to chance (see 4.3 for discussion and references). Referring explicitly to the example of Tswana-speakers in southern Africa – who are of particular concern in chapters 2, 6, 8, 9 and 10 – Jean and John Comaroff (1992:73-74) point out that a lack of bodily closure is a widely perceived characteristic of female bodies, especially in the childbearing years and during menstruation. Significantly, the lack of closure is a source of pollution, and women thereby often experience restricted access to communal spaces and processes of transformation that may be endangered by pollution. Women are constrained in their action upon the external environment:

At first glance, there were several correspondences between the two cases, all of which were conveyed during conversation with the women and other family members present. For instance, their accounts of how the craft knowledge was usually passed on from generation to generation through female members were similar. Also, in both cases economic factors were described as now being ‘prime movers’ for concentrating on pottery as a means for extra income. And their accounts of taboo and prohibitions relating to clay activities were exactly the same (see 6.1), corroborating the general observation for sub-Saharan Africa that prohibitions relating to sexual intercourse, pregnancy and menstruation are most common. Finally, in both instances the women saw the prohibitions as belonging to a tradition of the past, as something that had been stronger before. However, certain contrasts1 emerged when the movement of human bodies and clay were followed from the source to the homestead and in the various household spaces used during manufacture. These contrasts document the importance of following what is done and experienced, and not only what is conveyed during conversation (see 4.3).

It is as if they threaten to ’spill over’ into social space, breaching its order – in particular, the basic distinction between inside and outside, person and world. Yet this weakness is also a source of strength. For a body that is unstable and penetrable may be the stuff of powerful transformations, or it may serve as willing receptacle for superhuman forces (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:74)

Pollution ideas and taboos associated with such metaphoric expression of the female body as a container are widespread for potting activities on the African continent and, accordingly, the most frequent prohibitions are linked to activities and states of the female body: to keep away from potting after sexual intercourse and during menstruation and pregnancy.

While in the case from the Tswapong Hills there were three neighbouring women related as cousins who made pots, in the Molepolole example it was a family where the mother made pots with the active assistance from those of her sons that were still living at home. And the differences emphasized here may be related to the identity of the potters: to the male assistance in the latter case. Two specific examples will be emphasized: 1) the collection of clay and temper, and 2) the use of household spaces when shaping pots.

In addition to providing ways of understanding the technology and use of ceramic containers in culturally specific contexts, however, the degree to which these non-Western ideas about the material world are found to be part of everyday social practice involving clay, may offer opportunities to discuss the dynamics between such a system and material knowledge associated with modernity and capitalist society. The contrast between two fieldwork experiences from southern Botswana serves to illustrate certain key aspects of such dynamics.

In the Tswapong Hills the women collected clay themselves. A ritual was to be performed at the clay source before the material could be dug out. This was a one-off event for each individual potter. After this, she could go to the clay source at will, provided that she respected the prohibitions. People that she did not know whether were respecting the taboos were not allowed near the clay while still unfired, or near the pot fire. Also, potting activities were restricted to the winter months from July to September, during the dry season.

Entering Molepolole When this author went to the village of Molepolole in the Kweneng District, about 50 km northwest of Gaborone, to study social practice in household space involving clay and pots (see 4.3) among western Tswana-speaking Kwena, field studies in the Tswapong Hills in the Central District had recently been completed. The Tswapong Hills fieldwork will be discussed in detail in chapter 6. This had been a positive experience in several respects; while it confirmed some of the expectations from reading the anthropological and historical literature, and thereby provided examples of similarity and contrast to other Bantu-speakers elsewhere in southern Africa, it simultaneously offered some surprising challenges to reflect on. Turning to Molepolole with the hope of clarifying some of these, it must be admitted that the experience was found rather confusing and disappointing at first. In retrospect,

1 Obvious differences between the two cases were in the technique used and temper added. Following Olivier Gosselain’s (2000:201-2, fig. 4 and 5) terminology, the Tswapong Hills potters used the technique of drawing of a lump while tempering the clay with quartz sand (see 6.2) , whereas in the potters in Molepolole used the technique of drawing of a ring-shaped lump while mixing asbestos into the clay.

4

Introducing themes that these potters related to when dealing with clay. But what social processes may have occurred in the Molepolole case? The change in bodily habits may be seen in relation to a redefinition. Referring in particular to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) theory of social practice and emphasis on habitus, Comaroff and Comaroff (1992:7077) consider the effect of changes to bodily form upon people’s social imagination. They find the redefinition of apparently insignificant bodily habits to be a ‘scrambling of code’, which has implications for the actual imagining and acting upon the external environment. Thus, as bodily experience of the material world changes, so does the knowledge of this world. Changes in ways of doing become changes in ways of knowing.

In the potting season vessels should not be made out in the open. It had to be windless, and it had to be inside. Focusing specifically on movement in household space, it was noticed that the clay brought into the homestead was stored in spaces at the back, associated with the activities of women. This link to the female domain was also of importance during the subsequent shaping of vessels: a hut was especially designated for the purpose of ceramic manufacture during the potting season. This hut was her place while potting. Thus, ceramic manufacture stood in an intimate relationship with the female body and household spaces associated with activities of the female domain. In contrast, in the Molepolole example the associations between clay, the female body and household spaces were significantly different. The mother no longer went out to collect the clay and temper herself; it was now her sons that did it. In fact, she admitted she no longer knew exactly where her sons found the material. She had also left parts of the manufacturing process to them. Most often she ‘started’ the vessel, and midway up the body she handed it over to one of her sons to finish the shaping and subsequent decoration. The shaping was mostly done inside the main house or outside in the courtyard. The clay and the temper were kept outside in the front yard in an enclosure designated for potting purposes.

1.2

The archaeological sequence

While the comparative field studies of present-day contexts are all conducted among eastern Bantu-speakers (e.g. Hammond-Tooke 2004:71), in Mozambique (chapter 5), Botswana (chapter 6) and South Africa (chapter 7), the archaeological material of primary focus (chapters 2, 8, 9 and 10) is from the area west and northwest of Johannesburg, in the Magaliesberg valley and adjacent areas in the North West and Limpopo provinces of South Africa. The development of the Late Iron Age Moloko ceramic sequence (Evers 1983) and associated settlements will be discussed in particular. And, in the concluding sections of this work (see 10.5), the archaeological material and interpretations will be compared to and contrasted with those of settlements associated with Moloko ceramics in another region of South Africa, namely the Mpumalanga escarpment. In order for the specific questions and objectives to be presented, however, a short introductory research background for the relevant archaeological material in the primary area should first be outlined.

Thus, when comparing the two cases one notices that in Molepolole the clay could be collected at any time and by any one. Secondly, the pots could be made in spaces that neither had to be associated with women nor had to be inside, away from the wind, and they could be made by both women and men, at any time of year. In short, no prohibitions regulating the relationship between potter, clay and household spaces were followed. It is interesting, therefore, that the mother in Molepolole listed exactly the same taboos as the potters from Tswapong Hills did. However, in contrast to the other case, she conveyed that as a devoted Christian she had found out that nothing happened to the pots when the prohibitions were not respected. “So”, she asked, “what would be the point in respecting them?”

Moloko emerging Following Thomas Huffman’s (2007a) chronological framework, the Late Iron Age (LIA) of southern Africa is the period from AD 1300 to 1840. Archaeologists account for the changes from the earlier parts of the Iron Age in terms of agricultural economy, social organization and group identities, and the most dominant artefact category discussed is pottery. The LIA is defined from ceramic units that are profoundly different from the preceding ones (Pikirayi 2007:289). Although elements of continuity are found, ceramics demonstrate a decisive shift in decoration. Linguistic evidence suggests that ancestors of present-day language or dialect groups in southern Africa date from the early second millennium AD. Examples include the Shona of the Zimbabwe plateau and adjacent lowlands in e.g. Mozambique, and the Sotho/Tswana and Nguni south of the Limpopo River (Huffman 2002, 2004, 2007a).

In chapter 11 it will be returned to the issue of theoretically and methodologically understanding these differences, but a few remarks may be made about the relevance of focusing on the meeting between knowledge systems in material-culture studies. Some would perhaps argue that the changes demonstrate wellknown or even trivial aspects of modernity and the capitalist world order at work. However, they may be linked to the metaphorical associations between the female body and ceramic vessels emphasized by Comaroff and Comaroff – the degree to which the female body was viewed as lacking closure. Although very far from being disconnected from the capitalist world order, the Tswapong Hills example illustrates that the Tswana understanding of the body as potentially ‘spilling over’ with polluting substance was still an idea

The earlier ceramic styles belong to the Kalundu tradition, and the major disjunctions that are found between the Kalundu styles and later ceramics indicate that the makers of the LIA Moloko and Blackburn 5

Material Knowledges pottery which, by inference, are linked to the ancestors of Sotho/Tswana- and Nguni-speakers respectively, most probably migrated from the north and had Early Iron Age Urewe sources in eastern Africa (Huffman 1989, 2007a, 2007b; Huffman and Herbert 1994). As Peter Mitchell and Gavin Whitelaw (2005) write in their recent overview of archaeological research in southernmost Africa, the discontinuation, and thereby the migration hypothesis, is generally accepted among researchers within the discipline, and is supported by linguistic evidence (e.g. Ownby 1985) and kinship terminology (Hammond-Tooke 2004). Thus, the appearance of Moloko and Blackburn ceramics in the archaeological record marks a significant social transition. Mitchell and Whitelaw further note that since the Kalundu sequence in KwaZulu-Natal share an origin with the K2 pottery, whose makers are responsible for the LIA Zimbabwe Culture, there are interesting aspects of social dynamics between people responsible for the archaeological record prior to the LIA arrivals of Moloko and Blackburn. They conclude that an “origin for Nguni and Sotho-Tswana somewhere in East Africa can be argued linguistically and from the evidence of kinship terminology, although only rare ceramic parallels have yet been identified” (Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005:226).

2002, 2007a, 2007b). In addition, an important division is made between the two first Moloko phases and the latest (e.g. Boeyens 2003), due primarily to the introduction of stone walling at the associated settlements. The use of stone is intimately linked to concurrent changes in settlement location in the landscape and agriculturalists’ movement onto the highveld or Grassland Biome (Fig. 1.1). The relatively cold and windy grasslands covering large part of the Orange Free State and the transVaal do not seem to have been inhabited by agropastoralists before the people identified as Fokeng moved onto the Free State highveld in the 15th or 16th century. Despite intensive archaeological research, no trace has been found of earlier Iron Age occupation or activity (Maggs 1976, 1984, 1994/95; Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005; Huffman 2007a, 2007b). Most Iron Age agropastoralists chose broken country with alluvial and colluvial soils, and settlement location was usually based on agricultural requirements. The main grains before the introduction of maize (see 10.3) were sorghum and two types of millet (Eleucine and Pennisetum). To meet the minimum requirements for these African cereals, annual rainfall needs to be about 500 mm, and night-time temperature should remain above 15 degrees C. Evidence of cultivation also includes carbonized remains of cowpeas and tsamma melons (Huffman 2007a:97 with references).

Directing attention to the Moloko sequence in particular, the discussion of continuity versus discontinuity from the earlier Iron Age is reflected in the Oori/Moloko2 debate (Evers 1983, 1988; Mason 1983, 1986; for overviews see Boeyens 2003:64 and Huffman 2007a:428). The Moloko ceramic style spread into the area north of the Vaal River, or the transVaal (see Mitchell 2002:431), from the northeast to the southwest. Early 14th century dates for the Moloko were obtained from the Limpopo Province (Evers 1988), and subsequent dates from Botswana (Campbell et al. 1991; Van Waarden 1991, 1998) are seen to indicate that Moloko was present towards the end of the 13th and early 14th centuries AD (Boeyens 2003:64). The earliest phase of Moloko is called Icon (Hanisch 1979), which forms major disjunctions with foregoing sequences (Huffman 2007a:429, 2007b). The Moloko sequence is divided into three principal phases (see also 2.2): the Icon phase dates to between about AD 1300 and 1500, followed by a second from about AD 1500 to 1700. The third and final phase is dated from about AD 1700 to 1840 (Huffman

It has been noted that the lack of archaeological evidence for earlier cultivators on the highveld is not very surprising, since the largely treeless environment would have been of little value for economies which depended upon swidden agriculture (M. Hall 1987:47). Settlement in this terrestrial biome, therefore, demanded certain technological changes. In particular, as Huffman (1996) writes, it involved overcoming the lack of wood for fuel by burning cattle dung and to introduce stone for building walls. Tim Maggs’ (1976) early detailed study describes four basic settlement types (for settlement descriptions and discussion see 2.2). All are characterized by the use of semiweathered dolerite to produce a hard, binding daga – a mixture of dung and mud – for making house floors and building walls by using larger, more regular stones for the inner and outer surfaces, and smaller rubble for the infill. Dry stone walling was used for the construction of stock enclosures, assembly areas (courts) and the outer fences of residential units, which enclosed houses, kitchens and granaries. With the exception of corbelled stone huts on the southern highveld, cone-on-cylinder dwellings were usually constructed of poles and daga and covered with thatched grass roofs (Maggs 1997; Boeyens 2003:69).

2 The meanings of the two concepts are noted by Boeyens (2003:64). Mason (1983) called the historical line stretching from the local Iron Age Complex to the LIA Sotho/Tswana communities the Oori Tradition. This was a corruption by early European travellers of Odi, the Tswana name for the Crocodile River, and supposedly encapsulated the roots and development of the Sotho/Tswana. The term Moloko, meanwhile, is derived from the old Pedi (North Sotho) word for ‘tribe’, and was chosen by Evers (1981, 1983) to designate a cultural complex where the Sotho/Tswana spread over the country through a process of lineage segmentation or splitting of ‘tribes’.

6

Introducing themes

Figure 1.1: Southern Africa’s terrestrial biomes. Mitchell (2002:18, 430) describes the highveld as the highland grasslands of South Africa’s interior, especially the Grassland Biome areas of the Free State and Gauteng provinces. The Grassland Biome is found on the high central plateau, and extends into Lesotho and elevated inland areas of KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces. Mountainous in places it is mainly a flat and rolling landscape. Mean annual rainfall is 400-2000 mm (redrawn after Mitchell 2002).

subsistence and diet, perhaps particularly by its contribution to a system with increased opportunities for accumulation of personal wealth (Feely 1987; M. Hall 1987; Segobye 1998; Reid 2004; Phillipson 2005:306-7). Martin Hall has observed that it

The expansion onto the Grassland Biome is discussed in relation to climatic change (see 2.3, 10.2, 10.3), and the introduction of stonewalled settlements is a significant material change associated with social and economic transformations. These included a general shift in emphasis from agriculture to pastoralism (see 2.3, 10.2). The limited evidence available suggests that large cattle herds are a phenomenon of the latest Moloko phase (Boeyens 2003:66) after the introduction of stone walling. An increased emphasis on cattle-keeping may have helped against food shortage. Stable isotope analyses of human remains indicate that people living in the Grassland Biome depended more heavily on animal products relative to plant food than people in the mixed woodland savanna further south, although also demonstrating significant variability (Lee Thorpe et al. 1993). While cattle were the main contributor to the meat supply, communal hunting is also well documented (Maggs 1976, 1982; Dreyer 1992; Mitchell 2002:349).

would seem probable that many of these architectural features, highly expensive in terms of the labour needed to construct the walling, were associated with the signification of cattle as the principal medium in storing and transmitting relations of power (M. Hall 1987:13)

As Adam Kuper’s (1980, 1982) ethnographic work conveys, central to the practice of marriage has been the exchange of cattle for wives, an aspect of social dynamics also applied to the precolonial past (Huffman 1982, 1998, 2001). The exchange was that of cattle for the productive and reproductive capacity of women, and thereby a transfer of the labour power of both the wife herself and of the children which she produced. Jeff Guy

However, the shift in agropastoralist emphasis had important socioeconomic consequences beyond

7

Material Knowledges

Figure 1.2: Moloko pottery classes from before AD 1700 (redrawn after S. Hall 1998).

Figure 1.3: Post-AD 1700 Moloko pottery (redrawn after S. Hall 1998).

8

Introducing themes LIA, form the background for the aims and research questions.

(1987:19-22) has underpinned this continuous acquisition of labour as the dynamic social principle upon which southern African pre-capitalist societies were founded (see also 2.3, 10.2).

1.3

Moloko and LIA social transformations

Aims and structure

This work consists of three parts. The main objective is to arrive at an understanding of the relevant social dynamics involved in the developments of the Moloko ceramic sequence and spatial and material changes to the associated settlements, with a particular emphasis on the spatiality of households related to the introduction of stone walling. Three research questions which address the archaeological sequence directly will be presented in an opening section of Part III (see 8.2). In addition, the fourth question to be addressed is: From a theoretical and methodological perspective, what are the implications of a comparative approach to the meeting and interaction between knowledge systems for archaeological understanding of people’s relationship to the material world?

With a specific focus on the social dynamics of gendered domestic labour and the rights over reproductive forces in Moloko households, Simon Hall (1998) has analyzed all reasonably sized published collections of Moloko pottery assemblages from the western region of the highveld. Early assemblages (before AD 1700) have a relatively high stylistic variability, with a large number of decorated bowl classes (Fig. 1.2). Later assemblages (after AD 1700), on the other hand, show much less stylistic complexity (Fig. 1.3). Bowls occur in low frequencies and decoration is minimal. Placement of ochre and graphite is a highly visible and extensive attribute of Early Moloko ceramics, though infrequent on later pots. Hall relates the ceramic changes to the development of a complex economy by the late 18th century, and thereby to a change in Tswana political power and an increased control over productive labour, and most importantly, the productive and reproductive labour of women. The adoption of stone walling is seen as symbolic and serving to substantiate claims to land in a more densely populated landscape (cf. Boeyens 2003:70), where a marked shift in scale of agricultural production is linked to increasing competitive economies developed between rivalling chiefdoms. This is suggested by the interpretations of changes in activity location within households as reflecting increased gender differentiation and perhaps male anxieties over female agricultural production, with a spatial configuration underpinning hierarchy and control in the later part of the Moloko sequence, in contrast to a higher degree of symmetry in the earlier part.

This particular enquiry combines the two key themes introduced in this chapter, and forms the background for the formulation of a specific aim for each of the two first parts. While also presenting an archaeological research status for the Moloko sequence, the aim of Part I is to arrive at a theoretical framework for understanding materiality which takes meetings between knowledge systems into account. Building on this framework, Part II aims at developing a comparative methodology for capturing dynamics between people, materiality and household spaces in present-day household contexts. Through its spatial and temporal trajectories the everyday material of clay is engaged by people in socially and culturally specific practices and technologies, and is found combined with other members of the material world along the way – including water, soil, stone and fire. This approach is meant to clear the ground for archaeological interpretation in Part III. In this final part, understanding is sought of the ways in which clay containers were embedded in social dynamics and cosmology throughout the Moloko sequence.

In combination with the two key themes outlined above, these changes to the archaeological sequence, as linked to social transformations during the southern African

9

PART I Research, Knowledge and the Material World relevance to the household and analysis of social dynamics on a microscale.

This Part I presents the archaeological research status for aspects of southern African Iron Age related to the Moloko sequence and the theoretical framework to be employed in addressing the research questions and objectives formulated in the introduction. Particular attention is given to archaeological approaches to ceramics and settlement organization, and to the critical debate concerning the models used for explaining the past. The emphasis in the research presentation will be on the relationships that are established between ceramics, types of settlement and specific groups from oral tradition and written history. The last part of the chapter is devoted to LIA research which is of special

As was mentioned in chapter 1, archaeology is inextricably linked to modernity. The discipline is thereby part of a knowledge system which differs from the ones the researcher is meeting and trying to understand, whether one is interpreting material culture from the past or conducting material-culture studies in present social contexts. Chapter 3 sets out to clear the epistemological and ontological ground for the methodology developed for the fieldwork studies comprising Part II and for the interpretations of the archaeological material in Part III.

10

2.

RESEARCH STATUS corral. Oppositions of male and female, pastoralism and agriculture, ancestors and descendants, rulers and subjects, cool and hot are represented in spatial oppositions, either concentric or diametric (Kuper 1982:148-56; Huffman 1986a:289-94; Van Waarden 1998:130).

Two key elements have been of special importance for the discussion of archaeological sequences for the southern African Iron Age: ceramics and settlement organization. And, for the LIA after the introduction of stone walling, various types of stonewalled settlements and their correlation with ceramic types form the basis for a chronological framework to which social aspects and other material culture are linked. Informed by ethnography and history (oral and written), the finegrained chronologies bear witness of fluidity, movement and complex group interaction, at least for the last two Moloko phases. However, the ways in which social dynamics are understood through the chronologies have been challenged from various viewpoints. Figuring prominently is the debate over the use of ethnography and history as sources to inform archaeological material and, in addition, the issue of analytical scale. Since the understanding of present-day contexts for interpretation of past households, in order to potentially capture social dynamics between its various members, is a main area of concern in this work, it is of particular interest to ask to what extent the combination of such critical approaches to the use of analogy and the arguments for focusing on a microscale lead to complementary or alternative interpretations of the archaeological material. The following chapter is a presentation of the present status of research relevant to Moloko ceramics and settlement space, with an emphasis on its implications for an understanding of the household, seeking to prepare the ground for further discussion and analysis.

2.1

Rooted in structuralist thought, the CCP is a model for interpreting settlement space associated with mixed farming communities in southern Africa (Fig. 2.1). As a rule, men are associated with pastoralism and women with agriculture. Briefly, the CCP is characterized by a central male domain, comprising cattle enclosures where men of kin and other high status people were buried. This central male area also included sunken grain pits and raised grain bins for long-term storage, a public smithy, and an assembly area associated with men and political decisions. The outer residential area was the domain of married women, and included the households of individual wives, sleeping houses, cooking huts, grain bins, storage pits and graves. In addition, the CCP make statements about rank and political status (Kuper 1980, 1982; Huffman 2008:2035). Critique of the CCP The application of the ‘direct historical approach’ and the CCP as a model for archaeological explanation is criticized from different standpoints. Recent comprehensive evaluations of the research history are available (e.g. Lane 2005; Fewster 2006), it will therefore be concentrated on pointing out the main epistemological criticism, while at the same time ensuring that archaeological literature in the critical debate which refer to the CCP and the LIA after AD 13003 are presented. According to Lane (2005:30-34) the focus is on two main sides: an ethnographic/historical source-side and an archaeological subject-side. The two sides are, however, closely interrelated. On the sourceside the lack of consideration of the historical context of the ethnography from which the models are derived has been pointed out, since what has been deemed relevant by ‘informants’ and ethnographers have created ‘mentions’ of certain cultural traditions while others are

When archaeology meets ethnography and history

Running at the very core of the debate over the introduction of stone walling and associated pottery is the question of the application of the ethnographically derived Central Cattle Pattern (CCP) as a normative model for understanding southern African settlement space (Huffman 1986a, 1986b, 2001). The CCP and the ‘direct historical approach’ By invoking the ‘direct historical approach’ (Huffman 2001) the framework of the CCP is derived from the ethnographic present, or the last hundred years or so (for discussion of the concept see e.g. M. Hall 1986:76-78; Lane 2005:30-34). With gender as an important structuring principle, the CCP model is principally associated with Sotho/Tswana and Nguni-speakers. Huffman emphasizes this pattern as representing a cultural package restricted to Eastern Bantu-speakers who share four main features: “a patrilineal ideology about procreation, a preference for cattle for bridewealth, male hereditary leadership and certain beliefs about the role of ancestors in daily life” (Huffman 2001:21). Within this framework there is a typical spatial organization of an arc of houses around a central cattle

3 For the discussion of the use of the CCP and the Zimbabwe Pattern with specific reference to the period before AD 1300 and the Early Iron Age, see arguments by e.g. Huffman (1993, 1997, 2001), Maggs (1994/95), Calabrese (2000, 2007), Greenfield and Van Schalkwyk (2003), Greenfield and Miller (2004) and Whitelaw (1993, 1994/95, 1997, 2005), in addition to the discussion in Current Anthropology by Beach (1998) with comments and reply.

11

Material Knowledges

Figure 2.1: The Central Cattle Pattern. Male patoralism versus female agriculture (redrawn after Van Waarden 1998). This aspect of social change, paired with human agency, is a dominant feature of the critique. Interestingly, a significant factor seems to be to what degree postprocessual Africanist archaeologists have been influenced by sociological thought, particularly Anthony Giddens’ (1984) concept of duality of structure and theory of structuration (e.g. M. Hall 1986; Fewster 2006) and Bourdieu’s (1977, 1989, 1990) theory of practice (e.g. Davison 1988; S. Hall 1998; Lane 1998a). Here, the issue of archaeological scale figures prominently (see also Mitchell 2002:282-84). As a consequence of being informed by sociological theory critical to structuralist universalism and lack of attention to contextual variation, it has been pointed out that Huffman’s application of the ‘direct historical approach’ does not accommodate divergence from norms or the possibility of social change arising from internal social dynamics rather than external forces (Lane 2005:33). In general, practice theory criticizes structuralist approaches for sharing an objectivist and normative view, and thereby representing people as mechanistically obeying norms and structures (Jones 1997:117). This leads to the assumption of “a predetermined and unchanging character of the social and spatial practice of people through time and space” (Segobye 1994:6). As Simon Hall writes in his discussion of Moloko ceramics and settlement space, “such structuralist models distance people from social action, which becomes a set of rules within which people inflexibly live”, leaving us with “static and ahistoric ethnographic models of Tswana society” (S. Hall 1998:235-36).

left as ‘silences’ (Lane 1994/95, 1998a; Reid and Lane 2004). On the subject-side, questions are asked about the use of an approach that relies on ethnographic observations and oral traditions concerning recent southern African communities and cultural practices to interpret the archaeological remains of groups ancestral to present-day communities (Lane 2005:31) in relation to alternative readings of the material evidence. This raises the important issue of a priori assumptions that past behaviour was identical to that predicted by ethnohistoric models in situations where direct historical associations exist between past and present contexts (Lane 2004:284-85). It also challenges how we understand the term ‘ethnoarchaeology’ (Lane 1996, 2006a, 2006b) as a research strategy in order to provide better understanding to assist in the interpretation of archaeological data (see 4.1). Martin Hall criticized the structuralist settlement model from an early stage arguing that, by seeking universal processes of mental organization, it was potentially ahistoric and thereby inadequate to explain empirical evidence of change in the archaeological record (M. Hall 1984a, 1984b). Recently, he has added to this critique by pointing out that to argue recursively between an ethnography that is based on an assumption of continuity and equivalence and an archaeology that preserves only certain traces of past social life is to invite circularity. Using a particular custom observed in the ethnography to throw light on the archaeology, while a particular feature of the settlement pattern justifies the relevance of the ethnography, writes Hall (2005:184), is “a timeless entrapment in a cognitive structure that has allowed no significant change”.

Although Huffman states that the CCP is a general, normative model and not designed to investigate the detail of daily behaviour and dynamics (Huffman 2001:24), the criticism of the inherent determinism in such a synchronic and abstract model clearly 12

Research status formations, arguing that “[a]lthough ceramic styles could be used to recognize ethnic interaction, they are first defined in terms of discrete clusters in discrete areas. Ceramic style groups therefore represent large-scale identities rather than ethnicity” (Huffman 2002:3). Thus, Huffman stresses that stylistic definitions apply to the scale of group identity. He defines ceramic style on the basis of ‘material-culture groups’, where material culture can express group identity because it forms a ‘repeated code’ of cultural symbols expressed in a range of material objects. Particular emphasis is laid on language as the principal vehicle for conveying worldview and distribution of style:

demonstrates that subjectivity, individual creativity and intentionality are allowed little emphasis when considering past social dynamics of change. Ceramic style and social dynamics The research history of southern African ceramic classification and conceptualization of ceramic style has also been comprehensively discussed recently (Pikirayi 2007; see Calabrese 2007:5-26). The following discussion will therefore concentrate on the aspects of the debate related to the Moloko ceramic sequence from the time period around its inception to the present research status. Similar to the discussion of the CCP and the ‘direct historical approach’, criticism concerns the use of ethnohistoric sources for understanding past social dynamics, the account of social change and the scale of analysis.

Provided that the makers and users belong to the same material-culture group, it then follows that the distribution of the style must also represent the distribution of a group of people who speak the same language. (…) [B]ecause of the vital relationship between language and material culture, ceramic style can be used to recognize and trace the movements of groups even though their size, composition, linguistic scale and other characteristics are unknown (Huffman 2007a:108)

Innocent Pikirayi (2007:287-88) writes that the period from the 1970s to the early 1990s was characterized by American taxonomic approaches dominating the theoretical foundations of southern African Iron Age studies. Analyses varied from the ‘core-concept’ approach, which used consistent combinations of vessel shape, decoration technique and layout (Huffman 1978, 1983), to the ‘multidimensional’ approach (Huffman 1980) to define ceramic style, based on ethnic identity. Ceramic style was viewed as encoding cultural messages regarded as unique to a group of people. Using these approaches, researchers have argued for a correlation between group identity and general ceramic style, indicating that such styles are repetitive and integral cultural codes that are learnt and transmitted within groups of people. In the early 1980s, around the time of the Oori/Moloko debate (see 1.2), Evers’ and Huffman’s application of their classificatory-historical framework was heavily criticized by Martin Hall (1983, 1984a, 1984b, 1984c; see Huffman 1983) in particular. A central argument in his critique was that assumptions of colonial ethnography was perpetuated and that the style of interpretation reflected a general heightened ethnic awareness in southern Africa at the time, and thereby the framework demonstrated that “’neutral’ ceramic classes have been seen in the same way that their interpreters have seen the social environment around them” (M. Hall 1984c:270).

Through the method of seriation, analyses of stylistic structure relate archaeological entities with historically known groups of people. This framework, where an underlying stylistic structure in combination with the wider material culture design field form part of the historical conditioning of ceramic style, is clearly rooted in structuralism. According to Huffman, while “designs and layouts on other media help to restrict and direct ceramic change, (…) the underlying structure is resistant to change” (Huffman 2007a:115). For the analysis of pottery in household space, such objectivist, normative approaches leave a paradox. In submerging the more immediate social, economic and ritual contexts of ceramic production, use and discard (S. Hall 1998:236), the subjectivity of the producers and users of the material culture is to a large extent rendered invisible, whereas one is dependent upon materially manifested differences related to the dynamics between subjectively experienced social identities in order to understand changes in ceramic technology (Fredriksen 2007:127). Similarly, Pikirayi (2007:295) addresses this issue of analytical scale by remarking that the subject of identity is far more complex than indicated by the taxonomic models. As approaches to identity construction, they remain reductive and may not produce the social structures we are looking for. However, as he also emphasizes (Pikirayi 1999, 2007:288), despite the weaknesses of typology and the resultant cultural sequences, the approaches remain important to the region, given uneven research coverage and cultural historical work based on pottery.

Since the early 1990s, writes Pikirayi (2007:288), archaeologists have shifted in identity construction and approach towards interaction studies. Instead of directly correlating pottery with ethnic groups, ethnicity, although still defined in ceramic stylistic terms, is now viewed in terms of group interaction (Calabrese 2000, 2007; Huffman 2002, 2004a). While John Calabrese (2007) has applied frontier theory to understand regional interaction and ethnicity using pottery, others have used ceramics to address gender dynamics (e.g. S. Hall 1998, Schoeman 1998a, 1998b, Delius and Schoeman 2008). Recently Huffman (2002:2-3; 2007a:115) has sought to clarify the question of analytical scale and social

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Material Knowledges

2.2

these three components, and does not aim at accounting for all the various named groups within the different clusters found in oral traditions and written records (for a recent detailed discussion see Hall et al. 2008).

The Moloko sequence: present research status

Using his multidimensional methodology, Huffman (2007a:111-19) presents a specific terminology for ceramic analysis. Every ceramic unit is a facies, and belongs to a large cluster called a tradition. Moloko is an example of such a cluster of facies. Each unit also belongs to a time segment, or phase. Ramifications of a facies over time may lead to new branches or subbranches. As will be remembered from chapter 1, the development of the Moloko ceramic sequence is divided into three principal phases: 1) AD 1300-1500; 2) AD 1500-1700; and 3) AD 1700-1840. The two first phases predate stone walling. Walls mark the transition to the third phase, around AD 1700. In the following, Early Moloko refers to the two pre-walling phases, while the post-AD 1700 phase is called Late Moloko. With stone walls as a diagnostic element, the transition from the second to the third phase is of special significance in debating the time depth of the CCP as a normative model, emphasizing underlying principles governing social structures expressed in principles of settlement organization.

‘Regionality in the Iron Age’ Huffman’s 2002 synthesis of the ceramic sequence correlated the pottery with oral traditions of Sotho/Tswana-speakers by establishing relationships between the archaeological record and historical groups, where Martin Legassick’s (1969) analysis provided a framework. The period between about AD 1500 and the early 18th century is characterized in the Sotho/Tswanaspeaking area by the fragmentation of a number of chiefdoms into lineage clusters. Legassick distinguished four separate clusters with separate origins: Hurutshe, Kgatla, Rolong and Fokeng. The oral traditions also make statements about the ranking of these lineages, and seniority resides in Hurutshe of the Zeerust and Madikwe area (Manson 1995:352). Of the various Sotho lineages the oldest are the Fokeng, whose traditions locate their origins to Ntsuanatsatsi on the southern highveld of the Free State, where people first emerged into this world from a bed of reeds (Ashton 1952). Other Sotho lineages trace their origins to the headwater of the Limpopo from southeastern Botswana through the Magaliesberg to Pretoria. From here the Kwena are known to have moved into the Ntsuanatsatsi area (Mitchell 2002:352).

The earliest recorded facies of the Moloko ceramic cluster, Icon (Hanisch 1979), first appears in the Phalaborwa area in Mpumalanga Province (Evers and Van der Merwe 1987) and slightly later in the Limpopo province. Sites with Icon are limited to the two provinces, in addition to perhaps Botswana, and dating between AD 1300 and 1500 (Huffman 2007a:429, 2007b). The first appearance of the facies most likely dates after about 1350, and perhaps not until around AD 1400 (Huffman 2008:2043).

Icon pottery is seen to have developed into a second phase with three separate facies of Moloko: Letsibogo in Botswana, Madikwe in the North West Province and Olifantspoort in the Magaliesberg (Fig. 2.2). The Madikwe has been recorded from the Makapansgat area west into Botswana. Features belonging to Olifantspoort are found in assemblages spread from Brits to Platberg to the Marico, including the site Olifantspoort 29/72. Radiocarbon dates place this phase between about AD 1450 to 1700 (Huffman 2002:12).

After the initial Icon phase the Moloko tradition expands southwards and, in the Magaliesberg, the pottery is related to settlements dating from the 15th to the 19th centuries. The discussion of the subsequent development is characterized by temporal and spatial complexity. In 2002 Huffman published a comprehensive analysis of the Moloko sequence. However, he has recently (2007a, 2007b) presented a set of reinterpretations, particularly concerning the sequence’s relationship to the Blackburn branch, associated with Nguni-speakers. In order to provide an overview of this multifaceted discussion, it is found clarifying to present the research status for the second and third Moloko phases in several stages. The 2002 status will be presented first, followed by Huffman’s 2007 reinterpretations. Concerning the reinterpretations, recent critical comments to Huffman’s analysis are also presented, with particular emphasis on the Magaliesberg and adjacent areas. Finally, a short summary of the present status of the associations between pottery, stone walling and language cluster is provided. However, it should be emphasized that this research overview focuses on the relationships between

Type N walled settlements (from the name site Ntsuanatsatsi) and associated pottery south of the Vaal River (Maggs 1976) spread north across the river, where they are usually called Group I (Taylor 1979) and the associated pottery named Uitkomst (Mason 1962; Huffman 2002). Type N dates from the 15th to the 17 centuries AD (Huffman 2002:14, 2007b). This type predates all other settlements with stone walling associated with Sotho/Tswana-speakers north of the Vaal River. Traditionally, therefre, Type N settlements with Ntsuanatsatsi pottery is seen as having spread across the Vaal into Gauteng Province, where it is also known as Class 1 (Mason 1968) or Group I (Taylor 1979). To be precise, both sites of Type N and Type Z, or Taylor’s (1979) Group II, are seen as having extended from the northwest Free State across the Vaal (Taylor 1979).

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Research status

Figure 2.2: The three second-phase facies of the Moloko sequence: 1) Letsibogo; 2) Madikwe; 3) Olifantspoort. B = black; R= red; W = white. Stippling indicates a coloured area textured boundary (redrawn after Huffman 2002).

Figure 2.3: Two examples of third-phase Moloko pottery; 1) Buispoort; 2) Thabeng facies. R= red; O = orange; W = white. Stippling indicates a coloured area without textured boundary (redrawn after Huffman 2002).

Huffman traces the western cluster back to the Madikwe facies and the 15th or 16th century. Huffman (2002:18) further identifies Thabeng pottery and Type Z walling (see Maggs 1976) to related groups forming a southwestern Sotho/Tswana cluster, and traces this cluster back to Olifantspoort and the 15th or 16th century.

According to Huffman (2002:14), Mason (1986) finds that Uitkomst pottery occurs stratigraphically under the main stone walls at Olifantspoort 20/71, and Group I sites date from the 15th to the 17th century. Huffman views the second-phase Madikwe facies as later having developing into Buispoort, which is found in settlements with Group II walling, including the Olifantspoort 20/71 site (Huffman 2002:17 with references). Various Kwena groups of the western Sotho/Tswana cluster lived at Molokwane (Pistorius 1992) and Olifantspoort 20/71 (Mason 1986). These areas have Group II walling and Buispoort pottery. On the basis of this material evidence

To sum up, Huffman’s (2002) synthesis of the ceramic sequence concur with Legassick (1969) in showing a separation of a western cluster (cf. Hurutshe, Kwena) from a southwestern one (cf. Rolong, Tlhaping) by the 16th century (Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005:228).

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Material Knowledges

Figure 2.4: Molokwane walling: Olifantspoort 20/71 (redrawn after S. Hall 1998).

Table 2.1: Huffman’s table of the Moloko sequence from 2002 (redrawn after Huffman 2002).

16

Research status Tswana communities into their historic distribution” (Hall et al. 2008:63-64).

Recent reinterpretations In his recent reinterpretations (2007a:429-39; 2007b), Huffman argues that the Ntsuanatsatsi pottery, associated with the Fokeng cluster, belongs to a separate branch associated with Nguni-speakers. Therefore, Huffman says, it derives from Blackburn, not the Moloko Icon facies. While the early and isolated dates from Ntsuanatsatsi obtained by Maggs (1976) have been questioned (e.g. Vogel and Fuls 1999; Boeyens 2003), Huffman’s argument is consistent with these dates (Huffman 2007b), while also presenting a possibility which is echoed in the oral traditions that give the Sotho/Tswana Fokeng a Nguni origin. His interpretations also agree with the observation made by Mitchell and Whitelaw (2005:227) that “any archaeological interpretation must accommodate the antiquity with which the Fokeng are regarded in the oral traditions (…) and the origin of Fokeng pottery, which is different from that of pottery associated with other highveld Sotho communities”.

Ceramic style as more than surface The emphasis on complex inter-group dynamics between Nguni- and Sotho/Tswana-speakers has fuelled an interest in ceramic style where the sequence of gestures and actions taking place in the chain of production, or chaîne opératoire (cf. Leroi-Gourhan 1993; see also Gosselain 1999, 2000), into ‘technological style’ (Lechtman 1977) or ‘technological choice’ (Lemonnier 1992, 1993). Interestingly, this attention has revealed that it was not only surface decoration and range of ceramic forms that underwent changes between Early and Late Moloko. There are already strong indications that also the composition of ceramic ware and choices made during various manufacturing stages should be taken into consideration in future research. Dana Drake Rosenstein’s (2002) comparative geoarchaeological analysis of muscovite mica, likely used as temper, shows that it is absent in the earlier phases and that later mica inclusions were a deliberate choice. The inclusion of this material has been noted at Olifantspoort 20/71, Molokwane and Kaditshwene, and in Buispoort pottery from Mmakgame. These changes to the clay technology is seen to reflect the change of scale of ceramic production and use associated with the transition to third-phase agglomerated Tswana towns, arguing that technological strategies were employed in order to make ceramic production more efficient when

Consequently, according to Huffman, the development of the Moloko ceramic sequence cannot be viewed in isolation from the Blackburn sequence. The suggestion that a Fokeng identity can be linked to a movement of Mbo Nguni out of present-day KwaZulu-Natal between about AD 1450 and 1500 seeks to resolve the ambiguity of Fokeng origin and their apparent wide distribution, and is in agreement with oral records that describe Kwena movement south of the Vaal River into areas occupied by the Fokeng. On these grounds it may be substantiated that the early Fokeng introduced stone walling to both the western and southwestern Sotho/Tswana clusters. While western Sotho/Tswana built the Molokwane type of walling (Fig. 2.4) or Taylor’s (1979) Group II, southwestern Sotho/Tswana built type Z. The new interpretation that a subsequent Fokeng movement northwards back across the Vaal introduced stone walling to both western and southwestern Sotho/Tswana is relevant to the area of particular interest in this work. An implication is that the appearance of Uitkomst pottery results from Fokeng interaction with people responsible for Olifantspoort facies pottery of the southwestern cluster, and possible western Sotho/Tswana, represented by Madikwe facies pottery (Huffman 2007b; Hall et al. 2008:63). A central research issue at present is therefore the character of the social dynamics of the various groups involved. More specifically, a question is whether the occurrence of Uitkomst pottery in the Magaliesberg and adjacent areas reflects a Nguni presence which extended further back in time and was more widespread than was previously thought. In other words, does the pottery represent the presence and spread of so-called ‘Sothoized’ Nguni? The historically known Fokeng may then only represent “a disjunct fragment of a previously wider identity that, through a process of assimilation, was reduced and geographically compressed by western

Figure 2.5: Uikomst pottery. A = aplliqué; B = black; R = red (redrawn after Huffman 2002).

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Material Knowledges (cf. S. Hall 1998; Fredriksen 2007), the entire ceramic chaîne opératoire should be taken into consideration (see also 4.1 and 4.3).

faced with denser living conditions and an accompanying increased pressure on resources like firewood (see also Boeyens 2003:70). However, Rosenstein (2008) has recently found that while the inclusion of muscovite mica is a consistent attribute of Buispoort pottery, it is absent from contemporary pottery from Marothodi, as well as from Kgafela Kgatla pottery from the Pilanesberg area (see Hall et al. 2008:67). The question why some town dwellers, like the inhabitants at Marothodi, did not choose to include such tempers in their ceramics, while people living at nearby Olifantspoort, Molokwane and Kaditshwene clearly did include them, a strategy demonstrated not to be related to local availability, raises the important issues of variation in ceramic specialization and the potters’ relationship to other craft specializations, for example metal production (Rosenstein 2008; see also Hall et al. 2006; Chirikure et al. 2008).

Summary of present research status Present status for the Moloko sequence, according to Huffman (2007a, 2007b) is presented in Table 2.2. The correlations that are established between types of stone walling, ceramic facies and language cluster by Huffman (2007a, 2007b) may be summarized as follows:

Rosenstein’s recent results strongly indicate that the inclusion of muscovite mica should not be viewed solely as a measure taken when faced with the need for largescale production. Rather, they suggest that ceramic style is, as Hall et al. (2008:67) formulate it, “inseparable from a technology of style issue”. Thus, the concept of style is to be seen as more than surface decoration. When considering the changes that occurred in the symbolic load carried by pottery between Early and Late Moloko



Type N (Group I): c. AD 1450-1600 Ntsuanatsatsi facies (Fokeng cluster, Blackburn)



Type V: c. AD 1700-1850 Makgwareng facies (Fokeng cluster, Blackburn)



Klipriviersberg (Group III): c. AD 1600-1850 Uitkomst facies (Fokeng cluster, Blackburn)



Molokwane (Group II): third-phase Buispoort facies of the western cluster



Type Z: third-phase Thabeng facies of the southwestern cluster



Badfontein: third-phase Marateng facies of the northern cluster

Table 2.2: Present research status for the Moloko ceramic sequence (redrawn after Huffman 2007a).

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Research status

2.3

movement arising from environmental changes (e.g. Huffman 1996:58, 2007a:98-99) is still a prominent feature in Huffman’s analyses. And environmental arguments cannot be dismissed altogether. Within ecological contexts of semi-arid land with few variations in topography and precipitation, the Tswana pattern of exploitation represents a production form that is able to produce a surplus for an elite and to sustain large populations through a spatial and temporal distribution of the harvest (Widgren 2000:253). Recently, particular attention has been directed towards sacred leadership and rain control: “When we consider social change, such as the development of sacred leadership, we need to consider multiple factors. Rain control in particular was an important aspect of political power. Climate change was therefore one of those parameters within which Iron Age people made choices that had far-reaching consequences” (Huffman 2008:2045, see also 10.3).

The scale of things: understanding social change

As discussed earlier, the introduction of stone walling is at the very core of discussions of the time depth of the CCP, and it also marks the transition between the Early and Late Moloko ceramic sequence. Concurrently with the transition around AD 1700, western Sotho/Tswana communities such as the Kwena moved into the Rustenburg-Pretoria area, where previously communities of the southwestern cluster had lived. But what are the relevant factors relating to the level of the household and microscale social dynamics taken into consideration to account for these movements and interactions associated with the ceramic changes? The environmental and the social When reading the archaeological literature a significant difference in emphasis between Early and Late Moloko is evident. While for the early phases there is a focus on the challenges and opportunities to subsistence and technology caused by environmental fluctuations, the discussion for the latest phase adds intensification of agriculture, increased political competition, unrest and warfare to the picture. As Mitchell (2002:344) writes, southernmost Africa shares a certain unity because the archaeology of its later farming communities is clearly that of the ancestors of the present-day Sotho/Tswanaand Nguni-speakers, as well as demonstrating generally lower levels of sociopolitical complexity prior to the mfecane (Nguni) and difaqane (Sotho/Tswana).

Yet, crucial factors of change are still seen as coming from outside of society and being manipulated in the hands of the social elite. Aspects of social dynamics from ‘within’ or ‘below’ are not taken into consideration, a point echoing Lane’s (2005:33) critique of the use of the ‘direct historical approach’. Nonetheless, it should be pointed out that the general emphasis on the interplay of various factors established by Huffman’s (1986b) dismissal of environmental determinism has generated two closely interrelated facets of the discussion concerning the development of Moloko settlements, both of which will be presented and discussed in detail in chapter 10: the changes to landscape understanding in relation to changes in agricultural scale (see 10.1 and 10.2) and the debate over the introduction of maize (see 10.3).

The Sotho/Tswana settlement system has been recognized as an agricultural and social adaptation to low and erratic rainfall. The historic Tswana pattern of settlement and land use – large concentrated settlements combined with widely dispersed arable fields and pastoral organization reaching more than 20 km from the main settlements – was contrasted by Basil Sansom (1974) with the Nguni settlement structure of presentday KwaZulu-Natal. He argued that, because of the higher rainfall and more dissected landscape, the Nguni based their agriculture on a confined territory in each settlement. Sansom’s view was criticized by Huffman for its environmental determinism, stating that “the dichotomy was unnecessarily exaggerated and attributed to erroneous causes, largely because functional descriptions without historical perspective were turned into explanation” (Huffman 1986b:294). The main problem was that the view operated in a social vacuum, whereas Huffman’s research shifted the attention to the interplay of several factors: environment, agriculture, population dynamics, wealth and political power. He demonstrated that the highly concentrated settlements among the Sotho/Tswana reflected social hierarchies and that they were a recent innovation, dating from the 18th century (see also S. Hall 1995:311-13, 1998:238; Widgren 2000:252-53).

In addition to the criticism of causality being placed outside society or among the powerful, it is also noted that we should exercise caution in viewing oral histories as narratives of continuous conflict and aggression. Simon Hall (2007:171) writes that, being the records of the ruling elite, they perhaps present a somewhat skewed and selective memory which may bias our perception of the 18th century. In addition, since the oral records are comparatively rich they also have the potential of falsely emphasizing a change simply because equivalent records for earlier periods are not available. However, this is not to say that the gathering intensity of rivalry between chiefdoms in the post AD 1700 period should be doubted. When viewing the oral histories against the background of the archaeological record, the emergence of Tswana towns is a phenomenon of a period of political unrest, an expression of significant changes in demography and trade competition. Gender dynamics, labour and the house as social institution In addition to Alinah Segobye’s (1994:6) criticism of the CCP for assuming a predetermined and unchanging character of social practice, she also called for a reexamination of this broad model by taking into account

However, while dismissing environmental determinism, the emphasis on population growth, social tension and 19

Material Knowledges demographic replacement of agnatic kin” (Lane 1998a:198). However, while sharing Hall’s interest in the symbolic connection between female bodily experience and the Tswana house, exemplified by the term ntlo denoting the uterine house both physically and socially (see Comaroff 1985:56), Lane differed significantly from Hall in incorporating this symbolism into a gynecomorphic interpretational framework for the house.

women’s contribution to production, which may have led to power relations having been constituted differently among different groups (Segobye 1998). Since interpretation of the social meaning and use of space were drawn from structuralist theory postulating dichotomies between male and female roles and other spheres of social relations (e.g. Huffman 1986b, 1986c; Huffman and Hanisch 1987), Segobye (1998:231-32) argued that the tendency had been to infer broad spatial and temporal continuities, specifically for gender relations within communities with evidence for mixed farming, and whose settlement system was thought to conform with the CCP. By suggesting processes of complex social formation as being intrinsically maledirected, argued Segobye, the potential contribution of women to the diversity of forms of social relations and organization was ignored. The relegation of women and associated activities to the level of secondary factors in certain ways assumes that women were passive commodities in social processes characterized by wealthand power seeking male heads. Instead, Segobye (1998:232-33) directed attention to the role of craft production, including pottery and cultivation, in sustaining the wealth base of homesteads or villages.

An example of following the course of paying closer attention to material culture’s role in microscale social dynamics is Alex Schoeman’s (1997, 1998a, 1998b) analyses of the complex interaction between the Ngunispeaking Ndzundza, the Nguni-speakers characterized as ‘Sotho-ized’ and known as Koni, and the Sotho-speaking Pedi. The Pedi are associated with the third-phase Moloko facies Marateng (see overview in 2.2). Recently she has also co-authored an article on the subject with Peter Delius (Delius and Schoeman 2008). Delius and Schoeman’s analysis and discussion with Huffman (2004a) will be presented in more detail in chapter 10 (see 10.4), but a central feature in their argument is the pottery’s role, together with other material elements such as houses and practices of deposing ash in middens, in patterns of complex interaction between men and women involving intermarriage between groups.

The mid- and late 1990s saw a development in which focus was directed towards analysis of social dynamics on lower and less general scales, a course staked out perhaps in particular by Simon Hall (e.g. 1995, 1998, 2000). Clearly sharing an influence from Bourdieu’s (1977) theory of practice, and Jean Comaroff’s (1985) treatment of Tswana ethnography in light of this theoretical framework, Hall (1998) and Lane (1998a) presented interpretations of Moloko settlements with specific focus on gender dynamics and the relationship between the female body and the house.

The relevance of intimacy Close face-to-face interaction is the social fabric by which a system of key symbols is woven: it is the small world of everyday life that provides the materials for the construction, continuity and change of a culture. (…) Consequently, although changes in the big world may be the ultimate cause of the changes in the small world, it is in the small world that the decisive cultural change will be experienced (Jacobson-Widding 1992:2223, orig. emphases)

As seen in chapter 1, Hall’s (1998) synthesis showed that the changes to Moloko ceramics after AD 1700 were related to a shift in scale of Tswana political power and the control over the productive and reproductive labour of women (see also Mitchell 2002:360-61; Boeyens 2003:70; Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005:228-29). In a subsequent paper, Hall (2000) has also demonstrated complex interaction between foragers and agropastoralists within Early Moloko homestead space, while showing that Moloko hut floors associated with the Madikwe facies of the western Sotho/Tswana cluster may be compared with hut floors associated with the Olifantspoort facies of the southwestern cluster (see 9.3).

The household is an arena that captures social change. And since the main objective in this work is to approach diachronic variation in characteristics and distribution of material culture in Moloko household spaces, Anita Jacobson-Widding’s emphasis on intimate interaction and experience is a useful reminder of the importance of materiality for understanding social transformation. At the same time, however, Jacobson-Widding points to the dialectic relationship between the big world and the small world. By considering it as social process, the emphasis here will be on the household as providing a dialectical framework where human beings become social beings through a complex set of social relations, of which individual relations are only one aspect. Stella Souvatzi writes that “one of the most interesting and complex properties of household is that it looks both to the self and to society at the same time” (Souvatzi 2008:39).

Emphasizing bodily practice, Lane (1998a) suggested a more permanently settled landscape towards the terminal Iron Age (see also Lane 2004 and 10.2), while arguing for changing meanings of the house as social institution. Lane saw the spatial segregation of food-preparation activities from sleeping areas as linked to a development where notions of mutual cooperation between women and men became of less importance. Yet, he also emphasized the development as one towards “a domain more exclusively linked to sexual reproduction and the 20

Research status the Moloko ceramic sequence may be seen in close relation to changes in household materiality associated with the introduction of stone walling, particularly changes linked to diachronic variation in hearth location and its implication for dynamics between household members (Fredriksen 2007). However, as will be made clear in Part III, these interpretations need certain revisions and to be placed in a wider social and spatial framework, discussions to which chapters 8, 9 and 10 are devoted.

Although Huffman states that the CCP is a general, normative model and not designed to investigate the detail of daily behaviour and social dynamics (Huffman 2001:24), the inherent determinism in such a synchronic and abstract model allows little emphasis, as seen in this chapter, for subjectivity, creativity and intentionality in our considerations of past social dynamics. And, in understanding pottery, Huffman’s consideration of social interaction does not include the household. This is mainly due to the scale of analysis: ceramic classes are “defined in terms of discrete clusters in discrete areas. Ceramic style groups therefore represent large-scale identities” (Huffman 2002:3). The contributions presented in the foregoing section underscore the significant potential in emphasizing a practice framework for understanding dynamics between household members, while also promoting a reflexive notion of social life. Andrew Jones writes that the benefit of attention to fine-grained microscale analysis is that it not only allows for consideration of fine-grained localized differences in material culture patterning, but also allowing us to consider localized differences within a wider macroscale framework (A. Jones 2002:72), thus accommodating the need to understand the household within its wider societal context.

Concluding remarks The debates concerning the use of the ‘direct historical approach’, the CCP and the relationship between ceramic style and social dynamics in southern African Iron Age archaeology demonstrate the importance of problematizing the ethnographic and historical sources one makes use of in order to obtain better understanding of past material remains. Archaeology is a scientific academic discipline which is inextricably linked to Enlightenment thought and, as such, it belongs to the knowledge system of modernity and perpetuates the values of Western cultures. However, since it is crucial for the discipline to interpret through the use of analogy, archaeologists are constantly engaging past and present non-Western knowledges, and our understanding is formed, shaped and altered by these meetings with different knowledge systems. The theoretical implications of this particular interpretative engagement are the subject for the next chapter.

In order to approach the household the notion of reflexivity should be extended to include the material world – to focus on the intimate relationships between dwellers, dwellings and their material surroundings. In a recent article, this author has argued that the changes to

21

3.

WHEN KNOWLEDGES MEET

The wisdom of epistemological modesty is, surely, one of the lessons of the natural sciences; indeed, if there is one great lesson of the failure of positivism as a methodology of the sciences, it is (…) that there are no a priori rules that will guarantee us true theories (Appiah 2005:35)

relationships between people and their immediate material surroundings, both for the field studies of present-day contexts in Part II and for interpretation of archaeological material in Part III. First of all, however, recent postprocessualist critique in the South African archaeological context will be discussed, and on this basis an epistemological point of departure will be formulated.

Addressing epistemological problems in African studies, Appiah draws attention to the way one understands rationality and ‘truth’. By underscoring the failure of positivism in the sciences in general, his remarks also point to the difficulties associated with a prominent paradigmatic idea in the discipline of archaeology on the continent, not least in southern Africa.

3.1

Archaeology and the messiness of the present

The South African context The promise of the idea of archaeology as science is a powerful one: to trade the messiness of the present for the clean, aseptic certainties of a sure knowledge of the past (Shepherd 2003:844)

Nick Shepherd (2002:189-90) notes the paradox that references to the politics of archaeology in Africa are few and far between. He discusses two main reasons for this. The first is the nature of colonial sciences, which were heavily invested with a particular version of naturalized science (see 3.2). The second is processual archaeology’s concern to remake the discipline as a positivist science, by its rejection of the notion that knowledge is constructed within cultural, political and economic contexts. However, it is a widely shared notion among postprocessual archaeologists, as Lynn Meskell (2002:281) writes, that who we are, the questions we ask and the studies we do, underscore the kinds of archaeology, level of political engagement and points of connection between what we study and our own experience. Thus, the politics of location are central to archaeological understanding and deeply affect scientific practice today.

Shepherd points out that the idea of archaeology as science has been attractive to archaeologists in periods of societal transformation in South Africa. As was drawn attention to in the previous chapter for the criticism of the ‘direct historical approach’, South African archaeology has been predominantly interested in the truth value of the ‘archaeological record’. This is reflected in the combination of a tradition of archaeology as science, a set of values that favours fieldwork over other forms of inquiry, and an interest in systems of classification. These values have been underscored by a relative absence of counterbalancing intellectual strands (M. Hall 2005:181-85). Shepherd (2003:843-44) writes that at the heart of the notion is a retreat from society, and that this has been an enduring feature: from colonial archaeology in its academic avoidance of African society, to the archaeology of the period after c. 1970, which was a retreat from society at large. In the guise of the New Archaeology the idea of archaeology as science took hold in the period of mass engineering of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was reaffirmed in the 1980s in the events around the first World Archaeological Congress (see Ucko 1987). After 1994 it has been restated as an answer to various politicized pasts and postprocessual archaeology (e.g. Huffman 2004b), while postprocessualists, on the other hand, have argued the epistemological unlikelihood of such a position (Shepherd 2003:843-44).

Meskell identifies two interrelated phenomena that began to shape the production of archaeological knowledge in the early 1990s: the rise of politicized and ethical archaeology on the one hand and the theorizing of social identity in past societies on the other. Both are fundamentally driven by the voices of groups that used to be marginalized and their newfound academic legitimacy, and must therefore be seen in close relation to each other (Meskell 2002). Recent approaches to identity share the appreciation that identity is not a primordial characteristic of an individual or group, and thereby carefully avoiding essentialism in considerations of identity. However, this awareness is clearly rooted in a Western intellectual tradition, and may be difficult to apply in African contexts, where archaeological identities often have been deeply politicized, in both colonial and postcolonial discourses (Wynne-Jones and Croucher 2007:283-84; cf. Trigger 1984; Robertshaw 1990 (ed.); Ucko 1995; Stahl 2005).

An example of postprocessualist critique is Segobye’s (2005:80) contention that the past is value-laden, and the present ‘politics of the past’ have shaped, and will continue to shape, the archaeological discourse. And, given this awareness of the indelible links between past, present and future, as Meskell (2005a:73) underscores, it should not be surprising that memories and intimate relationships to particular areas or spaces are continually invented and developed. The South African context has

This chapter aims at establishing a theoretical foundation from which to engage in the meeting and interaction between knowledge systems. The foundation will thereby also constitute the framework for understanding 22

When knowledges meet made it obvious that indigenous and non-indigenous people share history, although not necessarily the same view about the consequences of that history. Accordingly, archaeologists should take responsibility and consider the ways in which the inherited cultural norms, practices and institutions may have been marked and shaped by a particular history. The awareness that communities of all scales and types must be understood in relation to local meanings and history has become critical to many archaeologists. This is because of the acknowledgement of the past as having been potentially as dynamic as the present: people migrated, left places and even heritage behind, while new groups settled in and created new heritage and formed relationships with the old ones. This means that layers of complexity are entangled in the definitions of terms like ‘community’ and ‘indigenous’ (Chirikure and Pwiti 2008:468). For sub-Saharan Africa, for example, almost everyone claims to be indigenous (cf. Kuper 2003; Shepherd 2003), rendering the term almost meaningless (Lane 2006a; recent contributions to the debate include e.g. Ouzman 2005; Chirikure and Pwiti 2008; Green 2008; Horsthemke 2008). Lindsay Weiss formulates the present status for the discipline as one where archaeology

reflection over knowledges as being context-dependent may be to follow J. Martin Wobst’s (2005:28) suggestion of “a broadening of our theoretical gaze”. According to Wobst, an important theoretical integration which will be of valuable assistance in order to approach materialities that are significantly different from the ones known from the present is to de-emphasize the difference between nature and culture and between artefact and non-artefact. ‘Natural’ (non-artefactual) and ‘cultural’ (artefactual) variables should be allowed to be viewed as potentially of equal importance to human action, and equally able to articulate with social life (Wobst 2005:28-29). From this epistemological departure point, an ontological position should be sought. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to the objective of arriving at an ontology which enables a framework for archaeological interpretation that may capture the relationship between experiencing human bodies and their immediate social and material world.

3.2

Combining two critical perspectives

As argued in chapter 1, knowledge systems may be seen as open-ended and continually subject to change. In the following, it will be argued for a symmetrical relationship between Western and non-Western knowledge systems and between humans and nonhumans. As reflected in the discussion thus far in this work, the problems are deeply rooted in the epistemic foundations of Western knowledge. For this reason a critical evaluation of science is needed, in particular a focus on problems emanating from Enlightenment thought and modernity. The combination of two strands of knowledge critique is particularly fruitful in developing a theoretical perspective: the feminist insight that all knowledge is situated and Africanist philosophers’ critique of the concept of rationality.

has come to inhabit a prominent position of creating and institutionalizing conceptual spaces that participate in the historical legitimating of contemporary struggles of selfhood and political autonomy that have come to settle on the question of cultural identity (Weiss 2007:415) Given the potential prominence of archaeological research in current debates, and acknowledging the indelibility between past, present and future, this author finds it important to formulate a theoretical position firmly placed within postprocessualism.

Situated knowledge Although often conceptualized in this manner, feminist theory is not simply a critique of androcentrism. Feminism is a political position with the stated goals of working towards women’s social, economic and political equality, while at the same time attempting to understand the societal structures that allow for the perpetuation of white patriarchy (Wilkie and Hayes 2006:252). It is therefore also an epistemological and ontological standpoint that calls into question the underlying ideology of Western social sciences that advocate neutrality. This questioning took hold as a central tenet to postprocessual archaeology from its earliest stages (e.g. Hodder 1982, 1986; Miller and Tilley 1984 (eds.); Moore 1986; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Tilley 1990 (ed.); Conkey and Gero 1991; Engelstad 1991). Feminist scholars challenge the presumption that science offers an objective view of the world, a view that can position itself outside of society (Engelstad 2007:229), what Donna Haraway (1991:189) describes as “the god-trick of seeing everything from everywhere”. For Haraway, all knowledges are situated in culture and society, in

An epistemological point of departure As Laurajane Smith writes, the polarization of theoretical discussion within archaeology is expressed in differences in epistemology and ontology. While epistemology asks questions about knowledge, ontology, on the other hand, asks questions of what things exist. The epistemological position of processual theory is logical positivism, and is ontologically grounded in the assumption that the archaeological record exists as a ‘natural’ and unproblematic entity. In contrast, the epistemology of postprocessual theory is postpositivist and generally wide-ranging and diverse. Its ontology is relativist in the sense that knowledge about the world is seen as created within discourses. However, postprocessual standpoints are contradictory, and there is an ontological confusion underlying postprocessual theory and its role within the discipline (L. Smith 2004:59). A point of departure which is sensitive to postprocessual problematization of the archaeological record and its 23

Material Knowledges political concerns, and in academic and institutional contexts.

Contextualizing Western philosophy Philosophers Didier Kaphagawani and Jeanette Malherbe (2003) write that rationality is that quality which enables achievement of goals and ways to act successfully. It helps to negotiate the immediate physical environment; it is the means by which we are able to form a reasonably accurate picture of the world. It is the framework within which the behaviour of others is interpreted and understood. Rationality is thereby closely linked to knowledge. Knowledge of the world – a reliable picture of how things are in the surrounding world – is the means by which we direct our behaviour in order to achieve ends most efficiently and successfully. To be human is to be rational. In perceiving the immediate environment, for instance, the human senses are set up in such a way that they tell how things in fact are. This is the case whatever continent we are situated, no matter what language used to express our experiences, and whatever behavioural codes the particular society has taught us as individuals to respond in. To understand or explain a phenomenon in any cultural context is to bring it under a rational framework of some sort. However, what varies greatly according to context is the way in which epistemic rationality and its related concepts are instantiated, the concrete content that they are given in terms of e.g. social customs. What counts as a good theory, as a widely accepted concept, or a satisfactory explanation – the set of established facts accepted as true within the society may be vastly different. Accordingly, the methods by which knowledge is acquired and the ways in which it is certified as reliable facts will also be different (Kaphagawani and Malherbe 2003:221-23).

But this does not entail that knowledge production is some form of fiction or at risk of extreme relativism. As Ericka Engelstad writes, to recognize the situatedness of knowledge production does not negate the importance of this knowledge. Rather, the concept of situated knowledges requires “a recognition that no position is innocent, whether it be feminist, minority, marginal, ‘other’ or mainstream. Most importantly, it demands accountability for the process of knowledge production” (Engelstad 2007:230). And, by underscoring the importance of accountability, another significant aspect emerges. For, as pointed out by Alison Wylie, not everything is left out in the open for academic discourse. By making clear values, interests and political standpoints to archaeological practice, it may be illustrated how a range of empirical and conceptual resources can be used to critically evaluate not only conventional interpretations of the cultural past but also the assumptions that inform them, assumptions that are sometimes so deeply entrenched in our thinking as to be invisible (Wylie 2002:198)

By directing attention to the potential invisibility of culturally specific assumptions, Wylie alerts us to the fact that not only is archaeology a deeply political enterprise in open, explicit or intentional ways, but that its practices and products reflect the standpoints and interests of its makers in manners that may just as well be implicit or even unintentional. And, as demonstrated for the South African context, by being situated in different academic contexts, it should be kept in mind that the archaeological voices one hears depend on their ability to be heard. This means that scientific knowledge is deeply embedded in power relations, and that power not merely impinges on scientific research from without. Power relations permeate the most ordinary activities, and scientific knowledge actually arises out of these relations rather than in opposition to them (Wylie 2002:186; cf. Rouse 1987:17-25).

Sandra Harding (2003:63) argues that while it is important to gain a richer appreciation of the epistemological knowledge systems of other cultures, a thorough engagement with these systems requires a critical assessment of the history, strength and limitations of our own knowledge systems. This may be advanced by using the new sociologies and histories of these other knowledge systems to identify problematic residual sources of support for the Western universalist understanding of knowledge. Turning to the African continent for a recent critical evaluation of this kind, philosopher Mogobe Ramose (2003) makes the important point that the Western philosophers from which the teaching of philosophy to other parts of the world emulated, always drew their questions from the lived experience of time and place – from a European social and political context. Such questioning contributed to the upkeep and refinement of an already established philosophical tradition. In this sense, Western philosophy has always been contextual (Ramose 2003:4). The particularly Western universal view of knowledge has, continues Ramose, had consequences for the way that human experience is conceptualized. More accurately, there has been a blurring of the distinction between insight and experience. The fact that human experience is bound by time and space allows for potentially similar insights to

What, then, does a commitment to a situated knowledge thesis entail for archaeological practice? According to Wylie (2003:31), it implies the awareness that social location systematically shapes and limits what the researcher knows, including tacit, experiential knowledge, as well as explicit, epistemic understanding. What individuals experience and understand is shaped by their location in a hierarchically structured system: by material conditions, everyday social interaction and the conceptual resources they have for presentation and interpretation. In other words, social location conditions our understanding of what knowledge is and what we view as being rational.

24

When knowledges meet ‘Discoveries’ about and from the ‘new’ world expanded and challenged ideas of the West about itself. With the advent of Cartesian rationalism and Lockean empiricism it was not long before the philosophical influences began to make themselves felt in the much younger discipline of anthropology. The critical question was how to think ‘the Other’, with whom the Western world had come into increasing contact since the great exploratory journeys of the 15th century (Biakolo 2003:9; see L.T. Smith 1999:59-60). Ideas, images, and experiences about the indigenous Other helped to shape and delineate the essential differences between Europe and the rest. Notions about this Other, already existing in European imagination, were recast within the framework of Enlightenment philosophies, the industrial revolution and the scientific ‘discoveries’ of the 18th and 19th centuries. Consequently, when discussing the scientific foundations of Western research, mentions of indigenous contributions are rarely found. As Tuhiwai Smith writes:

arise out of dissimilar experiences. This means that although insights might be similar they are always coloured by different experiences (Ramose 2003:7). The Western knowledge archive Western knowledges, philosophies and understanding of human nature form what Michel Foucault (1972) refers to as a cultural archive. He suggests that the archive reveals ‘rules of practice’ which its practitioners cannot necessarily describe themselves, because they operate within these rules and take them for granted. Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes that this sense of the idea of the West is important, because theories about research are to a large extent underpinned by a cultural system of classification and representation. This system consists of ideas, beliefs and theories about the social world which form the basis for social science research. Crucially, the Western cultural archive places the individual as the basic building block of society, as the basic social unit from which other social organizations and social relations form (L.T. Smith 1999:44, 47-48).

The objects of research do not have a voice and do not contribute to research or science. (…) An object has no life force, no humanity, no spirit of its own, so therefore ‘it’ cannot make an active contribution. This perspective is not deliberately insensitive; it is simply that the rules did not allow such a thought to enter the scene (L.T. Smith 1999:61)

As a concept closely associated with modernity and traced back to the Enlightenment, the growth of philosophical humanism was deeply connected to the emergence of the modern individual and has been most influential to Western conceptualizations of knowledge – for how we understand the individual, the social and society. In philosophical humanism the individual has absolute priority and is present before the social. It may therefore be detached from society. This enables claims of the individual as having certain inviolable and universal ‘natural rights’ vested in the person simply because he or she is human. Being an individual suggests distinctiveness from other individuals. However, at the same time it requires that all individuals are individuals to the same degree. In other words, the distinctiveness of individual characteristics rests on their universality. Humanism is thus the belief that certain characteristics of humankind are invariant and transcendental, broadly established and can be used as a basis for our discussion of human beings (Thomas 2004:129, 136; cf. Heidegger 1993:225).

Three problematic legacies of the archive In the following, attention will be drawn to three specific and closely interrelated problems with knowledgemaking within modernity and philosophical humanism, all of which have already been touched upon in foregoing sections: the relationship between nature and culture in science, specific notions of space and understanding of cultural change. This discussion clears the ground for the presentation of a theoretical framework for interpretation of present and past personhood, social practice and relationships between people and their immediate material world. Closely related to the development of the atomistic individual is the view of the nature/culture divide in science (see e.g. Ingold 2000:13-26; Thomas 2004:7895; Insoll 2007b; Tvedt and Oestigaard 2009). As the critique of the Western knowledge archive makes clear, although scientists think they are representing nature accurately, they are in fact representing it through the distorting lens of culture or society. Andrew Jones (2002:27-28) points out that an effect of this is that nature is perceived as having a prior existence to culture. The interpretative positions of archaeologists broadly rest on the premises which characterize the natural and social sciences. The world is divided into animate subjects and inanimate objects. Each is studied in different ways, using different methodologies. But this is problematic, especially if attempting to write an interpretative archaeology which incorporates knowledge produced using a scientific methodology (A. Jones 2002:23-26).

For this reason, discussion of human identity easily falls into a model of possession and ownership embedded in discourses about the sovereign subject where the individual is taken as a pregiven entity. Here, an identity is either something one ‘has’ and can manipulate, something chosen, or it is something that ‘constrains’ the individual by being an ascribed rather than chosen aspect of life (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a:12-13). Furthermore, in post-Enlightenment society, with its liberal political institutions and modern legal codes, the autonomous political subject and bearer of reason is associated with an individual which is implicitly gendered male (Thomas 2004:138-39). Today, as E.J. Hundert (1997:72-73) writes, any plausible account of self awareness must acknowledge the claim that an individualist mode of self-understanding is distinctive for contemporary Western cultures. 25

Material Knowledges interaction in limited, concrete locales to abstract, modern knowledge-making became a natural historical process. Thus, ideas about progress are grounded within ideas about space and time, assuming that

Bruno Latour (1993:91) writes that if science is seen as having a privileged access to nature then the knowledge constructed through this privileged position also allows the view that culture is demarcated, since those who are able to ‘see’ nature in its true form are also culturally exemplary. And, as he continues, a major achievement of our rational and modern view of the world is our ability to demarcate ourselves off from other cultures. Thus, the view is achieved that, although there are other innumerable cultures in the world, these cultures can all be set up in opposition to Western culture since only the West has a knowledge system – science – which directly represents nature (Latour 1993:100-104). This point lies at the very heart of rationalism, and Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan (2002:133-34) point out that the concept of abstract space in Europe emerged during the 17th century and was intertwined with the emergence of modern rationality. A consequence of the lack of reflection over this recently invented and problematic metaphor is that it has been taken for granted and treated as an expression of natural reality. Consequently, spatial distinctions related to mapping and geography, measurement and geometry, motion and physics, are parts of a taken-for-granted view of the world. By being represented as naturally given and universal, indigenous world views concerning, for example, relationships between people and landscape, have been represented in particular ways back to the West, and may thereby have been radically transformed in its spatial image (L.T. Smith 1999:50-51).

there was a ‘point in time’ that was ‘prehistoric’. The point at which society moves from prehistoric to historic is also the point at which tradition breaks with modernism. Traditional indigenous knowledge ceased, in this view, when it came into contact with ‘modern’ cultures (L.T. Smith 1999:55)

In order to develop a perspective for studies of the social dynamics and materiality of households which avoids the potential dangers represented by these three problems with the Western archive, attention may be directed towards the human body. As Biernacki and Jordan writes about the concept of space in the study of the social, following Foucault’s (1977) underpinning of the human subject as constituted by and inseparable from the spatial instruments of specific locales, even universalistic philosophy remains dependent for its meaning on the material context of these locales. In other words, abstract ideals in a particular social context come to life through living bodies (Biernacki and Jordan 2002:142-44).

3.3

A theoretical perspective

On the basis of the foregoing discussion, the following is a presentation of a theoretical framework for archaeological understanding which particularly emphasizes the human body’s relation to its surroundings: as part of social practice, the body’s various aspects of personhood and its intimate relationship to the material world.

Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997a:1, 1997b:3334) write that a key conceptual move during the early years of the 20th century was the idea of the world as a diversity of separate societies. This made it possible to speak of ‘a culture’ – an individual entity which was typically associated with ‘a people’, ‘a tribe’ or ‘a nation’. This entity provided the theoretical basis for cross-cultural comparison, as well as the framework for ethnographic description. The often implicit view of the world as a mosaic of separate cultures rests on an unproblematic ‘natural’ division of space. This “assumed isomorphism of space, place and culture” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997b:43) should be seen in close relation to notions of time, development and history, as was discussed in the foregoing chapter for the critique of the CCP (see 2.1), and viewed against the background of the emergence of the metaphor of abstract space. Usually, time is conceived as existing in an independent way and slowly moving forward in a lineal sequence. “Time, like space”, writes Håkan Karlsson (2001:47) “is conceived as something natural; that goes without saying”. Lineal understanding of both space and time enabled early 20th century social scientists like Emile Durkheim (1982; see also Ingold 2000:194-98; Lucas 2005:61-71), to divide between traditional, non-voluntary action in place, where thinking is bound up with local categories, on the one hand and voluntary action in abstract spaces, where thinking calls upon universal categories, on the other. As Biernacki and Jordan (2002:141-42) point out, these key components of Western science and philosophy required a notion of history where the development from social

Embodied social practice The Western tradition of philosophical humanism has distinguished human beings by their rationality, consciousness, morality and as subject to perception and action. By thinking of humans as self-subsistent atoms that enter into relationships with other human beings, society becomes a form of contract, freely entered into by autonomous individuals. It implies that human beings can exist independently before they enter into social relations with others, and sometimes that they may have some form of essential identity (race, ethnicity) that precedes political articulation (see Thomas 2004:100103, 129-135). The idea of a presocial, individual self that enters into a social contract made the thinking subject’s mind into the essence of humankind, and privileged as a nonmaterial site of identity and placed in opposition to the body (Joyce 2004:82; Thomas 2004:129, 133). René Descartes’ well-known formulation “I think, therefore I am” became a fundamental statement for human being. Consequently, in European philosophical and religious reasoning a person has come to consist of the mind, the soul and the body. The mind is where reason is, the soul is the enduring aspect of the person with spiritual overtones, 26

When knowledges meet and the body is simply the material location of mind and soul (C. Fowler 2004:11-12).

identity or loci of struggle (Strathern and Lambek 1998:6; Lambek 1998:112).

This notion of a presocial or precultural self by the separation of mind and body is considered a harmful myth because it becomes a variation of the relationship between nature and culture. As Haraway formulates it, “the universalized natural body is the gold standard for hegemonic discourse” (Haraway quoted in Strathern and Lambek 1998:14). Calls for alternatives have emphasized the need to start from a critical and dialectical approach which rests on two interrelated premises: that the body is socially mediated and that society is informed by the bodily practices of its members (see e.g. Strathern and Lambek 1998:7, 14). Such approaches acknowledge that people are born into a society, are educated by it, and their ‘selves’ are formed by constant interaction with fellow humans and the material environments in which the interaction takes place. In other words, the self is a function of the interplay of history, social conditioning and the behaviour of the individual person (Hacking 2000:1416). This necessitates the association between human identity and experience. Foucault (1991:36) writes that experience is “something constructed, which exists only after it has been made, not before”. Identity is shaped through experience, and identity thereby becomes a process in which the individual subject continually changes. Experience defines the way in which a person is subject to someone else and the manner in which she is tied to her own identity through self-knowledge (Gupta and Ferguson:1997a:12-19).

A provocative theoretical development in archaeology in recent years has been the use of phenomenology. According to Joanna Brück (2005:45), insights from this particular branch of philosophical thought have been employed in two main ways: as a source of critical reflection on Cartesian rationalism and as a heuristic tool to aid in the interpretation of material remains of the past. Perhaps in particular the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl has been discussed in some detail. Studies of embodiment (e.g. Csordas 1990, 1999) have become a central part of contemporary explorations of experience and subjectivity in the social sciences, and postprocessual archaeologists have found it increasingly necessary to clarify the assumptions they make in moving from theorizing perception to attempting to understand experience (Joyce 2005:141). However, some critics have pointed out that the embodiment paradigm, far from collapsing the Cartesian dualism, actually serves to reproduce it (see e.g. Ingold 2000:168-71), and others (e.g. Gosden 1996; Weiner 1996; Brück 2005:45) have questioned the extent to which descriptions of the character of human experience specific to the modern Western world can illuminate the difference of past societies. According to Michael Lambek (1998), the mistake of Cartesianism lies not in its dualism of mind and body per se, but in trying to rationalize the boundary between them. We tend to suggest that the dualism is a particularly Western problem. However, Lambek argues, body/mind or body/person distinctions are widespread and probably even universal. The point is that they need not take the same form, be divided in the same manner, or reach the same proportions or significance as the Western Cartesian version. And effort to depict a prerationalized seamless embodied world of practice risk, at best, a serious romanticization of non-Western cultures. In other words, what ‘mind’ and ‘body’ refer to are fundamental tensions of human experience, for example between subjective and objective, reason and sensation, morality and desire, being and becoming, active and passive, transient and enduring, male and female, life and death. When articulated as mind and body, Lambek writes, “these oppositions and concerns may appear specific to Western metaphysics. However, there are roughly similar sets of terms addressing roughly similar oppositions, though not necessarily all of them at once, characteristic of the thought of other traditions” (Lambek 1998:107).

In archaeology, an emphasis on the body and experience has brought attention to the exploration of ancient subjectivities and their agency, at least since the beginning of postprocessualism in the early 1980s (Hodder 1992; see Joyce 2004:82). Rather than merely identifying individuals, postprocessualism moved towards introducing the individual into social theory. Processual archaeologists were criticised for an overriding emphasis on structures and systems binding people into particular behaviours. Bourdieu’s (1977, 1989, 1990) theory of practice and concept of habitus, as well as Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration and the duality of structure, were important parts for a rethinking of archaeology’s use of concepts like person, individual, society and social actor (Shanks 2005:241). Sociologically informed approaches are dialectical; by focusing on situated practice and on how persons and ongoing social processes are actively constituted, society becomes embodied and, conversely, human bodily activities are culturally mediated, hence infused with ‘mind’. Bodily action is critical to the constitution of the perceiving and thinking person, which makes the processes contextually specific. The embodiment of persons and personification of bodies are processes which are highlighted differently in different places. Consequently, different moments in the ongoing processes become objectified and singled out for cultural attention, as core symbols, foci of power, vehicles of

Lambek’s argument is influenced by Maurice MerleauPonty (1962). Merleau-Ponty was, like e.g. Heidegger, concerned to reverse the ontological priorities of Cartesian rationalism (Ingold 2000:169), and Lambek (1998:120) argues that our task is to view the human body as an endlessly productive dialectic of the always ongoing constitution of experience, society and culture. 27

Material Knowledges For Beauvoir, then, the question is not how someone of any sex becomes a woman, but what values, norms, and demands the female human being – precisely because she is female – comes up against in her encounter with the Other (society). In order to understand what it means for the individual woman, we must investigate her concrete lived experience (Moi 1999:79)

However, a philosopher who also shared this ontological concern, but with an explicit focus on the female body, was Simone de Beauvoir (1989). In her reading of Beauvoir, Toril Moi points out the convergences to Merleau-Ponty: To Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, the body is our perspective on the world, and at the same time that body is engaged in a dialectical interaction with its surroundings, that is to say with all the other situations in which the body is placed. The way we experience – live – our bodies is shaped by this interaction. The body is a historical sedimentation of our way of living in the world, and of the world’s way of living with us (Moi 1999:68)

How may this ontology inform an understanding of the interaction between people and the material world in a manner that takes the considerations of meetings between present and past knowledge systems into account? As Laurie Wilkie and Katherine Hayes write, the concept of personhood seems particularly suited for realizing the potential of archaeologies informed by feminist critique. Personhood is a way of conceptualizing actors as the sum of their ascribed and achieved status, and provides an important alternative to the Western notion of the autonomous and independent individual. What defines a woman as a person varies greatly from culture to culture, and the cultural responsibilities and obligations of personhood shifts through an actors’ embodied experience (Wilkie and Hayes 2006:254). For this reason, argues Chris Fowler (2004:19, 38-39) consideration is needed of how bodies were produced and the practices that generated and revealed these bodies throughout their entire lifecycle. And, importantly, while these practices operate through the human body, the metaphors and principles entailed also permeate the material world. For, as ethnographers have demonstrated, the specific practices and technologies involved in people’s engagement with their surroundings do not necessarily individuate a person, nor promote any form of individuality. Rather, positions of personhood may change as one move through successive relationships of exchange, and these positions may be occupied by humans, animals and things alike.

Lived experience and the body as situation Archaeological interest in the human body has been closely linked to archaeologies of sex and gender. As a variation of the nature/culture divide sex has been maintained as the reference to biological characteristics, while gender emphasized a social or cultural construction. In effect, the two notions have referred to a distinction between biological and social aspects of the person (for discussion see e.g. Gilchrist 1999:9-16; Stig Sørensen 2000:41-59). The sex/gender debate has generated crucial insights (for a recent overview, see e.g. Carsten 2004). An example is the argument that sex is inextricably linked to Western cultural construction, and thereby dominated by the notion of a presocial self (Collier and Yanagisako 1987). Other examples include researchers influenced by Foucault who have rejected that gender is a constructed add-on to sexual identity, arguing that female bodies are not givens. Figuring prominently among these, Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) model dissolves the sex/gender distinction by arguing that they are mutually constituted through the repeated enactment of appropriate performance (see also Busby 2000). However, as Janet Carsten (2004:66) observes, in their various renditions, the terms of the sex/gender debate always seem to refer to an inescapable distinction between biology and culture. Similarly, Moi finds that the trouble with the distinction is that it upholds the ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ view of the body as the ground on which gender is developed (Moi 1999:73). Refusing to break it into an objective and a subjective component, Moi turns to Beauvoir’s (1989) concept of the body as situation. Beauvoir’s attention is on the concrete body experienced as meaningful, and socially and historically situated. In this manner, a situation is not an external structure that imposes itself on the individual subject, but a crucial part of lived experience. Significantly, Beauvoir claims that although our lived experience encompasses bodily sexual difference, it is also built up by many other things that per se have nothing to do with sexual difference. By this, Beauvoir does not deny that our biology fundamentally shapes the human world. But this is not the same as reducing social life to biological facts:

Humans and their surroundings: an ontology Material culture provides evidence of the distinctive form of a society. And it provides this evidence because it is an integral part of what that particular society is; just as the individual cannot be understood independently from society, so society cannot be grasped independently of its material stuff (Dant 1999:2). The ways in which material interests have crossed disciplines recently suggest value in enquires that emphasize the fundamental importance of things in the making of social relationships and of materiality for the reproduction of society (Geismar and Horst 2004:5-6). Material culture is not merely passive reflections of human interaction. And when relationships between the material world of households and their inhabitants – between dwellings and dwellers – become the main focus of attention, the active engagement with materiality is perhaps of particular significance. Archaeological discourse reveals an increasing appreciation of the potentially deeply intertwined 28

When knowledges meet understanding social life. And the dialectic between humans and things, their co-existence (Meskell 2005b:46) and the binding qualities which materiality allows for, relates to the idea of objects as having social lives (e.g. Appadurai 1986; Gosden and Marshall 1999) and grounded in the same conditions of existence as human beings are through their life cycles (Gilchrist 2000, 2004). Thus, the understanding of the concept of reflexivity will in the following discussion be in accordance with Miller’s formulation:

relationships between the life histories of human beings and material culture, by an emphasis on the intimacy between lived experience and things. The influence is especially evident from the works of Latour (1993, 1999, 2004, 2005), Alfred Gell (1992, 1998) and Ingold (2000) in recent discourse, and figure prominently in the articulation of what is termed a ‘symmetrical archaeology’ (e.g. Olsen 2003, 2007; Whitmore 2007). However, as Daniel Miller (2005:38) points out, having dethroned culture and society, it makes little sense in enthroning objects and materialism in their place. It is therefore important to emphasize the aspects of dialectics and mutuality. As Latour writes, it is “not the empty claim that object do things ‘instead’ of human actors”, but rather “that no science of the social can even begin if the question of who and what participates in the action is not first of all thoroughly explored – even though it might mean to letting elements in which, for lack of a better term, we would call nonhumans” (Latour 2005:72, orig. emphasis). Informed by decades of archaeological engagement with sociological theory, we know that there are aspects of reflexivity potentially to be captured in our studies of social dynamics in specific dwelling contexts. And, in addition, it is increasingly acknowledged that our notion of reflexivity in understanding past social life should not only concern the relationship between the individual and the larger society, but also be taken to include that between people and the material world.

It is not just that objects can be agents; it is that practices and their relationships create the appearance of both subjects and objects through the dialectics of objectification, and we need to be able to document how people internalize and then externalize the normative. In short, we need to show how the things that people make, make people (Miller 2005:38)

This reflexivity is important when it comes to making sense of diachronic variability in archaeological material, of how to understand social change. The point of departure in this work, following Olsen (2007), is that the features associated with historical change, the attributes connected with some form of development, were all made possible by humans increasingly extending themselves in intimate relations with nonhumans. However, these entities did not just sit in silence waiting to be constituted by meaning. Rather, landscapes and things possess their own qualities which they brought into our cohabitation with them. The qualities of soil, water, metals etc. were swapped with those of humans (Olsen 2007:586). In short, something different always comes out of the intimacy between humans and nonhumans than what was brought into the relationships.

Nonetheless, there seems to be an opposition between culture and materiality in many archaeological narratives. Bjørnar Olsen writes that studies of materiality should have as a premise that physical entities are beings in the world alongside other beings, such as humans, plants and animals. They all share substance and a membership in a dwelt-in world (Olsen 2003:88). By placing things and people within the same web of connections and obligations we see the close relationship between them as governed by the same conditions of existence (e.g. Gosden 2005a). Within familiarized environments the intimacies between human and nonhuman entities through embodied lived experience (Thévenot 2001) enables an emphasis on things as ways of extending ourselves in the world, acquiring knowledge about and changing it (Tilley 1999:34-35). Objects become a unity with the subject as an extension of the same (Jensen 2000:59) in a process where the body ‘unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis” (Merleau-Ponty 1968:136).

Concluding remarks This chapter has discussed an epistemological standpoint firmly placed within postprocessual archaeology, of which the combination of an understanding of situated knowledge and Africanist philosophers’ critique of the concept of rationality forms a significant part. Also, an ontology with the aim of arriving at a specific approach to the social that include intimate interaction with the material world has been emphasized; a symmetrical approach to humans and nonhumans that accommodates different knowledge systems, differing rationalities in relation to the material world. The following chapter seeks to integrate this theoretical perspective in a methodological approach.

This underscores the relevance of intimacy (cf. Fredriksen 2007) between humans and nonhumans for

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PART II Methodology and Material-Culture Studies Each chapter consists of two main parts. While the first discusses the potters and relevant aspects of social dynamics in household space on the basis of a combination of ethnographic literature and this author’s own field observations, the second part follows clay and pots through their various stages of production and use. The objective of each chapter is to arrive at an understanding of specific spheres in household space deemed particularly significant to social practice involving clay. Part II ends with a comparative discussion of similarities and differences between the three field studies, thereby preparing the ground for the interpretations of archaeological material associated with the Moloko ceramic sequence in Part III.

While Part I has established a theoretical framework for further analysis, Part II will seek to accommodate the framework into an approach for studies of clay practice in household space. Chapter 4 discusses and concludes with a specific methodology for the approach, which is implemented in the field studies comprising chapters 5 to 7. In turn, the data obtained by following the approach will inform the interpretations of archaeological settlement material in Part III. In order to obtain the aim for Part II (see 1.3), the focus of all three field studies is the relationship between social practice involving clay and household spatiality. A similar chapter structure is chosen for chapters 5 to 7. This is meant to facilitate comparison of the studies.

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4.

APPROACHING HOUSEHOLD INTIMACY

Just as the places and meanings people construct influence subsequent actions in the world, people’s ongoing actions continue to construct and reconstruct spatial meanings (Robin 2002:262)

analytical scale (e.g. Mitchell 2002:282-84; see also 2.1 and 2.3), it demonstrates, as Andah (1995:159) observed, that even studies of African thought and action that are well intended and broadly conceived has an outcome that is often essentializing and reductive. The CCP, which “emphasises the underlying principles that give order to society”, is thereby “not designed to investigate the detail of daily behaviour and dynamics”, and “has to subsume such differences in order to extract the common underlying principles” (Huffman 2001:24). This appropriation of space is the kind of situation where “the principles underlying indigenous customs are pressed into categories derived from Western social reality” (Andah 1995:159), and means that lived-in environments as spheres of experience and interaction are downplayed, and even disappear altogether. Somewhat paradoxically, while aspects of social life like bodily experience and interaction between household members are important in order to formulate underlying principles, these complex dynamics are mere representations of static and ahistoric oppositions.

Recently, considerable archaeological attention has been given to the concepts of space, spatiality and place (e.g. MacEachern 2002; Robin and Rothschild 2002; Blake 2004; Lake 2007). Cynthia Robin emphasizes intimate human-space relationships and how cultural meanings are constructed and altered through these always ongoing intimacies. By rejecting notions of space as passive backdrop or merely container for action, spaces are emphasized as coming into being as they are lived, constructed and experienced by people, rather than viewed as something abstracted from human lives. This understanding is an alternative to universalist theoretical positions by its articulation of a point of departure for investigation in contextually specific case studies where people, places and meanings are constructed, inhabited and experienced (Robin 2002:248).

4.1

The mutual becoming of people and things

In the following chapter the perspective on meetings between knowledge systems is sought rendered into an approach for archaeological interpretation of dwelling spaces. Specifically, an approach is developed that addresses the three problematic legacies of the Western knowledge archive (see 3.2): the nature/culture divide, the static view of space where it is divorced from time and the understanding of cultural change. With these considerations in mind, how may an approach be articulated that allows for both an understanding of material knowledges from present-day ethnographic contexts, while also enabling these knowledges to inform a diachronic framework for archaeological interpretation of past material remains? For the study of clay practices in household space, it is this author’s opinion that such an approach requires particular attention to the intersecting trajectories of human bodies, clay and ceramics and other members of the household material world. As will be shown, fire figures prominently among these material members.

As an alternative, it is argued here that culturally specific rationalities should be approached at the level of household space, and in a manner that takes the problematic legacies of universalist Western thinking into consideration. As Patricia Davison wrote more than two decades ago, material culture “carries meaning not in a mechanistic, generalized structuralist sense but in being one of the means through which social and material relations are perpetuated and transformed by members of society” (Davison 1988:101). And, it should be added, these members include both humans and nonhumans in dwelling space. For the southern African context in particular, a specific attention to culturally specific rationalities includes the discussion of concepts like substance and thermodynamic thinking. As will be demonstrated in the field studies comprising chapters 5 to 7, these rationalities are specific to cultural context, while also displaying similarities that allow for comparison and contrast. Given the emphasis on fire, heat transformations and hearth-centred activities, the location of fireplaces in relation to other aspects of household materiality and to social interaction is a dominant feature. The objective of developing this spatial framework is to enable comparison between fieldwork observations in present-day household contexts and archaeological settlement material, thereby enabling the former to facilitate interpretation of the latter.

Given the research history for settlement space in southern African archaeology, where the CCP and the ‘direct historical approach’ (see 2.1) occupy a dominant position in the debate, the problems of structuralist thought in relation to the three Western knowledge legacies are discussed in particular. Criticized for being “a timeless entrapment in a cognitive structure that has allowed no significant change” (M. Hall 2005:184), structuralist approaches exemplify the kind of appropriation of space made by a Western universalist view of knowledge, whereby archaeological explanation and understanding subsume contextual variation, and we are left with limited ability to understand cultural change arising from other factors than large-scale external forces (e.g. Lane 2005:33). While this is clearly also an issue of

This chapter has three main components. First, it discusses the concept of technology through the archaeological discourse relating to its sub-discipline ethnoarchaeology, or material-culture studies, in order to arrive at a life history approach. Secondly, the life 31

Material Knowledges other studies. While there is clearly no direct analogical relationship between the Other of the present and the Other constructed for the past, and both analogical reasoning and ethnoarchaeology might be difficult to defend on methodological criteria, Oestigaard emphasizes that these practices and processes are inevitably connected and still necessary to any form of interpretative, postprocessual archaeology. From an epistemological point of view, the same problem of analogy persists regardless of whether ethnographic data, sociological data and theories, philosophy or any other form of knowledge are used. On this background, Oestigaard suggests to abandon the term ethnoarchaeology, with its links to processual archaeology’s view of culture and a positivist ontology, and instead focus on studies of materiality in its widest sense: as the lifeworld of people, including all forms of materiality constituting this lifeworld, regardless of whether material elements are made by humans or not, under the heading of ‘material-culture studies’. This is in line with Miller and Tilley’s definition:

histories of clay and pots will be intertwined with human biographies and social dynamics located in household space. Finally, the insights from the two foregoing explorations will be combined into a spatial approach to household interaction between humans and nonhumans. Knowledge systems and material-culture studies To study relationships between people and material culture in present social contexts has in archaeology traditionally most often been associated with the subdiscipline of ethnoarchaeology. As Nick David and Carol Kramer (2001:6-13, table 1.1) write, ethnoarchaeology is primarily a research strategy in order to provide ethnographic analogies to assist in the interpretation of archaeological data. However, as David and Kramer (2001:54-62) discuss in detail, ethnoarchaeological research raises fundamental epistemological and ethical questions (e.g. Gosden 1999, 2005a:100; Lane 1996, 2006a, 2006b; Haaland et al. 2004). The problematization of such meetings between the narratives of modern, Western science and other forms of knowledge forms the background for discussion within postprocessual archaeology of the theoretical and methodological framework for approaching the various sources used in the process of interpretation. The debate thereby also includes consideration of archaeology’s relationship to oral tradition and ethnohistory (e.g. Tonkin 1992; Morantz 1998; Damm 2005, 2006; Lane 2006a), and the scope and potential of historical archaeology (e.g. Reid and Lane 2004; Gilchrist 2005; Pikirayi 2006; P. Schmidt 2006).

The study of material culture may be most broadly defined as the investigation of the relationship between people and things irrespective of time and space. The perspective adopted may be global or local, concerned with the past or the present, or the mediation between the two (Miller and Tilley 1996:5)

An important reason for following Oestigaard’s suggestion is the emphasis on a shift in understanding of culture, and thereby what is to be compared; that such studies, as Oestigaard (2004:29-30) points out, should pay attention to the interrelatedness of culture and nature. They are not to be viewed as opposing categories, but as different interaction spheres. Without including the entire lifeworld of people in archaeological analysis it becomes difficult to grasp the relevant factors involved in order to understand how material culture actively constitutes culture, perception and the world in which people exist.

Critical to the objectives of ethnoarchaeology, GonzalezRuibal (2006a:110-11, 121) writes that its construction of the Other differs from ethnography in eliciting the construction of the Other twice over: An Other in the present becomes a way of envisioning an Other in the past. However, as seen in the opening of chapter 1, Gonzalez-Ruibal also acknowledges that since nonWestern societies may not have established the same conceptions and divisions found in modernist thinking, lessons may be learnt about deep relations between humans and things that cannot be received elsewhere. This means that insights from ethnoarchaeological studies, and criticism voiced against certain underlying simplistic assumptions within the sub-discipline, are of potential importance to further development of theories of material culture (Gosden 2005b:100).

Regardless of preferred label, an arena for social agency and interaction where studies within the sub-discipline have contributed to important insights into the relationship between people and the material world is technology. As David Killick (2002:348-49) writes, social constructionist approaches to technological change have found their explanations in the social, political and economic structures of society, and in the ways that individuals and groups negotiate their relationship to these broader structures.

With reference to Chris Gosden’s (1999:9) argument that the practice of ethnoarchaeology is immoral insofar as it implicitly carries with it the colonial notion that present indigenous culture is simply used to interpret the past of another, Terje Oestigaard (2004:24-25) writes that hardly any ethnoarchaeological studies today are conducted with this purpose, and most often it is the critics who require ethnoarchaeologists to demonstrate the archaeological relevance of their ethnographic study. Largely confident in their emphasis on material culture, ethnoarchaeologists argue for the relevance of each study in its own right, and also as a source of inspiration to 32

Approaching household intimacy “technology is the social practice and the process-ing of the material world: it is an ever unfolding and intersubjective dynamic that is not reducible to the activities of artefact making and use” (Dobres 2000:96, orig. emphases).

Understanding technology The novice becomes skilled not through the acquisition of rules and representations, but at the point where he or she is able to dispense with them. They are like the map of an unfamiliar territory, which can be discarded once you have learned to attend to features in the landscape, and can place yourself in relation to them. The map can be a help in beginning to know the country, but the aim is to learn the country, not the map (Ingold 2000:415)

Consequently, studies of materiality should engage in the dialectic of people and things, which may be seen as a co-presence. Matter and object exist as a set of cultural relationships which are temporally, spatially and socially specific (Meskell 2005b:4-6), and the binding qualities that materiality allows for connect to the understanding of objects as having biographies or social lives (e.g. Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Hoskins 1998; Gosden and Marshall 1999). An important notion here is that objects may acquire a wide range of meanings, both during manufacture and during subsequent life stages, as they pass through the hands of various people and become embedded in different social strategies and networks. This notion may be extended to chaînes opératoires, or production sequences (Gosselain 2000:189), where every step in a technological process may become the locus of symbolic discourse and relate to various cultural pressures (Gosselain 1999).

Ingold’s analogy relates to his critique of what he calls the ‘standard view’ of technology. This view implies a pre-existing form in the maker’s mind, which is simply impressed upon a material. According to Ingold, the assumption of such a division between mental form and material substance has laid at the back of the minds of many anthropologists and archaeologists when speaking of artefacts as material culture: attention has almost entirely been on cultural meaning and its various forms. Consequently, culture becomes opposed to materiality. Meaning and social value come to inhabit the collective consciousness, and “culture wraps itself around the universe of material things, shaping and transforming their outward surfaces without ever penetrating their interiority” (Ingold 2000:340-41).

Thus, technology is understood as webs of social and material transformation which are always in the act of becoming. Over the course of their lives people live through a variety of experiences which transform their very existence, much as artefacts are transformed into culturally meaningful products and tools through their life histories. What necessarily links the material and the symbolic into a holistic experience, then, writes Dobres (2000:97-98, 149), are the social relations in which both materials and people are made, and made sense of. In this manner, while making up the physicality of the everyday, familiar objects may at the same time be instrumental in mediating between the mental and the physical (Attfield 2000:9).

The modernist attitude towards technology as instrumental, cold and inhuman has generated the powerful notion that freedom is that which escapes the material. The problem of the fetish runs deep in modernity; the making into a thing is the worst thinkable fate for a person or a social relation, and social relations are reserved for humans only (Olsen 2003:94). For example, Latour (1999, 2004, 2005), points out the continued identification with Enlightenment thought and separation between humans and nonhumans, when objects should instead be viewed as co-producers of society (Meskell 2005b:4-5). When emphasizing relationships that include both humans and nonhumans one opens for what Olsen (2003:87) calls “a fundamental ontological inquiry”, where it is asked how the material world “relate to human beings and what generally is thought of as ‘social life’”. Similarly, Alfred Gell (1998:17-19) made the point that the immediate Other in a social relationship does not have to be a human being. Social agency may be exercised relative to and also by things and/or animals.

Adopting a life history approach, social practice in households involving clay will here not be viewed only as consisting of the various operational sequences for making ceramic vessels up to the point when they are fired. Pots will also be followed through the stages in their life histories subsequent to the firing. And in addition, as will be demonstrated in the example from the Tswana world in chapter 6 in particular (see 6.1), the cultural connotations to the making and use of pots may be inextricably linked to those of another form of clay containers, namely houses. In the following, therefore, the concept of clay practice refers to all forms of embodied social practice (see 3.3) that include engagement with clay. Particular emphasis will be laid on practice unfolding in household spaces, but also engagements with materiality taking place at the clay sources and the movement of clay from source to household will be taken into account, as the strategies employed in extraction and transport are informative for clay practices within households. On this basis, it is necessary to clarify what is understood by households,

How, then, should technology be defined? Following Marcia-Anne Dobres (2000:149-50, 162), the mutual becoming of people and things is also powerfully resonated in the perception of simultaneous transformation of materials and human bodies. The experiential basis of technological practice connects materials intimately with culturally specific social meanings because objects are made meaningful through the hands and minds of real physical bodies. Technologies are forms of social and material transformation where the social and the material each necessarily instantiates the other. In Dobres’ words, 33

Material Knowledges including the social dynamics and transformations of substances that are associated with dwelling spaces.

clarifications of the concepts of house and household are needed.

4.2

Houses and households

Household substances and social dynamics

While a house is an architectural unit representing structures for human habitation, a household is a social unit. But household activities are not confined to the internal spaces of the house; they also take place in external spaces, on a larger social arena. Therefore, the household may be seen as engaged with the architecture and materiality of the house, but not confined to its internal spaces (Oma 2007:228; cf. Tringham 1995; Allison 1999). Households provide the framework that gives ideas and activities coherence and grounding, linking houses both physically and conceptually to the human body (e.g. Comaroff 1985; Davison 1988; Kuckertz 1990; S. Hall 1998; Lane 1998a; McAllister 2004). They are “loci of dense webs of signification and affect and serve as basic cognitive models used to structure, think and experience the world” (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995:3). The household is an essential scale for the study of social relations and production, including gender relations (Tringham 1991:99), and an arena for social and economic relations that interact dynamically with the larger society. As Penelope Allison (1999:2) points out, it is important to keep in mind that a household is an ethnographic phenomenon, not an archaeological one. Households are increasingly conceptualized as comprising multiple actors at different stages in life course, occupying different sexual identities and personhood. As sites for cultural reproduction, interaction and negotiation, there is a growing interest in the ways that materiality is used recursively to construct and contest identities within and between households. By illuminating the diversity of lived experiences that characterized the past (Wilkie and Hayes 2006:250-52), studies of household space may offer valuable insight into how households were altered by their interaction with other households, communities and larger forms of political control (Hendon 1996:50, 2004:278).

What makes a house a house? Is it its spatial layout, its physical structure as a building, the rituals which are enacted in it and which are part of the process of building? Or is it the social significance of the house, an aspect of the quality and types of relations of the people who live within it and of the activities which they engage in there? (Carsten 1997:33)

As was pointed out in the final section of chapter 2, the household should be viewed as providing a dialectical framework between the big world and the small world of intimate relations. A central argument for Souvatzi (2008) is that a social archaeological approach to household is particularly crucial to an interpretative theory of social organization as a dialectical, historical and dynamic process. In this way the household can also serve as a common frame of reference, a point of dialogue between archaeology and its related disciplines. According to Souvatzi (2008:25-29), studies of household may be divided into two main groups of approaches, social and ideational. Social approaches typically emphasize the processes which produce built space (e.g. Smith and David 1995). Primary focus is on the action, strategies and conduct of everyday life for the inhabitants, and approaches have emerged under various labels, including ‘agency’, ‘action’, ‘practice’ and ‘structuration’ theories. The theoretical interest in ‘agents embedded in structures’ (Lesure 2004:73), is widely shared, and the structure/agency debate is central (e.g. Dobres and Robb 2000; Barret 2001). Archaeological practice-based approaches have found their principal theoretical sources of inspiration in Bourdieu and Giddens, with their emphasis on the significance of daily, repetitive practice for the materialization and socialization of human behaviour. Ideational approaches, on the other hand, focus primarily on symbolism and ideology as cultural phenomena. Conceptions of the ontology of the house, the perception of it as a symbol of the self and the intimate relationship between house and body are frequently found. Also, house and settlement as providing cosmological maps, thereby serving to naturalize the social relations which they order (e.g. Gillespie 2000), is a dominant theme. And, as Souvatzi (2008:26-27) also points out, the general influence of all the ‘ideational’ ideas is evident in the archaeological construction of narratives of houses and landscapes as media for a complex of symbolic structures, cosmological principles and systems of classification.

Personhood and substance How may the theoretical perspective outlined towards the end of chapter 3 be methodologically accommodated within an explicit approach to households? More specifically, how may the notions of lived experience and the body as situation and the ontology emphasizing the intimacy between lived bodily experience and the material word (see 3.3) be integrated into an interpretational framework for both present-day ethnographic contexts and archaeological settlement material? By viewing households as belonging to the ‘regime of familiarity’ (cf. Thévenot 2001), they become changing arenas for bodily practice and lived experience. Diachronic changes to the material characteristics and distribution of artefacts in households spaces may be seen as alterations in the intimately experienced meanings associated with material objects and the built environment. This view allows one to focus on and to

The analyses of archaeological settlement remains in Part III contain influences from both these groups of approaches (see 8.4 and 9.5). Before outlining a specific methodology for the study of dwelling spaces, however,

34

Approaching household intimacy contextualize the relationship between e.g. houses, ceramic containers and experiencing human bodies.

Hearths and heat transformations Hearths are obvious sources of physical sustenance, but they are also often the symbolic focus of the house, loaded with the imagery of the commensal unity of close kin. Houses are material shelters as well as ritual centres. Their very everydayness both suggests the importance of what goes on within their walls and also makes it liable to be dismissed as familiar and mundane (Carsten 2004:55)

The term substance accommodates a wide range of nonWestern meanings that include bodily matter, essence and different degrees of fluidity. A blurring of distinctions may be underlined, and the term is analytically fruitful for the study of persons, bodies and their relationships (Carsten 2004:131-32). The notion of the largely indivisible individual in Western modernity has wide-reaching implications for how bodily substances are understood. Here, generative substances are transmitted through reproduction alone, people related by ‘blood’, and these blood-lines are metaphorically understood as family trees. This reckoning of descent in a unilineal manner is by Ingold (2000:136) called a genealogical model of relatedness. Such linearity of relations does not allow for much engagement between living and deceased members of society, nor for the revisiting of past relations (C. Fowler 2004:106). Within non-Western rationalities, on the other hand, generative substances are not transmitted between generations biologically but exchanged between the various differing entities that are incorporated into society at any time (Ingold 2000:144-46). Consequently, the deceased are not fully removed from society, and interaction with all beings is dialogic. This means that substances, energies and knowledges may be transmitted from other sources than the living, and in other ways than through reproduction. Coupled with an understanding of personhood as continuous processes of transformation for nonhumans as well as for human bodies, it may be focused on relationships that include both. Nonhuman bodies like pots and houses are not to be seen, therefore, as mere representations of human bodies. Rather, as C. Fowler (2004:128) writes, they may be seen as “bodies produced through social activity and practice, and bodies with personhood can apply equally to animals, monuments, and even entire landscapes”.

While substances provides means to convey ideas about relationships between personhood and the material world through metaphoric transformation, a common feature for many non-Western rationalities is that activities such as feeding, living in houses and growing things in the soil might be seen to transform bodily substances. This makes it impossible to divorce a house from its inhabitants and the relationships within it. As Carsten points out, by exploring the everyday intimacies between those inhabiting the shared spaces, one sees that there is a “dense overlay of different experiential dimensions of living together in houses”, and this density “leads many people around the world (...) to assert that kinship is made in houses through the intimate sharing of space, food and nurturance” (Carsten 2004:35, orig. emphasis). Furthermore, since cooking and sharing of food is often the most emphasized activity in the house; the relationships between those living together may be expressed in terms of eating and bodily substances. Consequently, the symbolic focus is often the place of cooking. The hearth may stand in for the entire house and its inhabitants, and becomes a manner in which houses, bodies, relatedness and marriage may be expressed (Carsten 2004:37-44; Bloch 1995; Haaland 1995, 1997, 1999, 2006). The centrality of fireplaces for dwelled-in spaces is closely connected to their transformation of substances through heat. The emphasis on hearths as transformational foci is of importance in approaching human/nonhuman interaction in household spaces.

For substances with generative qualities this means that they are not just circulated between human bodies but can be found contained in the bodies of buildings, objects, plants and animals. Various beings may be connected by their similarity in substance transformation, and through such transformation the same metaphorical concepts may link together humans and nonhumans (see also 9.1). The same logic can apply to transactions at all scales and across all entities. Such metaphoric links are inseparable from the social technologies that are fundamental to any particular society, including food production (C. Fowler 2004:1068).

4.3

Approaching human/nonhuman interaction

The aim of this final chapter section is to develop a specific methodological framework for approaching the relevant human interactions and material trajectories, especially connected to clay and fire, in household space. Concurrently, the discussion seeks to establish the methodology as an alternative that takes the three problematic legacies of the Western knowledge archive into account. In order to achieve this, a first important step is to present the main tenets of a thermodynamic philosophy in sub-Saharan Africa. Thermodynamic ways of thinking form a background against which to understand the use of household space for clay practices and the logics of transformation of substances in social life.

35

Material Knowledges As Olivier Gosselain (1999:211-12, 220) writes, African examples of the thermodynamic link between human production or reproduction and the process of making pottery are many. However, the link to the material world probably also pervades otherwise contrasting realms of human experience (cf. Heusch 1980, 1982), and most likely belongs to a wider and dynamic system where it connects to other materials (e.g. iron, food) and other metaphors than merely hot/cold (e.g. dry/humid, hard/soft), or take unpredictable and even inverse forms. Importantly, the idea of a thermodynamic philosophy is thus compatible with cultural diversity both in space and time, in that it always enables a wide variety of social relations and material culture to ‘think with’ in thermodynamic ways.

A thermodynamic philosophy People living in different parts of the African continent share a thermodynamic logic which pervades a wide spectrum of activities, including hunting, warfare, food processing and various other technologies using fire, and initiation (Gosselain 1999:215). A defining characteristic is that, as a measure against social chaos and ambiguity, cosmic reproduction is dependent on and entangled in human reproduction (Odner 2000:71). Originally introduced by Luc de Heusch (1980, 1982), the concept of a thermodynamic philosophy refers to the sharing of an idea by otherwise differing African cultural rationalities, namely that in relation to human productive and reproductive capacity potentially polluting bodily states and actions are considered ‘hot’ while cleansing agents are ‘cool’. Thermodynamic symbolism is closely associated with the colour triad white/red/black. White and cooling substances – water, rain, semen – are fertile. Red and hot things – fire, lightning, blood – are dangerous and may lead to sterility and death. Black things are neither cool nor hot, and are associated with darkness, night clouds and coagulated blood. These are particularly important in medicine associated with ritual. Depending on the specific situation, black and white is opposed to red, or black and red to white (Kuper 1982:18). The colours are actively involved in ritual transitions and dangerous phases of liminality (Hammond-Tooke 1981:137; see Ngubane 1977:11379), and are, as discussed earlier, often found as decoration on pottery.

Weighted spaces and spheres of experience In seeking to integrate the three aspects from 4.2 – houses and households, personhood and substance, and hearths and heat transformations – into a specific methodology for approaching spaces within a thermodynamic philosophy, the three concepts of meeting points, weighted spaces (Oma 2007:163-226) and spheres of bodily experience will be applied. As part of household spatiality, hearths are understood as meeting points. Relationships between people and the material world may be seen as interactions in spatial locations within the life-space of houses. Meeting points consider the relationship of the architecture with the distributions of people, substances and material objects. At such points, the discursive quality of architecture is seen as a negotiation of the use of space. According to Kristin Oma, the meeting points “allow both contact and exchange, creating possibilities for spaces where processes leading to mutual becomings can take place” (Oma 2007:163; cf. Birke et al. 2004). By weighted spaces are meant the contextually specific differentiation of ‘weight’ laid on a certain space in the way it is used and thought of. Spaces are weighted, that is, given variable social significance, in terms of both tangible and intangible structures that control movement and lead to various socially and ritually differentiated locales. The movement through space, both by human and nonhuman household members, are bound up with culturally specific social classifications (Oma 2007:196; cf. Douglas 1966; Parker Pearson and Richards 1994; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). Finally, the combination of hearths as meeting points and other weighted spaces in households may together form spheres of experience.

Experience of the body as a container relating to a thermodynamic logic – hot and cool substances that must be kept in balance – is central to an understanding of associations between pots and people (e.g. David et al. 1988; Ndoro 1991, 1996; Collett 1993; E. Herbert 1993; Sterner 2003; Barndon 2004; Haaland 2004; Haaland et al. 2004; Warnier 2006, 2007; Fredriksen 2006, 2007), and has been substantiated on a comparative level for southern Africa (Evers and Huffman 1988). Among Bantu-speakers in this part of the continent, pottery is strongly associated with women (cf. Lawton 1967:5-6). And, within a gendered universe, the identity of the potter seems to be at the core of a belief system that leaves nothing to chance. Pollution ideas, taboos and avoidances are of crucial importance to understanding the ambivalent relationship between potting and human reproductivity (E. Herbert 1993:215). Breaching a taboo may affect all stages in the manufacturing process, and the widespread prohibitions concerning gender identity may manifest themselves by keeping men aside from the whole potting process in areas where the craft is a female activity. Or they are found in the form of the most frequently occurring prohibitions: for women to keep away from potting activities after sexual intercourse and during menstruation and pregnancy. And when gender is a main source to understand prohibitions, age – as related to sexual maturity and fertility – also becomes important (Gosselain 1999:209-10). Thus, the different stages in the life history of pots and the lived experience of the female body are deeply intertwined.

A reflexive methodology In the following three chapters a life history methodology for understanding clay and ceramic containers in relation to hearths as meeting points, weighted spaces and spheres of experience will be used, while at the same time being sensitive towards thermodynamic ways of thinking about household spaces. The intersecting trajectories (cf. Haaland et al. 2002) of people, clay and other material members of the 36

Approaching household intimacy household will be followed with particular attention to heat transformations and their associated social spaces.

The questionnaire was actively used and continuously refined, but functioned mostly as a general guideline and checklist during interviews, and as a way of ensuring an adequate degree of comparability between the three different studies. Although information concerning the fifth theme was collected to the same extent as the other four, the complexity of reuse, discard and deposit patterning, and the degree of variation between the cases, is found to deserve a more comprehensive treatise at a later stage. Thus, for the following chapters attention will be focused on the first four themes.

The life histories of clay and ceramic vessels may be seen as consisting of up to 11 stages: 

collecting



kneading and pounding



shaping body, neck and rim



decoration



closing base



drying



firing



storage before use



distribution and use in household space



reuse



discard

In the field the insights offered by David Suggs (2002), author of a recent ethnographic contribution concerning Botswana, were kept in mind. Especially his evaluation of the limitations and disadvantages of using prestructured interviews. In comparison to more informal interviews and discussion, any understanding is incomplete: My experience has now taught me that the rewards of greater flexibility in research design outweight the value of prestructured interviews, particularly when the research is a first effort toward understanding (Suggs 2002:18)

The main focus in all three studies is the relationship between social practice involving clay and household spatiality. For this reason, in the fieldwork presentations, stages in the temporally extended series of operations during manufacture are grouped together when they are found to take place in the same spaces. For example, it is common to find the decoration phase to consist of two separate operations: the patterning immediately after shaping and the application of colouring at a later stage when the vessel is drier and harder. And time for drying is allowed both before and after the closing of the base. In addition, burnishing occurs repeatedly between the various stages between shaping and firing.

In engaging in a context-dependent ethnography which is reflective of the desire for postcolonial field strategies to embrace a new politics of decolonized methodologies (L.T. Smith 1999:137-41; Meskell 2007:384), an understanding of reflexivity in meetings and interactions between knowledge systems should be emphasized. Following anthropologist John Clammer (2002:44), such a reflexive project seeks to contest and overcome the somatization inherent in Cartesian thinking, and not only the mind/body problem. Rather, and most importantly, argues Clammer, one should contest the continued prioritizing of the cognitive dimensions of knowledge over other possible dimensions. The priority given to the primarily somatized framework conceals a Western bias by favouring knowledge that is conscious, intentional and explicable through language. This is problematic for knowledges that are practical and material. As most nonWestern knowledges have a pragmatic foundation, they are contingent, less systematized and non-universal. Knowledge is often learnt and communicated through practical experience, and people are not necessarily familiar with expressing all that they know in words. Furthermore, one should keep in mind that an outsider employing foreign words and concepts may misconstrue that which he manages to comprehend about other’s views and actions (Sillitoe et al. 2005:22).

The fieldworks consisted of a combination of interviews and observations of the different stages in the life history of clay and pots4. A basic questionnaire was developed where questions were grouped into five themes: 1.

Potter and pots in social relationships and networks

2.

The spatial and temporal distribution of clay before firing

3.

Steps and choices made in the technological process

4.

People and manufactured pots in household spaces

5.

Secondary resuse, discard of pots, and the formation of deposits

The acknowledgement that knowledge emerges as a product of the interaction between different actors, that it is multilayered, and is sometimes fragmentary and diffuse rather than unitary and systematized (Long 1992:274), is an understanding of a fieldwork reality marked by unintended and unintentional consequences. Therefore, knowledge should be approached as a construction that results from a particular social context,

4 With the permission from each individual potter, clay samples were also collected from every source encountered. For reasons having to do with the potential of pollution (see 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1), it was preferred that the samples were dug out by the potter herself.

37

Material Knowledges in this chapter, the three following chapters 5 to 7 set out to account for and understand the rationales relating to clay and fire that in culturally specific ways adhere to a thermodynamic thinking – discussions where household members’ productive and reproductive capacity and their relationships to ancestors, substances and colours are central themes.

and seen as an outcome of interactions and interfaces that take place between different actors and their lifeworlds (Long 2001:179; Pottier 2003:16). As Kaphagawani and Malherbe (2003:226) point out in their discussion of the philosophical question of what criteria of judgement one should apply when different cultures meet, the outside observer from another culture can never know it as the insider does. In another sense, however, the people brought up in a certain tradition cannot see it. They are blind to it just because it is, for them; the only way things could possibly be.

Returning to this chapter’s opening remarks and the reference to Robins’ rejection of notions of human-space relations where space is defined as passive backdrop for human action; there is a need to contextualize clay practices and to see them in relation to the household spatiality in which they take place. Consequently, for the field studies there is a relative shift of attention from potting techniques per se, and the cultural pressures that relate to these, to a preoccupation with the lived-in spaces where people’s engagement with clay take place. While the various techniques for shaping and decoration and the specific symbolism of the various types of ceramic vessels are documented, which is in line with mainstream research traditions for ceramic field studies, the primary focus of attention here is on the relationship between female bodily experience and clay within the specific spatial settings where meetings and interactions that include both humans and nonhumans (material culture, substances, ancestors) take place.

Summary and concluding remarks With the debate over settlement space in southern African archaeology specifically in mind, it is argued here that an important strategy, in order to develop a methodological alternative to universalist claims of space, is to engage with non-Western knowledges and rationales. Specifically, various sub-Saharan societies’ different ways of thinking and acting according to a thermodynamic philosophy should be emphasized, resulting in that household spaces are ‘weighted’ differently depending on activity, especially when linked to various transformations of substance through heat. Dwelled-in spaces thereby form differentiated ‘spheres of experience’ according to the activities taking place there. Therefore, by employing the approach developed

38

5.

THE HEAT OF INTIMACY AND FUSION

To the Manyika, there is always the risk of fire when you gaze into another person’s eyes, touch his body or show what is inside your heart. Any kind of fire may flare up – love or hate, desire or aggression. Whatever the kind of fire, it is dangerous because it will abolish the boundary of distinction between the two personal units. The fusion of man and woman is particularly dangerous, and thus particularly hot (Jacobson-Widding 1989:39)

This passage from Jacobson-Widding’s exploration of notions of heat and fever among the Manyika Shona in Manicaland in eastern Zimbabwe introduces a main subject in the following chapter, which discusses fieldwork conducted in the neighbouring Mozambican province of Manica. The dangers involved in household members’ engagements with heat and fire, and the ‘hotness’ associated with the perceived fusion of cultural categories draw our attention to intimacies between people and their immediate material world which may be seen in close connection to clay practice, female bodily experience and the spatiality of households.

5.1

villages (Bourdillon 1987:57). A village homestead usually consists of three to four circular pole and daga houses, covered by a conical grass-thatched roof. Each house has its assigned function. It is typical to find a combined kitchen and sleeping hut for each wife, a sleeping house for the boys, a sleeping house for the girls and a granary. The granary is now often a square house with a pyramidical roof and a raised floor resting on a square stone setting. Normally there is a primary granary where the maize is kept before the corn is removed from the cob, as well as a chicken pen and pens for livestock. Anders Lindahl and Edward Matenga (1995:20) have observed that the situation is fast changing. For example, families with sufficient economic means now have a rectangular brick house as the main living unit, although they may incorporate more traditional components.

Clay and thermodynamic spaces

The field studies5 were conducted in the District of Manica within the province bearing the same name, and included the area in and around the political administrative centre of the district, the town of Ville de Manica. Ecologically, the Manica district is situated in the transitional ecozone between Afromontane Forest and Tropical Temperate Forest and shrubland. The rainy season is from November to March/April, and the average annual rainfall is 1000-1200 mm. The district is predominantly a specialized agricultural area with emphasis on maize. From maize sadza is made, a stiff porridge that is eaten daily with vegetables and meat or fish. Other crops are banana and pineapple on a small scale, and some citrus. Traditionally, the economy has been mostly mixed farming subsistence with small family-based holdings. Each family has access to a field, a mashaamba. In the Manica district the Shona custom of keeping cattle as family wealth prevails, in addition to the mashaamba fields (Sætersdal 2004:28-40; cf. Moyo et al. 1993:140).

During the field studies the author and interpreters worked with eight different potters living in different parts of Ville de Manica itself (Bairro IV Congresso, Bairro 7 de Abril and Bairro Vumba) as well as in the surrounding areas of Guidingue, Chaica, Chitewe and Edmundia (Fig. 5.1). All of them speak the Manyika dialect of Shona. Manyika and N’Dau, another Shona dialect, are the most frequently spoken languages in the Manica province (Sætersdal 2004:22, 46; see also Beach 1980:18-23; Jacobson-Widding 2000:22). Transmission of clay knowledge The fieldwork observations of ceramic technology corroborated Martin’s (1941, plate I-IV) detailed account of the sequence of shaping and decoration and his list of names of various vessels (see 5.2). Also, several observations were similar to Lawton’s (1967:242-48) account of Manyika potting practices. The brief comments about potters’ social personae and the transmission of craft knowledge were found to still hold true. For example, Lawton (1967:242) noted that potters were women specialists who made pottery (hari) for their own use and to fulfil orders placed by neighbours, and that their skills were learnt from either their mother or from other women who knew the techniques.

Among rural Shona, a number of extended families live together in village communities. The Shona musha (village, home) is centred around the family of the headman and associated with him rather than with any locality or buildings. Should a headman move his home to new fields his village is likely to maintain its name and most of its inhabitants. Nonetheless, a village usually does have some form of territorial connotations, perhaps vaguely as a cluster of homesteads and their surrounding fields. More often, however, landscape contours such as a ridge between two streams are seen to mark off an area from the territory of neighbouring

5

The studies were carried out as part of the project Archaeological

Research and Cultural Heritage in Mozambique (Sætersdal 2004).

39

Material Knowledges

Figure 5.1: Map showing the location of the homesteads of the eight potters living in and around the town of Manica. moved after having learnt about clay and potting claimed that they continued using the same techniques for shaping and decorating ceramic vessels as they did while still living at home. However, since all of them made pots for sale or exchange with neighbours, they all complied with potential requests from buyers about pot size and decoration.

The Manica women generally conveyed that knowledge about clay (dongo) and potting activities are typically learnt from one’s mother or grandmother while still prepubescent, but that some also learn from neighbours after marriage as a means for extra income. Increasingly, though not the case with any of the potters in Manica, potters now learnt the craft by attending formal courses. While knowledge about clay practices did tend to run in certain families, largely due to the manners in which knowledge most often was transferred between generations, no restrictions were recorded concerning whom a potter could marry.

Time of year and distance to town were two variables of relevance to pottery production and the use of ceramic vessels. Firstly, women’s preoccupation with agricultural work had implications for when pots were being made. Ceramic manufacture took place for the most part during the dry winter months after harvest, but there were no restrictions against making pots during the rainy season. The winter was described as more favourable for the crucial drying phases; during summer the humidity may cause pots to dry slower, and even to not dry sufficiently at all. And secondly, distance to town was emphasized by potters in Guidingue, Chaica, Chitewe and Edmundia as a significant factor for continuing to make pots, and also for the kinds of pots made. As Leonor José explained, herself living in Ville de Manica, people living in or near town bought relatively more pots for cooking than people living in rural areas. People with longer distances to town, and therefore also often longer distances to water, generally depended more upon larger storage vessels for keeping liquids cool.

Among the eight Manica potters, all but two had learnt about clay practices from their mother or grandmother while still girls. These were Susanna Vasco and Maria John. They had learnt by sitting down with a neighbouring potter after they were married and, significantly, differed from the others in their relative authority when it came to ritual problem-solving at the clay source they used (see also 5.2). Thus, during the time of fieldwork it was still common for potting women to bring their ways of dealing with clay with them when getting married and moving into her husband’s homestead. Three of the women had moved to Manica from elsewhere: Marieta Nerio from Sena, Susanna Vasco from Gondola and Ana Madziwanzira from Mrewa in Zimbabwe. While Susanna had moved to Manica together with her husband and children in the first half of the 1990s, the other two had married into local families. All six women that had married and

It should be pointed out, however, that the eight women were on the whole very consistent in their answers to 40

The heat of intimacy and fusion questions about how things should be. While everyday reality generated differences in their ways of handling clay, largely due to pragmatic juggling of aspects of daily life in their respective homesteads, the women varied little in their descriptions of how things were to be done if they were to ‘do it right’. Their accounts of the regulations and avoidances involved, and of the measures to be taken if something went wrong (that pots cracked during firing), were very similar. In other words, the women had at all times during ceramic manufacture a clear perception of the extent to which they were ‘following tradition’, and how to ‘behave traditionally’ in relation to clay practices. This notion of tradition, and the women’s thoughts on whether it was followed or not, was inextricably bound up with a set of pollution concepts and the extent to which these were observed. The same avoidances when dealing with clay were listed by all potters: 

sexual intercourse



pregnancy



menstruation



infants before first teeth



people carrying money

ability and responsibility to take initiative to problemsolving activities at the clay source differed from those that had learnt the craft as young and unmarried girls. Independently, they attributed this to the fact that they had learnt the craft as married women – a knowledge that did not include the introduction by a mother or grandmother to the clay sources they used. Although this aspect of the relationship between knowledge transmission and female bodily experience does not directly address the key objective of this study, it does, however, provide us with an introduction to variations between the potters in Manica and their clay practices which clears important ground for further discussion of social dynamics in household space. Significantly, the difference highlights associations between knowledge about clay, Shona marriage and the meeting between ancestors that the marriage union implicates. Marriage and ancestors: ethnographic insights Of all the relationships that determined women’s status, marriage has traditionally been, and still is, the single most significant. The principal purpose of marriage is to create bonds between kin groups and to produce children for the husband’s patrilineage (E. Schmidt 1992:16). According to Michael Bourdillon (1987:36-38), a traditional Shona marriage is essentially a contract between two lineages, which become related as wifeproviders and wife-receivers, a relationship that gives status to the former. It is thereby a connection primarily between groups rather than between individuals. From the wife’s point of view, she joins her husband’s household as the member with the lowest status. And although a woman lives and works with her husband’s relatives, she remains a member of the wife-providing lineage, and is an outsider among closely knit kin. She is therefore particularly vulnerable in a society that seeks the protection of ancestral spirits. While the spirits of her husband’s lineage ensure the health and well-being of their living descendants, her own ancestral spirits are considered alien to his kin. As an outsider, a wife is an easy scapegoat for family crisis and especially open to charges of witchcraft. As a ‘stranger’ in her husband’s family whose raison d’être is to produce children for his lineage, a woman who fails to give birth to healthy children or whose children dies in infancy, is a vulnerable target for witchcraft accusations (E. Schmidt 1992:17; cf. Holleman, 1952, 1953; Gelfand 1967; Fry 1976; May 1983; Bourdillon 1987; Jacobson-Widding 2000:210-12).

With this “location of pottery within the nexus of sexual, menstruation and pregnancy taboos” (E. Herbert 1993:215) in mind, it should not be surprising to find a preponderance of potting women that are postmenopausal. This was indeed the case in Manica: at the time of fieldwork six of the eight were past their menopause. However, as Gosselain (1999:210-11) notes, this involvement can also be seen as having economic reasons. The craft may be practiced by widows and abandoned or neglected wives because of a wish to obtain an extra income during difficult times. Conversely, young people may be prevented from making pots for fear of the economic independence the extra income may bring about. When thinking of traditional studies of ceramic manufacture and use6, perhaps the first questions that come to mind have to do with the relationship between female bodily experience (see 3.3) and technological knowledge (see 4.1). Following Ingold’s critique of the genealogical conception of relatedness and transmission of substances and knowledges (see 4.2), knowledge is seen to subsist in practical activities themselves, and to engage in any practice is to remember how it is done (see Ingold 2000:146-48). Given this emphasis on bodily experience, it is particularly interesting that Susanna Vasco and Maria John, while listing the same pollution concepts as the other six women, conveyed that their

Women’s position within the relationship between wifeproviders and wife-receivers should be viewed as embedded in a patrilineal ideology and the exogamous clan organization with which the Manyika Shona are associated, as are Shona-speakers in general (JacobsonWidding 1989:41, 1993:8; cf. Holleman 1949, 1952). In the extended family system, a Shona woman’s status as wife is seen as relatively unimportant; her social standing depends on her being influential within her own

6 For a research overview of previous archaeological and ethnoarchaeological studies of Shona pottery and its relationship to settlement pattern, see Lindahl and Matenga (1995:4-7).

41

Material Knowledges lineage and as the ancestor of a growing group of descendants. Therefore, as Bourdillon (1987:50-51) emphasizes, her status acquired through marriage is not so much the status of wife, but rather that of provider to her own family. Jacobson-Widding (2000:31-32) writes that in such a social organization the conditions for individualized social personhood is non-existent. This is because identity is tied up with membership of a lineage, which is defined in the same way by all the people of a lineage. Interaction with other people is therefore not on account of oneself as an individual identity, but as representative of a kinship category. This has implications for the ways in which social obligations, attitudes and cultural values are understood in relation to the people one is interacting with. Personhood is contingent on a spectrum of relational social categories rather than on the value accorded to individual human beings.

ranked in importance and exist in a timeless, hierarchical world (Sætersdal 2004:180; see Jacobson-Widding 2000:122-131). A whole life of accumulated knowledge and experience will be available to the living in a spirit version that is a resource to be drawn upon and consulted when guidance, protection and divination is needed. The spirits see into the future and may give advice on how to avoid dangers. They may also be called upon to cure illness. With no material form they are not bound by time or dimension and can be at all places at all times, the form they take is called Mweya, breath or air. However, the spirits do have sensory experiences such as eyesight and hearing, as well as emotions (Lan 1985:32). Thus, the ancestor spirits play an important role in everyday life on all levels: from individuals, through family and clan to the collective experience of life in a larger Shona-speaking society. Spirits may leave quietly and never be heard of again, and new spirits take their place. Existing in a mirror world, they also age and fade away. They are replaced by spirits of younger relations who die and are reborn in the spirit world, in a continuing sequence into eternity (Sætersdal 2004:180).

Shifting attention to the men, the extended family system implies that every male member of society is caught up in a social hierarchy in which their relative positions are defined by kinship and by alliance through marriage. This hierarchical ideology permeates every aspect of Shona social life, and no man is in a position of absolute authority, except for the sacred chief or ‘king’, mambo. There will always be someone who may place himself above another man, for instance by giving him his sister or daughter as a wife. In doing so, he will move up one generation in relation to the wife-taker and his agnates. This is still found in real life, and the theme constantly recurs in Manyika myths (Jacobson-Widding 2000:55), within the complex dynamics of social and religious change experienced in present-day Mozambican society7.

Field observations at clay sites When visiting a clay site a customary ceremony has to be performed before entering and collecting the material. It is considered improper to venture into the bush without having someone along linked to the land to perform the proper ceremony. In most cases, this means the offering of tobacco at an ancestor tree, accompanied by the clapping of hands (Sætersdal 2004:190). During fieldwork, for the collection of clay, the clapping of hands was always observed when entering the source. The places where clay was found were usually riverbeds or near pools, preferably close to the potter’s homestead (see also Ellert 1984:93-106).

If the prohibitions for handling clay are not observed the pots will crack during firing. And the ancestors cause this to happen. When a person dies she or he becomes a mudzumi (pl. midzimu), an ancestor spirit8. These are

Jacobson-Widding’s description of the cooking hut Jacobson-Widding (2000:77-78) describes the cooking hut (Fig. 5.2) as the centre of social life of the family and its relations to the outside world. Its floor is circular, and the hearth is placed in the middle. When visitors arrive,

7 In Manica most people consider themselves either Christians or Muslims. The role of the Catholic Church is particularly strong, as it is throughout Mozambique. However, ancestor worship is still part of most people’s lives where ancestor spirits are considered to be living in

hand, was depicted by Ana and Leonor José as a quiet and servile spirit

a mirror world and may be called upon for protection, guidance and

that looks down with her hands in her lap. This spirit also came to the

action in all aspects of social life, including marriage. The Catholic

women in their sleep. But in contrast to the uncontrollable and

Church, for example, takes a pragmatic stance, and most people see no

euphoric behaviour of Benzi, which made them restless and

contradiction in being Christian or Muslim while also actively

unconcentrated, Muute had the effect that she made the women tired

engaging their ancestors (Sætersdal 2004:47-50).

and not particularly up to the task of making pots. Thus, these two spirits were at the same time emotional contrasts and complementary

8 Among the midzimu mentioned by name, three spirits in particular

explanation for the women’s action or, rather, lack of action. The third

were expressed by several of the women to be influential to their

specific spirit that several potters mentioned as being influential to

potting. Benzi was the ‘mad spirit’ or ‘the fool’: a spirit which

their potting was Musena. This is a mother spirit, and should be viewed

approached a woman in her sleep, behaving in an ecstatic and euphoric

in close connection with the ways that knowledge about clay and

manner, often laughing uncontrollably. Ana Madziwanzira described

potting are still most often transferred in Manica; between mother and

its appearance as a spirit that “have chicken wings on her head, jumps

daughter or grandmother and granddaughter.

up and down and laughs uncontrollably”. The spirit Muute, on the other

42

The heat of intimacy and fusion males are seated on the clay bench against the wall to the right of the entrance. The father of the house usually has his own separate chair, placed between the hearth and the door facing the bench. Women sit on the floor to the left of the entrance and the fireplace, and children are seated beside the women. While the fire in the centre occupies the space in between men on the bench to the right and women sitting on the floor to the left, at the same time it also mark a division between the spaces behind the fire, dominated by the chikuwa platform or pot shelf, and the more everyday spaces near the entrance. At the chikuwa, the male head kneels down and addresses the ancestors and, during formal ceremonies, sits down and asks family members to come forward and have a sip of the sacrificial beer. Also, tools and objects associated with men are attached to the poles supporting the ceiling, above the chikuwa and slightly to the right. Women, meanwhile, emphasize the chikuwa less as a ritual place and more in a matter-of-fact manner: it is the shelf where they store their clay pots (see 5.2).

ancestral spirits, there is danger. And the example of marriage illustrates the extraordinary problems arising from such meetings (Aschwanden 1982:220-21). Fertile women rival ancestors in their life-giving and life-taking capabilities. According to Shona thought, a lineage by itself is considered sterile and unable to reproduce. In order for a given lineage to be sustained, females from other lineages have to be absorbed as wives. Matters are complicated by the fact that all people with the same clan and sub-clan names are seen as agnatic kin. That is, they are classificatory brothers and sisters and prohibited from marrying because of incest taboo. In consequence, the mythical act of sexual intercourse between brother and sister is symbolic for a complex web of relationships extending to very distant agnatic kin. The control of female sexuality and lineage reproduction is a major male preoccupation. And because female fertility is also associated with the fecundity of the land, this resource control determines whether a people would eat or starve. Lineage sterility, the failure to reproduce, is closely associated with the sterility of the land, and the mythical association between incest and drought has been emphasized by ethnographers (E. Schmidt 1992:26-27; cf. Krige and Krige 1943; Holleman 1952, 1953; Gelfand 1962; Lan 1985).

Central to an understanding of these spaces is the relationship between men and women and their respective generative substances and links to ancestors. Where different blood meet, and thereby also different

Figure 5.2: Inside Emma Maocha’s cooking hut. Note the centrality of the fireplace on the hut floor and the chikuwa – the pot shelf – at the back. Here the concepts of tsvina and male and female ‘white blood’ are significant. Tsvina is considered to cause drought, and sometimes referred to as ‘blood on the land’. It is thereby a threat to fertility: the absence of rain may be attributed to the spreading of too much tsvina (Jacobson-Widding 2000:153). As Jacobson-Widding (1989) writes, it is emphasized that those who share

ancestors have ‘the same blood’. The ancestors are therefore a socially binding element connecting people in ideological units which do not necessarily correspond to a social unit among the living. The metaphysical explanation of clan unity runs as follows: “The ancestors live in the blood of all who come after them”. More precisely, this means that the ancestors continue to live 43

Material Knowledges in ‘the white blood’ of their descendants. The white blood of the man is semen. The woman’s white blood is her vaginal fluids, or madonjo. The Manyika hold that the meeting between these two is the meeting between their respective ancestors. This is a dangerous confrontation. When the fight is over, the woman is left with her womb full of dead ancestors, primarily those that belong to the man’s clan. These fallen ancestors are named tsvina, meaning ashes or dirt (Jacobson-Widding 1989:41). This implies that the main result of the heated act of life-giving love between man and woman is death, ashes and dirt. When viewing sexual pollution within such an ideological frame, sexual intercourse becomes a threat to male fertility and thereby to reproduction of the patrilineage (Jacobson-Widding 2000:469-71).

The heat of shoes and money – and an example from a clay source In Manyika thermodynamic thought, the manipulation of heat and coolness is based on complex knowledge of different kinds of heat. While heat is associated with disease, danger and excitement, coolness is linked to health, peace and order. But hot/cool may not simply be contrasted as negative versus positive: heat is also implicated in the creation of life. Agricultural crops and children alike are the result of fire which has subsequently been cooled down with water, and parallels in the material world are found in clay pots and iron9. An example is a child with fever, who should be isolated from contact with sexually active adults. Only the mother has an effective coolness, namely the ‘white blood’ or madonjo discussed above. Coming from the mother’s womb, it is also called mukaka (milk), and is likened to breast milk. However, since all liquids become hot in connection with sex, it is required that the mother avoids sexual intercourse (Jacobson-Widding 1989:27-29).

Dangers of transitory states and fusion The description of the cooking hut and the concept of tsvina illustrates that the act of procreation, generative substances and ancestors may be seen to be thought of in thermodynamic ways. During fieldwork, these links were also found to include clay practices and household spaces.

Heat associated with sexual activity and transformation of e.g. clay and iron through the use of fire provides meaning to the avoidances linked to sexual intercourse, menstruation, pregnancy and small, newborn children (see 5.1) during ceramic manufacture. But what about people carrying money? Significantly, a wide spectrum of states of transition and fusion – whether life/death, human/animal, human/things – are considered hot and associated with the colour red. Phenomena that represent boundary crossings, encounters between people or fusions of things or substances otherwise viewed as belonging in separate categories are considered hot, and so are places associated with such fusions. Consequently, among the places most often observed as hot are crossroads, because here people meet, while coming and going in different directions (JacobsonWidding 1989:31-35). Thus, material culture such as shoes and money are also associated with heat.

Field observations: contrasting containers A strong connection was observed between clay practice and female body experience through the concept of heat and the use and symbolism of fire. This connection was most clearly evident in the frequently observed rule of pottery making: to keep men at a distance when firing pots. And the association between women’s personhood, pottery and fireplaces may also be extended to childbirth and childrearing. The contrast made between the technologies of potting and basket making is illustrative for the relationship between sexual identity and fire. A main difference between the two kinds of containers is that none of the potters knew of any man making pots while the craft of making baskets, on the other hand, was an activity strongly associated with men. When asked why women make pots while men make baskets, the first response was most often in terms of the amount of labour involved and the complexity of the craft. However, there turned out to be few or no avoidances of pollution observed when collecting the material and making the baskets. On several occasions during conversation, the reason for this contrast between the two handcrafts given was in terms of fire and heat transformation. Rosina Taunde explained that the needs of fire were similar to the needs of an infant: “to keep a fire is the same as keeping a small child. You can’t leave them on their own. Men do that. That’s why women make pots and men make baskets”. The same metaphoric association between men’s relationship to fire and that to children, while also giving it a humoristic edge, was made by Maria John: “they like making them, but they often forget about them and wander off somewhere”.

An example of this association is found in the approaching of one of Emma Maocha’s clay sources. In addition to observing the other avoidances, all people present were also to take off their shoes and leave the money in their pockets behind at a distance from the source, and thereafter sit down and perform the clapping ceremony. Afterwards one was to walk the last metres to the actual source barefoot and without money. Emma

9 Sexual intercourse and the creation of iron through transformation using fire are conceptually deeply intertwined. Shona-speakers have regarded the peak moment of heat in intercourse as a smelting process, whereby the man ‘dies’ (Jacobson-Widding 1989:39; cf. Aschwanden 1982). For comprehensive overviews for sub-Saharan Africa, see e.g. Collett (1993), E. Herbert (1993), P. Schmidt (1997), Haaland et al. (2002), Haaland (2004) and Chirikure (2007).

44

The heat of intimacy and fusion cooking of sadza clear. However, the associations go beyond this and into the realm of sexuality and death. As we have seen, an ancestral war breaks out when the man releases his semen into the woman’s vagina. The woman’s ancestors start to kill off those of the man. The man’s ancestors will fight as well, but those of the woman are more active and more aggressive. The result is that the mixed fluids after intercourse are ‘hot’ and polluted with death. This, in a way, is a threat to the man’s patrilineage, or the principle of patrilineage. For the cooking of sadza, the particular moment when water and flour combine into a viscous fluid is important, because this fluid is perceived as semen.

explained the leaving of these things by the simple fact that “we do not know where they have been”. The shambakodzi and the ladle In line with the thermodynamic logic of fusion and transition, Jacobson-Widding (1989:42) finds for the Manyika that the contained heat inside an entity gives life, whereas heat transcending boundaries brings about death. At the level of the extended family system, these notions about fertile and fatal heat may be seen to serve the end of preserving patrilineal unity. The patrilineage is a bounded unit within which the heat of sexual intercourse is considered fertile. Since it is the ancestors of the woman in the perceived war between ancestors who try to win, this may be viewed as an ideological fight between patriliny and matriliny. But these dangers, associated with the sexual fusion between man and woman, are not merely abstracts; they are clearly brought into play for the spatiality of the cooking hut. Not only does sexual intercourse involve a potential danger by blurring the boundaries between two people, it also poses a danger to respective spatial associations of high and low, and is seen as aggressive interaction between ancestors that is a potential threat to the patrilineal social order.

The potential danger involved in that heat contained in human or nonhuman units may be transported across culturally perceived boundaries between the units, and thereby cause sickness, sterility and death, is found in ethnographic accounts of the symbolism of specific ceramic vessels, both among the Manyika and among neighbouring Shona groups, perhaps particularly the Karanga (Aschwanden 1982), who share many of the same names for pots.

5.2

The fusion of substances through heat transformation and the dangers involved are vividly demonstrated in Jacobson-Widding’s (2000:170-73) description of the everyday activity of cooking sadza and the avoidances observed which are, as will be shown below, closely connected to the symbolism of particular pots. The danger involved is that male members of the household may become impotent or lose their capacity to ‘rise’ sexually. The most prominent of the avoidance rules relates to the way a woman handles the ladle (mugoti) while stirring the sadza in the vessel called shambakodzi. When the mixture of water and maize flour begins to thicken, she may no longer leave the ladle in the pot. From hereafter she has to keep stirring vigorously until the sadza has thickened into the desired stiffness. If she leaves the pot, she must also remove the ladle from the pot, wipe it carefully, and place it next to the vessel. If only women are present, she may do it swiftly and without special care. But with men present she will lower her head, clap her hands and say “excuse me” or, alternatively, “upside down”. The men will answer with polite hand clapping, accompanied by “you can go ahead!” The implication is that men will become impotent if the ladle is left motionless in the hot pot. The saying that “the ladle will get burnt” refers to a particular aspect of male impotence, namely the fear of ‘drying up’, which means losing the capacity to keep the foreskin elastic (cf. Aschwanden 1982:36).

Life history stages and spatial problemsolving

Connections between female bodily experience, thermodynamic thinking and specific pots are not only limited to the stages in the life histories of clay vessels after firing. The associations between human bodies and clay also involve the engagement with different household spaces for the active problem-solving strategies for avoiding heat pollution, as the following fieldwork observations from Manica demonstrate. Collecting and transporting clay Tore Sætersdal (2004:190) has pointed out the strong connections between women, water, fertility and spirits found among the Manyika Shona. Spirits dwell in the water in particular, and springs and rivers are potent and important dwelling places for the spirits. This relationship also seems to be of significance for clay practices, especially the collection of material at riverbeds or near pools, and highlights the question of the material’s associations with the spirit world that was introduced in chapter 1: Is clay categorized as belonging to the aquatic world or is it earth and soil? Three observed examples When Emma Maocha was asked what kind of spirits were associated with clay and the clay place, she conveyed that they were the spirits of the hippopotamus and the snake, in addition to nzuzu, the female spirit living in pools, springs and wells (e.g. Holleman 1952, 1953; Jacobson-Widding 1993; 2000:123, 137-38). A river is different from a pool. In Manyika conceptions of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ waters, pools are clean, while rivers are dirty. People wash dirty things in rivers, but not in pools. Young boys may test their virility in rivers, but

By linking the fear of getting ‘burnt’ or ‘dried up’ with certain aspects of a woman’s handling of a hot pot on a fire, Jacobson-Widding’s consideration of the evidence for the sexual meanings of pots and ladles as symbols of wombs and penises (cf. Aschwanden 1982:187-89), makes the parallel between sexual intercourse and the 45

Material Knowledges definitively not in pools. A river is connected with tsvina, while pools are as pure as a chaste womb (Jacobson-Widding 2000:455).

and agreed that there was one particular site in Bairro IV Congresso which had the best clay. The problem was that the clay site was on the premises of the Roman Catholic Church. For the performance of the ceremonies accompanying the collection of clay, this created a form of problem-solving that was described with a good dose of amusement. Church days were avoided, and days when the priest was away were preferred for collection, although he evidently knew of the popularity of the clay on the church property. But the respect for the place led people to perform the clapping ceremony at the homestead after having brought the clay there. Accounts of this particular and well-known procedure were accompanied by smiling and laughter.

It should be considered that none of the potters used to add temper to their clay10. This made certain clay sources more preferable than others and used by several potters, a point which underlines an important aspect of the associations between potters and clay places. Three specific examples from Manica may draw attention to key aspects of the problem-solving associated with clay extraction. When Marieta Nerio was asked why there was a large crack in a pfuko (beer pot), she replied that this had started to happen recently and seemed only to affect the larger vessels for liquid storage. When asked about her thoughts on why this was so, she first replied that the clay was not good anymore. And when later explaining what she meant by ‘bad clay’ she said that there was a problem that had occurred with the particular source of clay. There were three potters using the same source, and all of them had recently experienced the same difficulties when trying to make larger vessels. They had agreed that someone else had gone to the source without observing all the pollution avoidances, and thereby caused the spirits there to be discontent. In order to correct the problem, a ritual was to be performed which would possibly enable the production of larger vessels again. But, Marieta explained, it was not her responsibility to do something about it, since she was not the senior potter using the source. The ritual should be performed by the senior potter, and there was still an ongoing discussion about when this could be done. Seniority was ascribed either to the woman having discovered the source or, more commonly, the woman to whom the knowledge about the source had been handed down to. This senior potter was in some instances also approached when a new potter wished to collect clay at the source.

The last example relates to the dangers of fusion associated with crossroads, shoes and money (see above). Emma Maocha expressed concerns about pollution from places and people along the way when bringing clay from the source to the homestead. Emma’s solution to this problem was to put a stem of the mororo plant inside the bag of clay. She explained that this plant protected the clay. Shaping and decoration Immediately before being shaped into a pot the clay was worked while water was added until the material reached the desired softness and consistency (Fig. 5.3). This was usually achieved by pounding the clay against a hard and flat surface, preferably a lower grindstone or a sufficiently large metal lid. The tool used for the pounding was normally a wooden tool which was rounded at the end, mostly a digging stick or the shaft of a broken axe or hammer. The technique employed for shaping the pots was the same for all eight potters; one or two large coils were first laid out on a plate or metal lid (depending on pot size), then the rings were drawn up to make the body. For larger vessels intended for cooking beer or liquid storage, another ring was added at shoulder level and used to draw the rest of the pot via the neck to the rim. A slim coil could also be added on the upper neck and rim. By not being fully a coil technique, it falls within the fashioning technique Gosselain (2000:201, fig. 4) describes as drawing of a ring-shaped lump. This observation also complies well with Gosselain’s (2000:202, fig. 5) distribution map for techniques in geographical areas associated with Shona-speakers.

Several of the women described their first visit as potters to the clay source as a ritual where firewood was brought, a fire was lit and a clapping ceremony held for the spirits. This was a one-off event; afterwards the women could go and find clay at will, provided, of course, that they observed the avoidances. Also, some of them held a ceremony every year. Leonor José conveyed that she brewed beer and invited friends and neighbours to a ceremony at her homestead every December. This was held because she made pots, and was for the spirits. The second example illustrates how the location of a specific popular source may create situations where the problem-solving in relation to the extraction of the material has to be adjusted. While all of the potters living within Ville de Manica had a source they could go to which was close to their homestead, they all knew of

In concordance with Lawton’s (1967:243) observations, decoration of pottery was done in two stages: graphic decoration while the clay was still wet, just after the completion of the base, and the application of colour a day or two later. Decoration is dominated by incision of chevron patterns, often accompanied by space-filling punctuates inside the chevrons. The decorative patterns were placed along the shoulder, sometimes extending upwards onto the neck area, and the colours red (haematite) and black (graphite) was applied. Red was used for the entire outer surface, while black was used in

10 The observation about a preference for naturally tempered clay was also made by Lindahl and Matenga (1995:28) for the Shona potters in the Buhera district, Zimbabwe.

46

The heat of intimacy and fusion

Figure 5.3: Emma Maocha working the clay. The lower grinding stone was also used for maize. association with the incised chevron patterns. On larger storage vessels such as the pfuko red colouring was sometimes also applied to the visible parts of the inside of the neck.

closed later the same day, while larger beer or storage vessels were left overnight. Storage and drying After closing the base the pots were stored away before firing. They were placed in the shade in order to dry sufficiently slow. If left in the sun, the clay would dry up too quickly and crack. However, some of the potters mentioned that they placed their pots in the sun or next to a burning fireplace just before firing as a last measure to remove remaining humidity from the clay. The amount of time for drying depended on size, the individual potter’s trust in the quality of the clay and the time of year. The dry winter season after the harvest was the preferred time for pottery making, and pots also dry faster this time of year. During winter an average sized shambakodzi cooking pot was normally left to dry for two to three days, while a larger pfuko or gate vessel for beer or water could be left for a week or more.

The similarities to observations made of Karanga ceramic decoration should be noted. The rongo, for example, is decorated with designs that are also found on the human body or that represents articles of clothing. Thus, a triangle of punctuates on the shoulder is equivalent to the cicatrisation marks on a woman’s abdomen, and a narrow band of oblique hatching or crosshatching (or a similar method) at the neck/shoulder junction represents the beaded belt a woman wears around her belt to protect her fertility (Aquina 1968). Shona potters place decoration such as eyes, breasts, belt and tattoo below the neck because the pot neck is seen as the neck of the cervix, and therefore the pot is upside down relative to the human body (Evers and Huffman 1988:739).

The avoidances of potential pollution applied to the same degree during the drying process as they did at any other stage before the pots were fired. And, since the clay also needed to be placed in the shade, pots were stored in shady places associated with female spaces and situated low. This meant that pots were kept away from potential exposures to sun and potential pollution, while at the same time kept out of reach from everyday, mundane

After shaping and incision, the pots were left to dry, for the larger beer or storage vessels most often overnight, before being turned upside down and the base closed. This was done in order for the pots to harden sufficiently for the body to support its own weight while standing upside down. The time period for this phase varied according to size; cooking pots’ base was normally 47

Material Knowledges activities and playing children. Typical spaces chosen for drying unfired pots were under the grain bin, in the kitchen hut (on the female side and not on the male clay bench to the right) or, if the potter was post-menopausal and sleeping alone in her bedroom, the pots could be kept on the bedroom floor.

frequently moved her firing place around the homestead. She did, however, prefer to keep it near the kitchen huts. Marieta Nerio and Leonor José (Fig. 5.4) both had a designated spot they had used for years, which were only slight depressions between the kitchen area and the outer homestead perimeter. The largest pit encountered was that of Maria John’s, which had been in use for at least two generations when Maria started potting.

Firing Pots were usually fired at the outskirts of the homestead, sometimes also at a nearby place on the outside. The location of the firing place was determined by wind direction and the perceived danger of houses and vegetation catching fire. All firings observed during the Manica fieldwork took place within the perimeter of the homestead, although on the outer fringes and well away from houses. The firing places varied greatly in size and depth of the pit. In some cases no depression was used at all. Also, the number of times the firing places were used varied considerably: while some dug a new pit for each firing, others had a designated pit they had used for years, and sometimes the same pit had been used by female relatives before them. The range in depth and size of the firing places used may be illustrated by four examples. At the time of fieldwork, Ana Madziwanzira fired her pots on a hard and flat surface a few meters from the kitchen hut wall, but also told that she had

Eugenia Herbert (1993:209) writes that the ritual apparatus for pottery manufacture in sub-Saharan Africa is overwhelmingly directed towards controlling the firing process. The observations made of clay practices in Manica confirm this statement. And the same avoidances as for earlier stages of manufacture should be observed during the firing. A point most clearly articulated by Rosinda Taunde, in addition to the pollution concepts listed above, was that during the firing of pots men should not come to close to the firing place. The fire should be lit by the potter herself, in order for her to have control over the potential pollution from people and their shoes and money. Spatiality of finished vessels Between the eight potters in Manica and their households there was a high degree of uniformity in the

Figure 5.4: Leonor José and her place for firing pottery.

48

The heat of intimacy and fusion different kinds of pots made and used in household space. For the purposes in this work, two main groups may be recognized11: the largely undecorated and relatively small vessels used for cooking and serving food and as eating bowls, and the larger, more often decorated vessels used for brewing beer12 and storing liquids. The liquids were mostly water and beer, but there was also a particular pot for storing honey (see Table 5.1). Among these the smallest were used for carrying and serving liquids as well as for drinking. This division concurs with that made by Lindahl and Matenga (1995:35-36). Pots used for cooking and serving were mainly found in and around the kitchen area and in the vicinity of the fireplace. While this was also the case for the liquids vessels, at least to a certain extent, these vessels were strongly associated with ceremonies and spatially to the chikuwa – the pot shelf – and the clay bench where

11 For more detailed descriptions of Shona pottery types, including manufacturing techniques, vessel shapes, decoration and use areas, see e.g. C. Martin 1941; Lawton 1967:242-48; Ellert 1984; Lindahl and Matenga 1995:62-63. 12 With particularly Reid and Young’s (2000) and Arthur’s (2003) interesting articles in mind, questions of beer brewing was incorporated into the questionnaire, and ceramic samples of cooking and brewing vessels were collected, in order to potentially identify abrasions from processing grains and to trace the fermentation process inside vessels. Beer is traditionally brewed in a gate. However, although all eight potters conveyed that beer was to be brewed in a gate and that this still was practiced (several of them kept at least one gate in the homestead), nobody knew of anyone who still made beer regularly using the vessel type. The gate was now mostly kept for special occasions and ritual ceremonies. Normally, metal containers were used more often for the brewing process than ceramic vessels.

49

Material Knowledges NAME

USE AREA

gate

brewing beer/storing water

pfuko/chipfuko/kachipfuko

carrying and storing beer/water

musufze

carrying and storing water

rongo/chirongo

heating and storing water

hodzeko

storing milk

muringa

storing honey

shambakodzi

cooking sadza

n’hamba

cooking

tsayia

cooking

hadyana

cooking relish

nzuwi

serving plate

Table 5.1: Name and use area for vessel types encountered in Manica. larger pots were placed, at the back of the kitchen hut. This was particularly so for gate and pfuko pots used for brewing and storing beer. The position at the back and the elevation of the chikuwa point towards the links to ancestors, and the strong associations between men, high places and the back of the hut as the place where the male head of the household approached the ancestor spirits (Jacobson-Widding 1992:10).

(Evers and Huffman 1988:739). In principle, Aschwanden (1982:190-91) states, every wife is seen as a rongo. The smaller hadyana, or chihadyana, is used for cooking and serving relish, and symbolizes the vagina (Aschwanden 1982:211). Therefore, it is usually hidden inside the rongo; such body parts should be kept away from the public eye. Consequently, a woman placing her chihadyana where everybody can see it is regarded as putting an intimate body part on display. Lastly, the chipfuko is a smaller version of the pfuko and used for serving beer. This pot symbolizes virginity, while the even smaller kachipfuko corresponds to the vagina after sexual intercourse (Aschwanden 1982:192-93). With these intimate associations to female bodily experience in mind it becomes meaningful, as Evers and Huffman (1988:739) point out, that clay pots are important symbols for the relationship between husband and wife: his handling of her pots reflects his attitude towards her, and her placing of a pot upside down is to stop his conjugal rights. And the associations to the female body are also expressed in thermodynamic ways. As Evers and Huffman continue, a pot being fired is likened to a girl entering puberty. If a man is present its heat will be transferred to him and he would ‘boil over’ and lose his virility.

Aschwanden’s account of Karanga symbolism and spatiality Significantly, most pots symbolize the female body or a specific part of it, such as the womb or the vagina. As discussed above, the shambakodzi was used for cooking sadza, and the vessel itself represents sexual intercourse and fertility. Through its containment of white substance, it is also likened to a mother’s breasts and her milk, and thereby the capability to bear children (Aschwanden 1982:190-92). The rongo, or also chirongo13, can symbolize menstruation. This is because they share a common link to the cleansing of tsvina. It is the rongo that the wife should use for heating the water to clean her husband in the morning, paralleling the way her menstruation cleanses her womb of his sperm after the ancestral battle inside her. In addition, the rongo is also said to be a symbol for the wife and her fertility in general, as a young bride should bring a new vessel of this type with her as a token of the transfer of fertility 13 The prefixes chi- and ka- indicate a diminutive, and pots with such prefixes are smaller versions of specific vessel types, but used for similar purposes (Aschwanden 1982:192-93). Two examples of this found in Manica are chirongo and chipfuko. An example of both prefixes used at the same time is found for the vessel type kachipfuko.

50

The heat of intimacy and fusion

Figure 5.5:Examples of chipfuko (left) and pfuko (right) vessels, made by Ana Madziwanzira.

Figure 5.6: Emma Maocha holding a shambakodzi pot in the making. The vessels and their symbolism are also linked spatially to the cooking hut. As we have seen, the place for the pots is on the platform. And the elevated position of the chikuwa is associated with the dignity of the ancestors: since the ancestors are higher than anyone else, they have the highest place in the house. But the relative positioning of specific pots differ, as described by Aschwanden (1982:203-4). On either side of the main

shelf (see Fig. 5.2) there may be additional elevations. These steps are used to store vessels used several times a day. Pots on these stands include the shambakodzi and the rongo. While the pots on the main shelf is said to represent the whole group and the unity of family, the stands on each side are associated with the woman serving the group and the family as a stranger.

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Material Knowledges observations by Jacobson-Widding (1992:10), of associations between women and ‘low’ places on the one hand and between men, ancestors, and ‘high’ places on the other. Thus, this chapter may be concluded by bringing attention to four particular aspects of the relationship between pollution concepts, social dynamics in household spaces and practices involving clay:

Field observations of storage of vessels for sale and exchange Concentrating their work to the dry winter months, most potters made a quantity of vessels in order to keep stock and meet demands for pots throughout the year, in addition to production for own use and as gifts for family and friends. These pots were often kept in places where they were left alone from the daily activities of the household, usually together with pots left to dry before firing. However, these pots were not subject to the same avoidances as clay and vessels that had not yet been fired. As Ana Madziwanzira explained when this mixing of fired and unfired pots was observed, the finished ones were already fired, and since they didn’t crack they showed that all the rules had been followed successfully. Concluding remarks Following the methodological approach to household spaces within a thermodynamic philosophy (see 4.3), the centrally placed hearth in the cooking hut as a meeting point and the chikuwa at the back as a particularly weighted space may be seen as together forming a sphere of experience. This sphere is thereby taken to include the

1.

pollution as linked to dangers of transition and fusion

2.

practices involving unfired clay in spaces associated with female bodily experience

3.

‘hot’ pots and their contents as associated with the fireplace: ceramic vessels and transformation of substances symbolize the dangers associated with heat

4.

‘cool’ storage of beer and other liquids in ceramic containers placed in an elevated area at the back of the hut

As will be seen in the following two chapters, these aspects establish the main principles for comparison with the insights from the other case studies.

52

6.

TWO POTENTIAL DANGERS

[T]he limited capacity of women to act on the world was associated with their lack of physical closure, with their natural condition as receptacles for polluting heat. Unless confined or neutralized through rites of ‘washing’ or ‘cooling’, females laid down ‘hot tracks’ (methlala) on the public pathways, threatening the health of others and the fall of the rain. Transactions across female bodily thresholds, and especially sexual intercourse, were ideally confined to the house (Comaroff 1985:81)

recognized as a comparatively favourable place for agriculture (Motzafi-Haller 1992:34, 1997:235-36).

The following chapter discusses potters and social practice involving clay in the village of Manaledi in the Tswapong Hills. As will be recalled from chapter 1, the field study from Molepolole was compared to prior experiences from the Tswapong Hills. The observed differences in the relationship between female bodily experience and clay practice was argued to be a form of change or redefinition of apparently insignificant bodily habits (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:70-74). While the contrasts between the two cases give grounds for theoretical and methodological reflection on the meeting between differing knowledge systems, thoughts which will be returned to in the final chapter, it will here be drawn particular attention to metaphoric conceptualizations of the female body as a container that may ‘spill over’ and their links to social practice involving clay among Tswana-speakers. An important point in this regard is that the notion of clay containers should be taken to include houses as well as ceramic vessels.

6.1

The population of the Tswapong Hills is diverse, and it has been noted that the people “is really a collection of several groups named generally after the hills in which they live” (Schapera 1952:185). While most residents of the region today considers themselves as ‘Batswapong’ or ‘Bapedi’, many of the contemporary struggles over land are found to be rooted in the particular history of the region14. Village communities (motse) are often small and located at the base of the hills and near water sources. Cultivated lands are found at a distance of one or to several hours’ walk away from the village settlements. The arable land cultivated by residents of one village community tends to fall within one or more named land area blocks which are locally known to ‘belong to’ that specific community. Narrow strips of pasture land are available on top of the hills and in several locations between the cultivated areas between two neighbouring villages. In these limited grazing areas15, herd owners from several village communities can be found (Motzafi-Haller 1992:104). Ideally, Pnina Motzafi-Haller (1992:17-19, 1997:231-32) notes, the settlement and land use pattern in the Tswapong Hills is divided into three concentric zones.

Clay containers and heat

As the first of two main parts of this chapter, the following discussion focuses on environmental, social, and spatial aspects in the Tswapong Hills considered to be of particular relevance to further treatise of practices involving clay. The Tswana concept of heat is regarded as especially important. Environmental and social context The organization of space within each of the small Tswapong villages emulates that of the larger Tswana capital town. The clustered settlement around the central arena of the kgotla and other spatial representation of socio-political ordering of relations within these Tswapong communities reproduce, although in a miniature form, the model of Tswana territorial and land use described elsewhere in the country (Motzafi-Haller 1992:41)

14 The territory of the Central District largely corresponds to the boundaries of the precolonial Ngwato kingdom, and is created out of the colonial Ngwato ‘tribal reserve’. Available oral and written evidence suggest that the Tswapong region had been a tribute paying

The major environmental challenge for farmers in Botswana is the periodic recurrence of drought, due to a semiarid climate with relatively warm winters (April to September) and hot summers (October to March). The rainy season begins in December and lasts through April, providing an average annual rainfall of around 460 mm (Suggs 2002:14). The Tswapong Hills is described as a relatively well-watered region in the east-central part of the Central District, and is the most densely occupied area within the district. Although much of the Tswapong Hills’ farmlands are described as sandy, poor, and rains known to frequently fail (see Landau 1993), it is still

area to the Ngwato kingdom since the mid-1800s. The Ngwato expanded their control to the Tswapong Hills in the 1860s, and the ethnically diverse population was allowed a large measure of self-rule as long as tribute was paid (Motzafi-Haller 1992:38-40, 1997:238; see also Landau 1993). 15 In the Tswapong Hills, larger grazing areas are generally located to the northeast and northwest, outside the clustered residential and agricultural areas.

53

Material Knowledges

Figure 6.1: Map showing the location of Manaledi in the Tswapong Hills. In the centre there is the clustered village settlement, which is surrounded by arable fields, often referred to as ‘the lands’, and beyond the cultivated areas are open grazing areas. Within this pattern people migrate seasonally between permanent village residence and a second dwelling placed next to the crop fields. Sorghum, millet, maize, beans and melons are cultivated during the rainy season. Cattle provide the draft power, and after the ploughing they are driven away from the unfenced cultivated field to the more distant open areas. In this third zone, which may range from ten hours’ to over three days’ walk from the village settlement, herders, usually young boys or clients, live in provisional dwellings (see Landau 1993:1-3).

19th century Tswana polities (merafe) in the area16. The ward (kgotla) at the centre of the village is the nexus of public life. This is the local court presided over by the village headman. Around the kgotla, which was the most significant unit of administration in the precolonial Tswana system, households are organized according to kin and political divisions (see Comaroff 1985:44-45).

Motzafi-Haller (1997:232-34) writes that even the smallest Tswana village settlement in the Tswapong Hills is a representation of its internal social and political order, and that the roots of this settlement and land use can be traced back to the sociopolitical structure of the

the 19th century, first by encapsulation into the market economy and

In precolonial times, the chief or king (kgosi) of the Tswana polity resided with his followers in a large, concentrated settlement or town (see 1.2, 10.2), which is 16 Many aspects of the socioeconomic and political organization of the precolonial Tswana polities were transformed towards the latter half of then by the declaration of a British protectorate. Despite dramatic changes, large clustered towns and the land-use system consisting of three concentric circles continues to serve as the basic model for recording the residence of the population to this day (Motzafi-Haller 1997:233-34).

54

Two potential dangers exogamous households of Nguni-speakers (e.g. Sansom 1974). This ethnographic perspective has been reified as an enduring preference, as well as a culturally specific adaptation among the Tswana to the relatively arid environments where they have been historically settled. However, as will be remembered from chapter 2, this pattern of town living as a defining characteristic of Tswana life breaks down under archaeological scrutiny (Huffman 1986b; S. Hall 1995), and the possibility has been presented that the Tswana emphasis on endogamy is a recent development that occurred as the process of settlement aggregation proceeded (S. Hall 1998:238, 255).

seen as a production form that is able to produce a surplus for an elite and to sustain large populations through its spatial and temporal redistribution of the harvest (see 2.3, 10.2). Suggs (2002:5-14) writes that in these chiefdoms there were basically two ranks of people – ‘royals’ and ‘commoners’. The chiefdom was conceived as a collection of all of the co-resident lineages, as a whole they are thought of as one large group of relatives that could be characterized as a clan. The kgosi was the senior living adult of male of the founding ‘royal’ lineage within the polity. The chiefdom may be conceived as having a pyramidical structure: there was a patrilineal core that united the group from top to bottom in familial identity. However, each lineage within the whole clan was still a separate entity. Each ward was a separate group of cooperating close families, and each household within the wards separated residential familial units.

Clay knowledge and ancestors The Manaledi settlement is situated in the southern side of the Tswapong Hills, mid-way between the villages Ratholo and Gotau, about 8 km from each (Fig. 6.1). It is known as a relocated village community and used to be classified as a ‘land area’ belonging to Ratholo, with a history of discussion over its status as a motse proper. Motzafi-Haller (1992:281-92, 1997:242-47) writes that the present locality of Manaledi used to be the land area of Maboong, a small village located on the top of the hills. The ‘old village’ was not accessible from the main road, and so after the mid-1950s many of Maboong’s residents chose to stay at their land area dwellings which lay closer to Gotau, Ratholo and the main road connection to Palapye17.

Spatial division into three zones – domestic, agricultural and open grazing – corresponds to a symbolic order which contrasted the town, associated with order, government and civilization, with the bush or wild naga, where uncontrollable spirits (badimo) and undomesticated animals roamed (Motzafi-Haller 1992:59-60, 2002:116). When the town moved, as was often the case during the first half of the 19th century due to droughts or social unrest and warfare (see 10.2), various initiation ceremonies preceded the establishment of a new settlement. These ceremonies and other forms of ritual practice served to separate the social space at the core of the concentric settlement pattern from the surrounding naga. Dwelling in the clustered village was strongly associated with full citizenship and membership in the social entity. People who did not keep their house in the village were called ‘bush people’ (Schapera 1938:66; Comaroff 1985:54-60; Motzafi-Haller 1997:232).

It was mentioned in chapter 1 that there were three active potters in Manaledi, and that all were related. The following discussion will concentrate on Gabaratiwe Piti, the eldest potter, since the interviews with all three took place in her homestead, and therefore in her spatial and material settings. It was Gabaratiwe who had taught the other two, Mapula Jonas and Gaotame Lebonetse, about pottery making. The two neighbouring women came over and joined the discussions for long periods of time. For the most part, however, it was Gabaratiwe who replied to the questions, sometimes supplemented by Mapula and Gaotame.

The concentric settlement pattern, which is still found to be spatially emulated in villages in the Tswapong Hills, corresponds to the Central Cattle Pattern (see 2.1, Fig. 2.1). Men are associated with cattle and women with agriculture, and spatially the model is characterized by a central domain which includes a cattle enclosure and an assembly area associated with men and political decision-making. The outer residential area is the domain of the households of married women. The concentric structure of the CCP therefore makes statements about rank and political status (Huffman 1986a, 2001, 2008).

Gabaratiwe had learnt the craft of making pots (pitsa) from her grandmother, who grew up in the nearby village of Gotau. While not having practiced potting much after she got married, Gabaratiwe took up the craft again as a means of extra income in 1994. While most of her pots were sold locally, buyers also came by to bring pots to the larger town markets, especially in Gaborone. Most popular objects for sale were larger vessels for cooking beer and for cool storage of liquids (beer and

Concerning marriage, Tswana-speakers are associated with an agnatic descent ideology which encourages all forms of cousin union (Schapera 1940, 1957, 1963; Radcliffe-Brown 1950; Preston-Whyte 1974; Kuper 1975a, 1975b; Comaroff and Roberts 1981; Comaroff 1985; S. Hall 1998). Ethnographers of the southern Bantu have drawn clear distinctions between the endogamous town settlements of Sotho/Tswana, particularly Tswana-speakers, and the dispersed

17 The first indication that their claims for independent village status were officially approved was the beginning of a local public project – an access road to their settlement. The 1991 national population census recorded 191 residents in the ‘village of Manaledi’ (see Motzafi-Haller 2002:119-123 for discussion of the development towards village status).

55

Material Knowledges water). Concerning transmission of knowledge, she explained that potting used to be taught from mother to daughter or from grandmother to granddaughter. She had not taught any of her own children about potting. Mapula and Gaotame did not learn while still girls, they sat down with Gabaratiwe after they had married. She added that this is how most potters begin today. Whether they know it from childhood18 and ‘activate’ their knowledge as married women when needed, or sit down with someone and learn without prior knowledge, most women nowadays do it for the extra money. And, because of the money in it, they were not only women doing it anymore. Gabaratiwe and her cousins conveyed that the traditional Tswana marriage preferences were observed by many, but there were no restrictions on who a potter could marry because she was making pots.

work with the potters in Manaledi proceeded, they will provide the framework for the remaining discussion in this chapter. Heat and previous ethnoarchaeological research The concept of heat (fiša) is well documented for Sotho/Tswana speakers (e.g. Brown 1926; Schapera 1940; Krige and Krige 1943; Ashton 1952; Pauw 1960; Mönnig 1967; Hammond-Tooke 1981, 1993; Kuper 1982; Comaroff 1985). While rain is associated with ‘coolness’ and is thought to symbolize the healthy, prosperous and socially euphoric, qualities regarded as opposites are associated with heat. As we have seen for the Manyika Shona, heat is considered a state of impurity and therefore danger. David Hammond-Tooke (1981:122-23) writes that the three main loci of danger are death, people living on the perceived social margins of society, and sex. Thus, the bereaved, women experiencing pregnancy and miscarriage etc., and people in marginal positions, such as youth undergoing initiation and travellers, are thought to be hot. The danger is frequently not conceived to be towards the hot person, but those who potentially come in contact with the person (Hammond-Tooke 1981:122-23).

As was the case in the study from Manica, in relation to social practice involving clay (letsopa) the three potters in the Tswapong Hills seemed to associate the concepts of ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’, and the extent to which these were followed when making pots, intimately with a specific set of taboos. The following pollution concepts relating to clay were recorded: 

sexual intercourse



pregnancy



menstruation



mourners



clay activities during rainy season

Of particular interest to the comparative framework emphasized in this study is that previous ethnoarchaeological studies of Tswana pottery (see also Lane 1998b:179-81) confirm the concept of heat as being of importance to the manufacture process, and that comparison of Tswana- and Shona-speakers has revealed the existence of similar pollution ideas. Taken together, the work of Phenyo Thebe (1996) on Kwena-speaking Tswana and Ingrid Kgang’s (2002) comparative treatise of Kwena- and Kalanga Shona-speakers indicate that certain metaphoric associations and pollution ideas are found to relate to activities in household space in both cases:

The three first avoidances were also recorded in the Shona case, and in Manaledi discussion of the pollution ideas directed attention to topics of comparative interest: social practice at the clay source and the use of household spaces while dealing with clay. The two last concepts of mourners (people associated with closeness to death) and seasonal restrictions that follow the agricultural cycle, attracted particular attention to cultural linkages between clay and ancestors (badimo) and associations between the material and aquatic beings, rain and the fertility of cultivated soil. Significantly, the clay avoidances were found not to be confined to pottery manufacture alone, but also to include those parts of hut building where women were constructing walls out of earth materials. As these aspects turned out to be core topics around which the



the association between womb/birth and pottery making



restricted access for men to the potting house



avoidance of sexual intercourse before coming in contact with clay



avoidance of pottery making during menstruation and pregnancy

As also seen in the Manyika Shona case, Eugenia Herbert’s (1993:215) contention that the location of potting is within the nexus of sexual, menstrual and pregnancy taboos is corroborated – a location which emphasizes its analogy to human reproduction but at the same time invokes the danger that human reproductivity may imperil pottery and vice versa.

18 The Tswana-speaking Kgatla, for example, divide the human life span into four major stages. For women, the stages correspond roughly in relative age to the Western categories of girl, adolescent, woman and old woman. However, as Suggs (2002:24) notes, age is actually only of secondary importance in a woman’s movement through these stages. Physical maturation, competence in decision-making and judgment, motherhood, household provisioning and the establishment of

6.2

managerial household independence are primary agents in life-cycle transitions.

Life history stages and their spatiality

Following the same methodological approach as for the Manica case, this second part of the chapter considers 56

Two potential dangers the connections between household spaces and the various life history stages of clay and pottery. Particular attention will be given to links between clay activities and thermodynamic spaces associated with transformation of substances belonging to the agricultural domain.

Ethnographic discussion of rain, fertility and the cultivated soil The restrictions on the use of clay and their associated problem-solving strategies indicate that the material is linked conceptually to water, rain and the fertility of agricultural soil. That the prohibitions also include the collection of clay at the source is meaningful when taking into consideration that the badimo are seen to inhabit not only the places where they lived and died as people (villages and graves), but are also believed to traverse the woods and streams and watch over the use of the resources in them19, as Paul Landau (1993:10) writes in his discussion of rainmaking practices among Tswana-speakers in the Tswapong Hills. For the Tswana-speaking Kgatla, Isaac Schapera (1971:92-93) observed that there were practices associated with rainmaking besides the public rainmaking ceremonies. These involved all citizens annually. For parts of the cultivation season people had to observe various prohibitions in order to prevent the ‘spoiling of the year’. Taboos included avoiding felling or cutting certain species of trees, to discontinue the ploughing and clearing of any new land for cultivation, and to avoid cutting grass for thatching huts. Other seasonal prohibitions were that people should not castrate young bulls or kill bulls during the day, which would generate hailstorm and unfavourable wind. Of particular interest to social practices involving clay is that these seasonal taboos also included “killing lizards, iguanas and crocodiles, digging pot clay, making pots and building huts” (Schapera 1971:93). This indicates a conceptual link somewhat similar to that which was seen for Manyika Shona-speakers, namely that clay is associated with water and aquatic animals.

Collecting clay [W]ater (rain) and agriculture were certainly linked in the Tswapong lexicon, and this can be heard in the Tswapong songs, probably very old, that associate fertility, crops, rain, and the wilderness, where the ancestors dwell (Landau 1993:13)

Field observations All three potters in Manaledi collected their clay from the same source. Gabaratiwe learnt about this particular place from her grandmother. In her grandmother’s days, all potters in and around the village took their clay from this source. Furthermore, it had been used for a long time when her grandmother came to Manaledi from the nearby village of Gotau. And, she added, “It’s so much of it there that we will never be able to finish it”. Gabaratiwe always went to collect clay herself. She could not ask anyone else to dig out the clay for her, but others could help carry it to the homestead. As with clay activities in general, collection of clay could only be done in the dry winter months. Potters were not allowed to work with clay during the agricultural season by other people, by the chief, and by the ancestors. The punishment from the badimo for engaging in such activities outside of season was that the pots would crack during firing and that it would keep the rain away. The same pollution avoidances applied for clay extraction as for the manipulation of clay in household spaces. Gabaratiwe’s husband Ramokate conveyed that the nearby hilltop called Matolani was a site where they went to approach the ancestors. A new potter wishing to use the clay source should first ask the chief for permission to enter the site, and afterwards go to Matolani to ask the ancestors for permission to collect clay at the source, accompanied by a traditional healer. This was a one-off event, after having introduced herself to the ancestors it was not necessary for the potter to ask for permission to find clay at the source again. People from several villages were known to go to Matolani. The measures taken by the potters in Manaledi in order to avoid pollution were both temporal and spatial. Temporally, social practice involving clay was confined to the dry winter months. Spatially, the potting activities were kept away from the wind by being confined to the inside of a designated hut (Fig. 6.2). The hut was associated with the female domain, and otherwise used for cooking activities (see below).

19 Landau also notes that there has been no need to contrast ‘tradition’ with Christian practice for the study of rainmaking in the Tswapong Hills. Rainmaking continued to be a subject of social and economic contestation, and was still linked to the political life of village and region, after the introduction of Christianity in the region. Thus, rainmaking “remained a factor wherever Christians negotiated their practice and eventually, assumptions: in a prayer circle, farmland or village kgotla” (Landau 1993:28).

57

Material Knowledges

Figure 6.2: The hut used by Gabaratiwe Piti when making pottery. thereafter sifted in order to remove small rocks and pebbles. The temper, white quartz sand, was also pounded in a small mortar until it reached the desired powdery consistency. Subsequently, the red clay and the white quartz powder were brought together in an operation resembling winnowing in a basket (Fig. 6.4). Gabaratiwe considered the right combination of the two to be to add half the amount of temper to that of clay (10 buckets of clay and 5 buckets of temper). When the desired mixture of red and white materials was obtained, the finished dry clay could be stored away until the day before the process of shaping pots was started. After adding water the clay was left overnight.

Storage, shaping, decoration, and drying Once brought to the homestead, which could be done from any direction, the clay was stored (Fig. 6.3) either behind the main house or in the hut used for making pottery. It could not be left out in the courtyard towards the front entrance. The reason for this, told Gabaratiwe, was that clay could not be left amongst people. And when asked whether it was the clay or people that were the potential problem, she replied that it had to do with people who were ‘difficult’, either by choice or by being in a state that endangered the clay. For example, a person could put salt in the clay, which would spoil the firing. Another example could be a woman in her period coming too close, which would have the same result: the pots would crack during firing.

When shaping her pots, Gabaratiwe used the method termed by Gosselain (2000:202-3, fig. 4 and 5) as drawing of a lump (see also Krause 1985:112-21). Before closing the base, the pots were left to dry overnight. Afterwards they were left for another two days before decoration. Only larger vessels for brewing

The clay and temper came from two different places. The red-coloured clay was first processed dry; it was pounded using a wooden mortar and pestle, and

58

Two potential dangers

Figure 6.3: Storage of clay in a metal drum behind the main house.

Figure 6.4: Red clay and white quartz brought together.

59

Material Knowledges her family. Outer boundaries are often found marked with a fence (of wooden poles or metal wire) enclosing a large open yard (Motzafi-Haller 1992:61). Each homestead may typically include the separate houses of parents, older children and other extended kin who have built with them and, in line with the CCP, often in a rough circle or arc facing onto a central place. It may also include a sleeping house, house for storage of goods, foodstuffs etc., a sleeping house for young children, shelter for the cooking fire, a sleeping house for visitors as well as structures for domestic animals (Morton 2007:163). Of particular interest here is the part of the homestead referred to as the segotlo and its relationship to the lolwapa.

beer and storing liquids were normally decorated. Decoration consisted of colouring the vessel with red ochre and usually also applying a painted white band immediately above the shoulder. The band was often made of small chevrons or a zigzag pattern, and spaces filled with punctuates. The drying period before firing lasted about a week for small cooking vessels. For larger vessels for liquids this period could last up to three weeks, depending on the weather conditions. The expression used was that they had to become ‘wind dry’. They were left to dry in the same hut as they were shaped. The reason for this was the same as for the stages of storage, shaping and decoration; it was kept in Gabaratiwe’s spaces because other people could, by their bodily state or intentionally, cause harm to the clay. These spaces included those behind the main house and the designated cooking areas where the hut used for potting was situated.

As already shown, polluting heat is associated with women’s lack of physical closure. Following Comaroff (1985:71, 81-82), female and male bodies’ association to containment differed. The female body’s orifices of procreation was associated with unstable and uncontrollable transformations with ambivalent social existence, such as birth and death, and these transformations were also related to the products of cultivation and foraging. For the male body, on the other hand, the mouth was emphasized, giving grounds for associations to physical closure, to controlled speech and to eating, as well as to the relatively stable resource of cattle as an opposition to the more unstable agriculture.

Ethnographic accounts of the segotlo and the lolwapa Motzafi-Haller’s note on the degree of continuity in settlement spatiality is significant for the observations made during fieldwork in Manaledi, even though the village’s present location is fairly recent. Spatially, a homestead is well defined in Tswana villages, as was also the case for the homestead of Gabaratiwe Piti and

Figure 6.5: Two ngwana vessels, used for brewing beer and storage of liquids.

60

Two potential dangers

Figure 6.6: Examples of household spatiality at Gabane 1. Grey areas indicate spaces used. Above: cooking activities and storage of household equipment. Below: brewing of beer and storage of water (after Larsson & Larsson 1984).

61

Material Knowledges These metaphoric associations stood in a spatial opposition to each other in the homestead which, as will be remembered, was situated in the middle of the three concentric circles of Tswana settlements, that is, between the area with the kgotla and the cattle enclosure in the inner centre and the outer periphery of cultivated fields and naga. While women followed the unstable seasonal rhythms between the household and outer fields, men followed a more determinedly social rhythm between the political centre and the household. Thus, within the perimeter of the homestead each house had a front and back yard, the former oriented towards and the latter away from the chief’s court. The backyard (segotlo) was the sphere of the woman of the house and of her children and matrilateral kin, and was engaged in a continuous relationship of symbiosis with fields and naga. The segotlo was the area for storage of cereal, where “raw food from field and bush [was] prepared, cooked, stored and apportioned, and the young nurtured and raised” (Comaroff 1985:58). In other words, the space started structuring and transforming ‘ecology’ into the deeper spaces of household and homestead (S. Hall 2000:85). By contrast, the frontyard (lolwapa) articulated between the household and the larger sociopolitical structures of the polity. It was an arena for male political interaction and it contained the only passage from homestead to communal ground and gave sole access to the public arena of the ward (Comaroff 1985:57-58). Significantly, as Comaroff (1985:80) also notes, the female body and the person of the chief was each associated with a hearth and was foci for two different spatial orientations.

Spatiality of finished pots: a comparative example Following a similar classification as for the Manica pottery (see 5.2), the ceramic vessels are divided into two main groups: relatively small pots (sejwana) used for cooking, serving or eating, and larger vessels (ngwana) used for brewing beer and storage of liquids (Fig. 6.5). These were all found within the same domain as that used for making pottery. The spatial situation in Manaledi is found to be very similar to that documented by Anita Larsson and Viera Larsson (1984:63-85) for the homestead Gabane 1 in the Kweneng District (Fig. 6.6). Among the various household activities that are directly relevant to the use and storage of ceramic vessels are: a) cooking activities, b) storage of household equipment, c) brewing beer, and d) storage of water. In light of the discussion of a contrast between the segotlo and the lolwapa, it is significant that these four activities not only share the domain with the preparation and storage of grains and consumption of food (Larsson and Larsson 1984:65-68, 70-71, 74-76), but also that there is a marked spatial contrast between all of these activities and the cattle enclosure.

Since they were found to be situated in spaces at the back and in the designated areas for cooking activities, it can be argued that the life history stages up to the firing of pots in Gabaratiwe’s homestead were associated with the segotlo sphere.

This may be seen as a spatial articulation of the two concepts of women and cattle as being in a paradoxical way both identified with and standing in opposition to one another. The articulation is made particularly clear in the context of marriage exchanges in which women are equated with cattle (Kuper 1980, 1982; Guy 1987), while on the other hand there is the form of pollution concept found when women and cattle come too close. For example, as Hammond-Tooke (1981:123, 128) notes for the Sotho-speaking Kgaga, no woman during her fertile years is allowed to enter the cattle enclosure.

Firing

Concluding remarks

The firing of pottery took place at a designated space outside the perimeter of the homestead, and the seasonal restrictions also applied for this stage in the process. In addition, only the potter should light the fire and come near it while firing. Other people should keep a distance to the potting fire, because of the potential danger of pollution.

Following the methodological terminology presented in chapter 4, it is argued here that the segotlo and the lolwapa may be seen as two separate areas of weighted spaces, and thereby to constitute two spheres of bodily experience. Each sphere is associated with its own hearth as meeting point and they are, according to Comaroff (1985:80), foci for two different spatial orientations.

62

7.

CLAY AND THE OUTSIDER WIFE

[T]extured decoration on beer pots is directed primarily at people with whom one cannot share sour milk, that is, potential partners in marriage. Interaction with them is critical. Through it, agnatic clusters promote themselves as social entities and accumulate productive and reproductive capacity. Without it, homesteads could not exist and lines of descent would have no future. And yet, the presence of strangers in the ancestral home is potentially dangerous (Armstrong et al. 2008:544)

southern Africa. For Nguni-speakers, however, the classificatory ambiguity and threat to social order represented by pollution is more often expressed through concepts of dirt and inner darkness. Contamination is believed to render people vulnerable to bad luck and sickness, especially in terms of the productive and reproductive success of family and homestead (e.g. Krige 1950:280-335; Berglund 1976:225-28; Ngubane 1977:77-99; Huffman 2007a:439; Armstrong et al. 2008:515). In relation to this, ethnographers have drawn attention to the ambiguity of the outsider wife. Since exogamy makes the wife a stranger to her husband’s ancestors (amadlozi), she is particularly susceptible to suspicions and accusations about pollution. And, by being at the same time both her father’s representative and a part of her husband’s homestead, she is also considered ambiguous in another way. When giving birth, a particular and potentially dangerous intimacy occurs between the life-giving outsider wife and the husband’s amadlozi. Consequently, pollution is most strongly associated with birth and death. Milder pollution exists for other transitional and ambiguous circumstances which are associated with reproductive potential, such as puberty, menstruation, sexual intercourse, pregnancy and breastfeeding (e.g. Ngubane 1977:77-99; Armstrong et al. 2008:515).

This conclusion by Juliet Armstrong et al. in their recent article on Zulu ceramic style is found to be a salient point of departure for the discussion in the following chapter, for more than one reason. The first is that they focus on the role of pots in social dynamics taking place for a large part in household spaces, and thereby that they discuss dynamics which include nonhuman ancestral members of society as well as the living. Thus, they emphasize the intimate links between human reproduction, pollution ideas and agricultural and pastoralist produce (particularly beer and sour milk) coming together to partake in social transformations in households. Since intimacies between humans and nonhumans have been central to the two foregoing chapters, the analysis by Armstrong et al. may be particularly helpful for the purpose of comparison with Shona- and Tswana-speakers. The second reason is that their article is based on fieldwork from different rural areas in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, including the area where the field studies in this work were conducted, namely in Pongola. Hence, although this body of data is much more limited and the approach differs in important respects, the combination of the two approaches may potentially offer important insights into the various ways that clay is embedded in social practice in households.

7.1

Household spaces and dangerous women

For Nguni-speakers pollution ideas may be seen in close relation to the concept of hlonipha, an expression which, in a wide sense, translates to the English term ‘to respect’ and is found commonly used in both Nguni and Sotho linguistic traditions (Kuckertz 1990:311-12; Huffman 2007a:439). The custom involves both action and speech as forms of respect (e.g. Kunene 1958; Finlayson 1984; R. Herbert 1990). According to Armstrong et al. (2008:515-16), hlonipha as the basis for appropriate behaviour is still significant, especially in rural areas, and serves to protect the integrity of the homestead head’s agnatic cluster. This cluster includes the homestead head’s amadlozi. The ancestors include both an undifferentiated group of clan ancestors, as well as recognizable members who died recently. The first category comprises all the dead who shared the homestead head’s clan name. The second, typically grandparents, distinguishes the ancestors of different agnatic clusters within a clan (see also Hammond-Tooke 1993:151).

Instructive for the purpose of comparison with the Shona and Tswana cases discussed previously is marriage preferences. Zulu is a Nguni language, and Zuluspeakers are fiercely exogamous: a man cannot marry a woman from any of the clans of his four grandparents (Hammond-Tooke 1993:107). Armstrong et al. (2008:544) make the important point that the social role of ceramic vessels should not be studied as a function of the proximity between men and women alone, but must also be seen as part of complex social dynamics having to do with the strict rules of exogamy, with the relationships between members of a certain lineage and other lineages to which it interacts through bonds of marriage. This point is taken into consideration here and, as will be demonstrated, the aspect of the ‘outsider’ wife and the close links she maintains after marriage with the lineage she was born into, not only have implications for the social significance of specific types of vessels and the substances they contain, but also for clay practices’ association to certain household spaces.

These aspects of social dynamics in households – pollution ideas, the outsider wife and hlonipha – provide the background against which the question sought resolved in this chapter is formulated: To what extent are the differences from what was seen in the Shona and

Another characteristic trait for Nguni-speakers involves the ideology of pollution. As seen for Shona- and Tswana-speakers, pollution ideas are expressed through the concept of heat, which is a widely shared notion in 63

Material Knowledges current chief (inKosi) at the time of fieldwork was Zaba Ndlangamandla. Situated in the Northern Zululand Sourveld, the area receives summer rainfall of between 600 and 1050 mm a year, with a little rain in winter. The dominant vegetation type is wooded grassland, and the terrain is mainly low, undulating mountains (Mucina and Rutherford 2006:505-6).

Tswana examples linked to differences in the use and understanding of household spaces associated with clay practice? Similar to the two previous fieldwork chapters, this also consists of two main parts. The first seeks to establish variables in relation to hearths as meeting points, contextually specific differentiation of social ‘weight’ laid on certain spaces and spheres of experience (see 4.3). Particular emphasis will be laid on clay and pots’ relationships to ancestors, household spatiality, and symbolism relating to colour and fire. The last part follows clay and pots through their various life history stages, and seeks to arrive at an understanding of weighted spaces in the households in Pongola. As the final of Part II, this chapter concludes with a brief comparison of aspects in the three studies which will inform archaeological interpretation in Part III.

The homesteads of the three women – Peni Gumbi, Gulaphi Buthelezi and Zaziena Masondo – are situated within a few hundred metres from each other, and they were all familiar with the others’ potting activities. Apart from a fourth woman who occasionally made pots, they were the only active potters left in Phondwane. However, none of the three were related, and they had all acquired their skills independently. Although focusing on Zulu-speakers in a different area from the ethnoarchaeological investigations by Kathleen Mack et al., the observations made in Phondwane corroborate their findings in that many of the terms for the various areas of homestead and hut were still in use, and the appropriate behaviour observed (Mack et al. 1991:1034).

Household spaces and ancestors The field studies were conducted with three women making pottery (izinkhamba, sing. ukhamba) in the rural area of Phondwane, about 12 km west of the town of Pongola, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (Fig. 7.1). The

Figure 7.1: Map showing the location of the Phondwane area. principle emphasized in the ethnographically derived CCP model (see 2.1). Inside the outer perimeter is the dwelling area, while the innermost circle is a cattle enclosure. The main entrance of the umizi is directly opposite to the principal hut (indlunkulu) and aligned

The Zulu homestead in the ethnography In the ethnographic literature, the form of the typical Zulu homestead or umizi (pl. imizi) is conveyed as consisting of three concentric circles (Fig. 7.2), a 64

Clay and the outsider wife of the hut is a raised hearth with three firestones (amaseko), one of which points to the umsamo. This stone is regarded as sacred and also associated with the ancestors. In addition to the umsamo and the hearth, the ancestors are known to favour the entrance of the hut (Raum 1973:144-47; Berglund 1976:102-4; Mack et al. 1991:119; Kuper 1993:477-79).

with the entrance to the cattle enclosure. The practice of building the homestead on a hill slope, so that the two entrances of the homestead and the cattle byre face downwards, has been emphasized. This typical layout is seen as an expression of the polygynous, extended family. The homestead head, his wives and children form the core of the settlement, where the position of each wife’s hut reflects her and her children’s relative status. Also, the settlement may accommodate nonrelatives in client relationships. The homestead is thereby the centre of productive activity, and its inhabitants form an economic unit with rights to cattle and other property (M. Hall 1984b:65-67; Davison 1988:101; cf. e.g. Holleman 1986; Kuper 1993).

In the homestead, two huts are regarded as being of particular importance: the indlunkulu and the grandmother’s hut (kagogo, an abbreviation for indlu likagogo). This is due to their association to their intimate links to the ancestors. Especially the kagogo is important; the grandmother has the ancestors concentrated around her (Berglund 1976:103, 197; Mack et al. 1991:103:4). The right/left orientation of huts is, when seen from above, the reverse of the right/left orientation of the homestead. Spaces that are known to be strongly associated with the amadlozi include the main entrance to the cattle enclosure, the grain pits beneath its surface, and the back of the enclosure, opposite the entrance (Raum 1973:147-51; Berglund 1976:102, 112; Armstrong et al. 2008:516).

The traditional Nguni hut is circular in plan. In structuralist terms, ethnographers have pointed out that Nguni-speakers stress a right/left distinction, right being very generally associated with men, left with women. The rear of the hut is a raised sacred area, the umsamo, which is associated with the ancestors (Raum 1973:154; Kuper 1982:146-47). The umsamo is a ritual site and the ancestors are found at the back of all huts, including the principal hut, residences and cooking huts. At the centre

Figure 7.2: The typical Zulu homestead (after M. Hall 1984b). Heinz Kuckertz (1990: 289-90) and Mack et al. (1991:125-27) have corroborated Kuper’s (1982) argument for the importance of a central axis of the Nguni homestead, which largely determines the position and alignment of the buildings. Along the axis are the

principal hut, the cattle enclosure, the homestead entrance and the ash heap. The central axis ties together people, their ancestors and cattle. There is, according to Hammond-Tooke (2008:64),

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Material Knowledges a line of spiritual force that ties the sacred umsamo to the world of men, and the byre, the home of the family herd. This symbolic link expresses a profound reality, for there is a fundamental identity between the members of the homestead and their cattle. Household and herd are said to be one, constituting a single community

intercourse, the time just after having given birth and mourners were emphasized as the most important by all three. Armstrong et al. relate this to the fact that moulding of the clay is considered analogous to the development of the foetus in the womb. A new mother resumes potting some three months after she has given birth. Also, this relationship between procreation and potting means that a newly married woman cannot make pots in her husband’s homestead until she has given birth to her first child (Armstrong et al. 2008:520). Although menstruation and pregnancy were mentioned by all three, they were explicitly stated to be milder and less important than the other avoidances. Specifically, pregnancy tended to be downplayed in relation to sexual activity and matters which were directly linked to giving life and to mourners intimately associated with death. Raum (1973:274) writes that pregnant women do not make pots because the work conflicts with that of their husband’s ancestors and interferes in the timing of the birth.

Turning to the women and their homesteads in Phondwane, the links to ancestors and symbolic associations to household spaces and materiality – especially the umsamo and the central hearth – are of importance to social practice involving clay (ibumba). Clay knowledge and marriage Peni Gumbi learnt about pottery making from a neighbouring woman, the late Selina Ndlangamandla, when she and her family first moved to their present homestead in 1994. Peni and her husband are both from Nongoma, and came to Phondwane after having lived in the town of Pongola for a short while. At the time of fieldwork, her husband worked in the mining industry in Mpumalanga, and was away for longer periods. Gulaphi Buthelezi, the eldest of the three women, was taught how to make pots by her mother when she was still a girl. Now a widow, she had been the first of three wives. She turned out to be an important source of information concerning the hlonipha system of avoidances, particularly for the relationship between mother-in-law and wives and between the different wives making pots. Gulaphi had stopped making pots a few years earlier, complaining that her hands were not up to it any more. Thus, our meetings were based on conversation alone.

Concerning practice involving clay and the hlonipha system relating to the outsider wife, there seems to have been at least a certain degree of spatial avoidance within the homestead between women making pots. Zaziena Masondo described: “You keep the clay separate. If you don’t know about the clay, where it’s been kept, then you don’t know if it will come right”. Peni Gumbi gave a similar account, describing how each wife and the mother-in-law kept their clay activities separate from each other. However, she added, this depended on whether the homestead expanded when new wives came. Thus, the practice demanded that each wife had her own kitchen hut to keep her clay and do her potting. This situation seems comparable to that observed by Mack et al. (1991:105) for activities associated with the cooking hut in general. It is the place where many of the daily activities occur, in particular child care, entertaining woman visitors and food preparation. When a wife stops cooking with her mother-in-law, they also stop pooling crops, and with her own kitchen follow one or more granaries. Gulaphi Buthelezi told that a young wife who wanted to make pots at her husband’s homestead had to ask her mother-in-law. It was usually to her mother-inlaw a wife should turn; when asked about the relationship between wives, none of the three women knew of any need for a young wife to ask for the consent from an elder wife. This indicates the relative importance of the mother in-law’s intimate link to the ancestors, living in the kagogo with the amadlozi concentrated around her.

Zaziena Masondo was the youngest of the three. Her husband was at the time of fieldwork working in Swaziland. Zaziena told us that although her mother had made pots, and she watched her doing it, she did not actually learn it as a girl living at home. After Zaziena got married she wanted to learn the craft for the extra income. But although she tried to do it on the basis of what she remembered from watching her mother, she found out she had to ask her elder sister, who did learn the craft from their mother. Significantly, Zaziena did not know about the pollution concepts and hlonipha avoidances before her sister taught her. And, she added, she observed the same rules for potting as her mother and sister did. The three potters in Phondwane all accounted for the avoidances in similar terms: 

sexual intercourse



pregnancy (mild)



menstruation (mild)



infants under 3 months



mourners

Based on her experience as having been the first of three wives and a mother-in-law, Gulaphi Buthelezi conveyed that the women could all go together to collect clay and, furthermore, that the ones going could bring clay for others. Also, the women often used the same place for firing outside the homestead perimeter, and the firing of pots was frequently done together (see also 7.2). Thus, the separation of clay activities between women seems to have been a phenomenon that for the most part was

Peni Gumbi conveyed that elder potters were stricter on following the rules than young people. Sexual 66

Clay and the outsider wife Based on her experience as having been the first of three wives and a mother-in-law, Gulaphi Buthelezi conveyed that the women could all go together to collect clay and, furthermore, that the ones going could bring clay for others. Also, the women often used the same place for firing outside the homestead perimeter, and the firing of pots was frequently done together (see also 7.2). Thus, the separation of clay activities between women seems to have been a phenomenon that for the most part was connected to the use of spaces within the confines of the homestead.

described as ‘small’. When asked why there were differences in how people hlonipha fires differently according to their size and location, Gulaphi Buthelezi explained: It is because the fires are different. The fire for the pots is big, and the one for the ancestors in the cattle kraal as well. The one in the kitchen hut is small. You only hlonipha the big fires

The fires kindled by men were especially associated with ceremonies in the cattle enclosure held in September, before the rains and agricultural season. They built up a special fireplace for the occasion, and made a fire suitable for big pots. Then they prepared the meat for the ancestors there. The women did not go to that fire in the cattle enclosure. The men lighting and kindling these ‘big’ fires had to observe the hlonipha avoidances, especially to keep away from sexual intercourse and mourners.

Sour milk and fire: the ethnography and field observations As indicated in the opening of this chapter, sour milk is not shared with people outside one’s own lineage. More precisely, a man can eat sour milk only with people who share the same clan names of his four grandparents. He is not to eat it at the homestead of his wife’s father, and his wife can eat sour milk at his homestead only after the ukudlakudla ceremony, when she becomes more closely integrated into her husband’s homestead. The substance is directly related to descent; its consumption is seen to promote the production of semen in the homestead head and thereby to secure the reproduction of the homestead (Krige 1950:55, 383; Raum 1973:126, 171, 275; Armstrong et al. 2008:544). Armstrong et al. (2008:544) further note that sour milk in certain respects stands in opposition to meat, beer and visitors. As a food of the household it was commonly kept in the umsamo, but removed when ancestral offering of meat and beer were placed there, or when guests were expected in the hut. Raum (1973:151) writes that sour milk is avoided during certain female conditions such as menstruation, avoidances that are also observed for fire.

7.2

Life history stages and their spatiality

For the ceramic manufacturing process and surface treatments, recent detailed accounts by Frank Jolles (2005), Kent Fowler (2006) and Armstrong et al. (2008) are available. The following discussion will therefore concentrate on the relationship between clay activities, pollution concepts and household spaces. Due to the use of the same spaces for the life history stages taking place in the homestead, the presentation of the temporally extended process is divided into four segments: 1) the collection and transport of clay; 2) the storage, shaping, decoration and drying phases; 3) the firing of pots; and 4) the spatiality of the vessel types encountered in Phondwane. This chapter concludes with the definition of a sphere of experience and a brief comparative discussion of the three field studies.

Fireplaces are located at the centre of the hut or slightly off-centre towards the door, depending on the position of the poles supporting the roof (see Mack et al. 1991:11923), and the customary rules or behaviour associated with hearths (Raum 1973:150-51; Berglund 1976:103-4) bear witness to their relatively heavy load of sexual connotations. Fire was associated with sexual activity; while the shape of the fireplace suggested a vagina, the redness and heat of the fire was said to suggest sexual intercourse. The throwing of milk into a fireplace was therefore to suggest the ejaculation of semen into the female organ (Raum 1973:151).

Collecting and transporting clay All three potters collected their clay from the same source at the nearby Nhlangula Hill. In fact, the potters in the Phondwane area have used to go there for a long while, and this particular hill has been their main source20. Gulaphi Buthelezi knew of another place by the Pongola River called Emuzi Nsango, but people had

Field observations

20 Gulaphi Buthelezi described how the source had been used for

The three women in Phondwane conveyed that there were differences between fires, depending on who were kindling them, and where they were situated. Peni Gumbi described the fire for the ancestors as being different from all other fires. Associated with the cooking of meat for the ancestors and made at the top of the cattle enclosure, she described it as ‘big’ and ‘roaring’. And people gather around the smoke from this kind of fire, because it attracts the ancestors. Conversely, the everyday cooking fire inside the kitchen hut was

many generations, and told that the women collecting clay there had actually started at the top. As the sources were exhausted they moved downwards to the foot of the hill and ended up at its present location. She also explained the way potters have used to locate new places to dig for clay at the hill. The soil above a clay source is often salty, and goats like salt. The women therefore used to watch where goats showed more interest in the soil than the vegetation, because they knew there was a good chance of there being clay underneath.

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Material Knowledges potting house was to ensure that the clay was not polluted during manufacture (see also Lawton 1967:52; Armstrong et al. 2008:521). Regarding the technique for shaping pots, all three women in Phondwane used coiling, which is in accordance with Gosselain’s (2000:201-2), fig. 4 and 5) classification and distribution map for African ceramic techniques. Firing Normally using a shallow depression during the dry winter months, the firing pit was located outside the perimeter of the homestead. Importantly, the place was downslope from the homestead entrance. Normal firing time was two to three hours, depending on the size of the pots and how many pots were fired at one time. Shallow depressions in the landscape were preferred to avoid winds as much as possible, with sufficient distance to the homestead and anything else that may catch fire (trees and tall grasses). Thus, although less detailed, the observations of firing in Phondwane corroborate the information given by Armstrong et al. (2008: 521-23). The same rules apply for firing as for the other stages of ceramic manufacture. Interestingly, in light of the previous discussion of hlonipha in relation to certain forms of fire associated with the amadlozi, a potter told Armstrong et al. (2008:521) that the flames and smoke from the potting fire could disturb and upset the ancestors.

Figure 7.3: The fireplace and the back part in the indlunkulu at Gulaphi Buthelezi’s homestead. stopped going there after a short while, because the clay was not good anymore: the pots started to crack. Gulaphi said the clay from Nhlangula Hill proved to be stronger and could take the drying in the sun better. Concerning the potential of pollution, Peni Gumbi preferred to go and find the clay herself, in order to make sure that the clay was right. If she had to send someone else, she sent her daughter, not a male. Sometimes men or boys came along to remove the top soil, because of the occasional need to dig deep down in order to get to the clay. In cases when pots started to crack or one had other reasons for approaching the ancestors that related to the clay, Gulaphi Buthelezi conveyed that ancestors were not approached at the clay source. No ceremonies were ever known to be held there. The umsamo was the site for approaching the amadlozi. This was also confirmed by Peni Gumbi, while she added that she would usually ask her husband to do this when he was home but would otherwise do it herself.

The spatiality of four vessels and their contents As was the case with the manufacturing process and ceramic style, the Zulu ceramic repertoire has recently been discussed in detail by Jolles (2005), K. Fowler (2006) and Armstrong et al. (2008). The presentation here is limited to the four vessel types and their contents as encountered during fieldwork in Phondwane. Two vessels were associated with brewing and transport of beer and storage of liquids; the imbiza was used for cooking beer, and the uphiso typically used to transport it. As beer vessels, the imbiza and the uphiso were usually placed in the umsamo. Two vessel types were associated with cooking of food and serving of food and drink. The isoco was a small bowl used for cooking cereals and vegetables, and usually found in a wife’s cooking hut. The omanchishana was a small bowl sometimes used for serving of food. However, it was not given to guests, and was more commonly found as a vessel for beer that was placed in the umsamo at the back as an offering to the ancestors. These offerings are later drunk by the oldest members of the household – the members closest to the ancestors.

There were no seasonal restrictions on the collection of clay. Regarding transport, the clay could be brought into the homestead from any direction. Once brought into the homestead, the clay was kept in the same spaces she used for shaping the pots, usually a kitchen hut.

A sphere of experience

Storage, shaping, decoration and drying

Returning briefly to the methodological considerations in chapter 4, and in particular hearths and heat transformations (see 4.2), it is argued that the clay practices and use of pottery observed in the homesteads in Phondwane demonstrate that the fireplace as a meeting point and the umsamo as a particularly weighted space together form a single sphere of experience (see

As discussed above, there seems to have been a certain degree of spatial avoidance within the homestead between the women making pots. Usually the stages of clay storage, shaping of pots, decoration and drying all took place in the kitchen hut of the potter, where she also kept her tools for potting. The restricted access to the 68

Clay and the outsider wife 5.

4.3), a suggestion of intimacy between the two which finds support in the symbolism of the three firestones, as described by Mack et al. (1991:119), where one is pointing towards the umsamo and is associated with the ancestors. As the examples with sour milk and fire symbolism illustrates, the adjacent umsamo and central hearth are sites where substances regarded as important to the continued existence and well-being of the homestead combine with fire into symbolism laden with notions of fertility and sexuality, where the use of the white/red/black colour triad is of importance. This may be seen in relation to the discussion of personhood and substances within non-Western rationalities (see 4.2), namely that generative substances and energies may be transmitted from other sources than the living and in other ways than through reproduction. As seen in the example of sour milk, there is among Zulu-speakers the perceived danger that such a transfer may occur when sharing this substance with people that belong to an outsider clan. Following Ingold (2000:144-46) and C. Fowler (2004:128) it may be argued that the generative substances (sour milk, semen) are not just perceived and having the potential to be transferred biologically, but also to be exchanged between the entities incorporated into society at any time.

Regarding the first aspect, although the pollution concepts are similar in many respects, the relatively heavier emphasis on mourners and infants in the Tswana and Nguni case studies than among the Shona-speakers is an indication of the importance placed on lifecycle transitions associated with death and birth in these two contexts. Also, the prohibition against clay activities during the rainy season in Tswapong Hills is significant, not least since it seems to be linked to the second aspect, namely the cultural categorization of clay. Concerning clay’s material and spiritual associations in the three cases, there seems to have been comparatively more emphasis on clay as linked to aquatic animals and beings in the two first examples than in Pongola. In Manica clay was found associated with aquatic animals and spiritual beings linked to water, including the crocodile, the hippopotamus, the snake and the mermaid (nzuzu). In the Tswapong Hills ancestors are seen to watch over woods and streams and the resources in them, and Schapera (1971) finds among Tswana-speakers in southeastern Botswana, for example, that the seasonal restrictions included social practices having to do with clay as well as the killing of aquatic animals such as the crocodile, the lizard and the iguana.

Furthermore, the link between ancestors and fire was also found to be significant to another material aspect: the difference in social qualities associated with fire. There seems to have been differences in the weighting of fireplaces as meeting points according to spatiality and occasion. Everyday fires inside the cooking hut of a wife were described as ‘small’ and not found to be subject to avoidances associated with the hlonipha system. Fires prepared for the cooking of ancestral meat at the top of the cattle enclosure, on the other hand, were associated with the homestead head, and described as ‘big’ and ‘roaring’. The male that was to light the fire had to follow the hlonipha custom of avoiding sexual intercourse the preceding night. This form of fire was said to attract the attention of the ancestors – an attribute it shared, as we have seen, with the potting fire.

The three last comparative aspects relate to the use of household spaces, and especially to the concepts of heat and fire transformations. For all three, the Tswana case is found to differ in certain respects from the other two. Following the methodology presented in chapter 4, the differences may be seen through the concepts of hearths as meeting points, weighted spaces and spheres of experience. Concerning the third point, the centrality of fireplaces is significant. In the Shona and Nguni examples the back part of the hut – the Shona chikuwa and the Nguni umsamo – and the centrally placed hearth are found to be weighted spaces that combine into a single sphere of experience. By contrast, there seems to be two discrete spheres of experience in the Tswana case, due to the opposition between the female segotlo and the male lolwapa, each linked to a hearth as its focal point, at least conceptually. Fourth, the difference in spheres has implications for social interaction in household space. Whereas the centrally placed hearths seem to be meeting points for female and male bodily experience in the Shona and Nguni examples, in the Tswana case the fireplaces appear to be relatively more linked to either female or male experience. This brings the discussion to the fifth and final point, namely fire symbolism. The fireplaces in the Shona and Nguni examples, which were associated with a relatively high degree of interaction between differing sexual identities, seem to carry a relatively heavier symbolic load emphasizing sexuality than in the Tswana case, where fireplaces appear less linked to this form of symbolism. Here, the emphasis is rather on perpetuality (see Comaroff 1985:80; 8.4).

Comparing the three studies While taking into account the caution against outcomes that can be essentialist and reductive (see 4.1), the differences that have emerged between the three case studies allow for some concluding remarks. These concern characteristics that will be of particular relevance to the interpretations of the archaeological material in Part III. When comparing the respective social practices involving clay and pots, and their associations to household spaces, five aspects are emphasized: 1.

pollution concepts

2.

clay’s material and spiritual associations

3.

hearth location

4.

implications of the spatiality of fireplaces for social interaction

fire symbolism

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Material Knowledges These points will be taken into consideration and be used to inform the archaeological interpretations of settlements associated with the Moloko sequence in Part

III. While the first two will be addressed in chapter 9, the last three will be brought out in the following chapter 8.

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PART III Ambiguous Fires, Clay Containers and Dangerous Bodies This last part is made up of four chapters, each focusing on a specific theme. Chapter 8 is devoted to fire and the changes in hearth location and household materiality from Early to Late Moloko sites. Chapter 9 introduces clay into the interpretational framework; it contrasts excavated Early Moloko households with the Tswana ethnographic present in order to point out significant diachronic variation. The keyword for chapter 10 is stone. It discusses the household as social process, with particular emphasis on changes in women’s personhood, in relation to the wider sociopolitical context of transformation for the stonewalled communities during the LIA. And it compares the interpretations with other stone-builders associated with Moloko pottery, namely the inhabitants of the Bokoni settlements along the Mpumalanga escarpment. The final chapter 11 summarizes this work and revisits the concept of knowledge.

The opening chapter of Part II presented an approach emphasizing socially ‘weighted’ household spaces which combined into spheres of experience in relation to various stages in the life histories of clay and pots. This framework was applied for the three material culture studies in Part II, enabling a comparison of present-day contexts’ social practices and household dynamics involving clay. The studies illustrate the synchronic variation in built environment, social organization and cosmological universe in which these practices find their place, but also the similarities in pollution ideas relating to clay observed among Bantu-speakers in southern Africa. The following Part III consists of an archaeological synthesis which combines insights from the first two parts. The theoretical perspective and fieldwork experiences will be used to inform a diachronic approach to archaeologically captured Moloko household contexts.

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8.

A CHANGE OF HEARTHS

[T]he questions to ask about any agent are simply the following: Does it make any difference in the course of some other agent’s action or not? Is there some trial that allows someone to detect this difference? (Latour 2005:71)

intentionally, and are thereby also seen as the causal force in relation to the physical world. Consequently, causality is always placed somewhere else than with fire and other nonhumans. As Olsen argues, the “materiality of past societies is mostly seen as the outcome of historical social processes that are not in themselves material, leaving materiality itself with little or no causal or explanatory power for these processes” (Olsen 2003:90).

Latour directs attention to what he sees as the main reason why material objects traditionally have had little chance to play any significant role in the social sciences. A dominant version of social theory has become ‘the default position’, and an important problem with this position is the consideration that “there exists a social ‘context’ in which non-social activities take place” (Latour 2005:3-4). In other words, a specific domain of reality has been constructed where things are non-social or, at least, less social than people. Latour wants to blur the categorical distinctions between objects and societies. As a researcher of the social one continues to identify with Enlightenment thinking, with its separability of the human and nonhuman, when one should be reconfiguring modernity in new ways (Meskell 2005b:4-5).

8.1

Fire is an element which triggers an ambiguous fascination at a material and a psychological level (Flohr Sørensen and Bille 2008:253). And in archaeological interpretation fire seems to occupy an ambivalent position in the hierarchy of people and things. On the one hand fire is manipulated by people in ways similar to the rest of the passive material world. Materiality is subordinate to people and their thoughts, being handled and controlled as part of social practice. Fire is, however, found to be the most active among the nonhumans. After all, it is fire that transforms from one state to another and poses a danger through its heat, to humans and things alike. This ambivalence is a good illustration of the relationship to materiality within Western modernity in general and not least in archaeology. There is a line of argument running deeply through material studies and social archaeologies of different kinds: “that social relations are objectified – or ‘embodied’ in artefacts or monuments” (Olsen 2003:94), a general emphasis where culture is opposed to materiality, and “culture is seen to hover over the material world, but not to permeate it” (Ingold 2000:340).

The ambivalence of fire If fire, which, after all, is quite an exceptional and rare phenomenon, was taken to be a constituent element of the Universe, is it not because it is an element of human thought, the prime element of reverie? (Bachelard 1964:18)

Narratives of modernity often convey an understanding of people’s interaction with the material world expressing varying degrees of mastery and control. Fire is a good example. In addition to providing heat and light, humanly controlled fire also transforms vegetative resources into food, and substances like clay, iron, copper and tin into artefacts or tools. As such, fire is a life-giving aspect. However, the absence or lack of human control is associated with dark and destructive forces. Inference about causality associated with uncontrolled destruction gives grounds for suspicion that a person, deity or force with the knowledge and ability to act has intentionally unleashed fire as part of interactions between human and cosmic actors where an imbalance or breakage in exchange has occurred.

In the following analysis it will be argued that fire and other nonhumans are potentially actively involved in social processes taking place in household space. The analysis aims at demonstrating the implications of this understanding for the ways in which to interpret diachronic variability for Moloko household materiality.

8.2

As Mircea Eliade wrote: “The alchemist, like the smith, and like the potter before him, is a ‘master of fire’. It is with fire that he controls the passage of matter from one state to another” (Eliade 1962:79). Here, human and cosmic actors are actively and intentionally engaged. And, following the logic of such narratives further, a consequence is that those under control are passive, whether they are fire or other participants in human lifeworlds that are placed outside the mental inhabited by intentionality, ‘out there’ in the material world. For even when materiality is beyond human control, the ability to control is attributed to immaterial forces perceived to be equipped with intentionality. In other words, both human and cosmic actors are ascribed the ability to act

Moloko households and the spatiality of fire

The two broad groups of approaches to households (see 4.2) will here be combined. Although they generally share a common view of the built environment as integral to various cultural, social or ideological facets of life, the two groups can be distinguished by the principles or aspects they emphasize: ‘social’ on the one hand and ‘cultural’ or ‘ideational’ on the other (Souvatzi 2008:25-27). The emphasis in the initial parts of the analysis in this chapter would fall within the ‘social’ group, but gradually ‘ideational’ aspects are being implemented into the interpretational framework.

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A change of hearths each of the chapters 8, 9 and 10. The remaining part of this chapter is devoted to refining the earlier interpretations by particularly emphasizing hearth location and diachronic variation in meanings of fire and flames.

Aspects from both forms of approaches are sought combined in chapter 9. This author has previously (Fredriksen 2007, see 2.3) presented some preliminary interpretations of Moloko household space, making use of certain aspects of the fieldwork data from Manica. While still finding the overall theoretical and interpretational framework a useful point of departure, significant questions and ideas have emerged as a result of discussing responses to the article. In addition, the new ideas may now be combined with a broader, comparative framework offered by the two material-culture studies from the Tswapong Hills and Pongola (see 8.2). The article used the two sites 29/72 and 20/71 at Olifantspoort in the Magaliesberg, near Rustenburg, as examples. The sites were excavated by Revil Mason (1986). In order to provide a background for discussion of the new questions, the contexts will be presented briefly, followed by a short recapturing of the preliminary interpretations. This leads up to the articulation of three research questions; one for

The sites and their households Olifantspoort 29/72 (Mason 1986) belongs to the second phase of the Moloko sequence, before the introduction of stone walling, and is associated with the Olifantspoort facies (see 2.2), dated to between AD 1450 and 1700 (Huffman 2002:12, 2007a:434). The stonewalled 20/71 site, on the other hand, is associated with Buispoort pottery. Buispoort is found in a group of stonewalled settlements which, in addition to Olifantspoort 20/71 (Mason 1986), include Boshhoek (Huffman 1986b), Buffelshoek (Taylor 1979), Kaditshwene (Boeyens 1998, 2000) and Molokwane (Pistorius 1992, 1996). Buispoort is dated to the time period after AD 1700 and into the 19th century (Huffman 2007a:433-36).

Figure 8.1: Example of a hut floor from Olifantspoort 29/72: Hut floor A. Note the central firebowl with mortar and the table on each side, and the shaped curb with pot dimples both on the back platform itself and immediately below it (redrawn after Mason 1986).

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Material Knowledges 1.2, 2.2, 2.3). It was argued that the shift from internal sunken firebowls and elevated rear platforms to external and elevated hearths was particularly significant. The compartmentalization using walls did what the firebowls and the richly decorated pottery, including the high degree of ceramic bowls, had done in the pre-walling households. When the sunken firebowl as a focal point inside the hut was emphasized to a lesser degree, the symbolic associations changed. Activities around the fireplace shifted to external and sometimes elevated hearths. And material elements strongly associated with the sunken firebowl – the ceramic bowls and their elaborate decoration with frequent use of ochre and graphite – became of relatively less importance. The element of food transformation represented by firebowls and mortars disappeared after the introduction of stone walling, and such sunken objects are therefore not found on the floors at Olifantspoort 20/71.

Typical of Olifantspoort 29/72 (Fig. 8.1 and 8.2) are clay or daga floors with a shaped curb separating a raised platform from the rest of the floor. The curb is sometimes angled. Pot dimples occur on the platform immediately back from the curb edge, as well as below the curb to the front. In front of the platform there is a sunken wooden mortar and a firebowl and associated cooking stones, usually three of them. On several floors this arrangement is also found together with a slab ‘table’. The house floors are multipurpose spaces for sleeping, cereal storage, preparation and cooking of food, and for consuming this food (S. Hall 1998:240). Mason (1986) suggests that the platforms could have been located to one side of the door, while Simon Hall (1998) interprets them at the rear, which is more in line with the CCP model (Lane 1998a:197). Mason interprets the internal separation and difference in level as functional: between an elevated storage area and a lower living area, where the storage area is raised to keep dust and ash away (Mason 1986:243). In contrast, by placing it in opposition to the entrance, Hall suggests that the raised platforms also can be seen as defining the ritually charged and private rear that is often associated with ancestors. The platform can be used to store male and female goods, such as ancestral spears and private storage vessels (S. Hall 1998:240).

These spatial changes had consequences for the system of key societal symbols. When the intimate experience of the material world changes, so does the symbolism associated with it. Thus, when the everyday bodily experience of the house changed, so did the significance of the physical and symbolic transformations associated with food and the metaphors for social relationships. This also had implications for the raised platform opposite the entrance, associated with storage and possibly ancestors. As a ‘cool’ space situated close to the ‘hot’ firebowl, it is of importance that the platform was elevated while the firebowl was sunken. There seems to have been an opposition between cool storage and hot food transformations. And this opposition was extended to that between hot regenerative transformations linked to social relations and the female body on the one side and ‘cool’ ancestor associations, and possibly aspects of maleness, on the other.

The internal layout of houses in late 18th and early 19th century settlements such as Olifantspoort 20/71 is different (Fig. 8.3). Tswana ethnography is directly relevant to this last Moloko phase. Most houses seem to have a storage platform at the rear and are associated with a compound in front as well as one at the back. A key element is the change in position of hearths. While the early phase had internal sunken firebowls, hearths are later placed either in the front veranda or in structures interpreted as designated cooking huts with elaborate mosaic hearths and firestones, and slab ‘tables’, lower and upper grindstones and pots within a circular enclosure on the side of the hut. This spatiality of hearths seems to have become more common through time. Noticeably, the hearths are now more commonly raised or elevated. Food storage, preparation and cooking has been fragmented and ‘bounded’ in dedicated spaces, and the main hut seems to be restricted for sleeping (Mason 1986:384; S. Hall 1998:242-44).

The breaking away of the closely interwoven association between the hot, central and low hearth inside the woman’s womb of the house from the cool, elevated platform – tentatively linked to ancestors and maleness – had important consequences for a ceramic technology that, for a large part, took place in household space, eventually leading to a comparatively more ‘bland’ pottery style. Whereas pottery had been mediating in a highly symbolic household space in the earlier phase, the later spatial compartmentalization made the symbolic association with transformation weaker. The ceramic decoration associated with liminality and transformation was not as charged with meaning as before, which is particularly illustrated by the decline in the use of colours belonging to the white/red/black triad.

Preliminary interpretations An important background for the preliminary interpretations (Fredriksen 2007) was Simon Hall’s (1998) analysis of the Moloko sequence, demonstrating a change in the symbolic load carried by the pottery (see

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A change of hearths

Figure 8.2: Site plan of an Olifanspoort 29/72 homestead and a composite plan of an Early Moloko hut floor (redrawn after S. Hall 1998).

75

Material Knowledges

Figure 8.3: The Olifantspoort 20/71 settlement and a composite plan of a Late Moloko household (redrawn after S. Hall 1998).

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A change of hearths New questions There are several reasons for returning in more detail to the differences in household space. First of all, there is a lack of contextualized understanding of the development of more spatially differentiated fireplaces. What changes to the social meanings of hearths and fire can be identified? This question should be seen in close relation to another aspect that was not sufficiently addressed. The changes in hearth location were more than a shift from internal, sunken firebowls to external, often elevated hearths. The fireplaces’ materiality changed considerably as well. Importantly, there was a shift from soft to hard materials: they went from being made of clay and daga to be more frequently constructions of stone.

Each question will be approached in an individual chapter: the first question is the focus of the remainder of this chapter, while questions 2 and 3 are the topics of chapters 9 and 10 respectively.

Another reason for reconsideration has been mentioned briefly. It has to do with the comparative fieldwork material available for understanding the relationship between clay practice and fire materiality. The article drew on some of the insights from the material-culture study among Manyika Shona-speakers presented in chapter 5. It was only after the completion of the case studies from Tswapong Hills and Pongola that it has been possible to develop a comparative perspective that relates the various field observations to the theoretical framework of weighted spaces and spheres of experience informing about social meanings associated with the spatiality and materiality of fireplaces.

Of the 20 excavated huts at Olifantspoort 29/72, 15 had remains of firebowls centrally placed in a plastered floor. The firebowls were clay-lined or daga-plastered. Most of the firebowls had stones carefully placed in them; 5 of the 15 had three stones (see also 8.4). Functionally, the stones would have stabilized the cooking pot over the fire (Huffman 2006:64).

8.3

The following discussion presents the material changes of hearths at Olifantspoort in detail, and considers the differences in pyrotechnology implied in the shift from firebowls to stone-pebbled hearths. From sunken clay to elevated stone

As seen above, the hearths at Olifantspoort 20/71 were placed differently (Mason 1986:383-86). While two- or three-celled huts were residences and sleeping areas, single-cell units were designated cooking huts typically situated on the side of the compartmentalized hut. Mason found a number of mosaic fireplaces in the single-cell huts. There were fireplaces in 26 of a total of 40 excavated huts. A typical mosaic hearth was a circular construction elevated above ground level, consisting of upended pebbles laid down in concentric circles (Fig. 8.4). Measuring more or less a metre in diameter, it was situated in the middle of the hut floor. Firestones were found in the fireplace itself or next to it, and a slab ‘table’ was in several cases found associated with the hearth. Mason (1986:399, fig. 173) notes that the pebbles probably provided a carefully controlled heat for cooking.

Finally, questions of how the interpretations relate to important social transformations during the LIA were left unresolved (cf. Fredriksen 2007:138). Two questions should be emphasized in particular: Can the endogamous marriage pattern we find in the ethnographic present be seen as a result of a process where marital relationships between women, men and their respective associated ancestors underwent changes? And how should the changes in household space be linked to social processes at the level of regional economies, such as changes in the scale of political power and increasing control over productive labour during the 18th century, and the roles of male and female social identities in these processes? These considerations may be formulated into research questions: 1.

There are certain significant differences between these two types of fireplace. In addition to the change of hearth location in household space, attention will be drawn to two obvious differences in materiality and their implications from a functional perspective: the material used and the morphology.

What would an increased spatial and material differentiation of fire and hearths mean socially, and what would such changes in meaning entail for weighted household spaces and spheres of experience?

2.

Is the endogamous marriage pattern found in the ethnographic present the end result of a historical process of changing social dynamics between household members and their respective associated ancestors?

3.

How were the changes to Moloko households linked to social processes at the level of regional economies, and what were the implications of the societal transformations for women’s personhood?

A chronology of fire practice

A change of flames The introduction of stone seems to have had implications that went beyond walling; it has affected the role of pyrotechnology in households as well. As Dragos Gheorghiu (2007:1) writes, fire can be perceived not only as a phenomenon, but also as a material artefact.

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Material Knowledges

Figure 8.4: A stone-pebbled fireplace in a cooking hut (after Mason 1986). The combination of fire, flames and a material support create different pyroinstruments. Seeing the shift from clay bowls to elevated stone hearths in relation to Ulla Odgaard’s (2007a, 2007b) discussion of fireplaces has implications for how one understands the functionality of the two. Odgaard relates morphological traits to a combination of ethnographic understanding and information derived from experimental archaeology in order to enable classification of use areas. Among the fireplaces she discusses, of particular interest are the differences she points out for two particular types (Odgaard 2007a: 13-17; cf. Sørensen 1993) with noteworthy similarities to the ones from Olifantspoort.

would be concentrated by the pit, making the hearth a perfect structure for broiling over flames and grilling of meat. The main difference between the two hearths is evident. The sunken one concentrates heat from open flames, making the fireplace into a multipurpose space equally suitable for transformation of both vegetable and animal food. The stone-built one, on the other hand, seems relatively less associated with meat and open flames. This shift in functionality indicates that we also have a change in the social significance of fire and flames between the Early and Late Moloko sites at Olifantspoort: from a centrally placed firebowl that covered the whole spectrum of food transformation, including the association between meat and open and visible flames, to hearths in designated cooking huts where the association to meat and flames was comparatively less emphasized. Noticeably, there was a shift in pyrotechnology that coincided with the compartmentalization of household spaces in general; from multipurpose firebowls at the centre of Early Moloko multipurpose hut floors to more specialized hearths in designated spaces. The open, visible flame for roasting meat seems not to have accompanied the hearths that moved to the designated cooking huts. But what were the social implications of this spatial and material breakage?

The first is a circular, stone-built hearth with rocks placed as a flat cobbled area, measuring 0.8-0.9 metre in diameter. According to the functional typology this hearth gives the opportunity for open combustion providing the dwelling with light from the fire and heat radiating from the flames. However, the primary purpose of such a construction would be for the rocks to accumulate heat, and the flames would subsequently be allowed to die out. The culinary options for this kind of fireplace would have included cooking by boiling in pots, provided the combination with moveable rocks in the fireplace, corresponding to the mosaic hearths at Olifantspoort 20/71. In addition, the hearth type could be used for broiling, roasting or grilling of meat. But, as Odgaard (2007a:16-17) writes, although these activities could be done at a hearth of this type, there was another type that was more effective for these forms of food transformation. This fireplace was in a depression, dug into the dark brown earth without any form of stone construction. The sunken hearth would provide the same opportunities as the first in terms of light, heat and culinary options. Additionally, the heat of the embers

8.4

Changing hearths – changing meanings

In order to understand the changes to pyrotechnology in relation to social dynamics of households, we need to place fire and hearth firmly within a theoretical frame for the house as social institution. As was discussed in chapter 4, the house is a domain for socialization 78

A change of hearths Shared consumption of food and drink often provides the basic idea of cohabitation and kinship, making the hearth a focal point for both physical and symbolic transformation. Activities taking place in femaledominated, hearth-centred domains have a broad potential for symbolization of important event and relations in human life, and may become metaphors for human experience and social relationships (see 4.2, 4.3). A closer look at the spatial and material differences between the Early and Late Moloko household contexts reveals that the shift from multipurpose firebowls in multipurpose spaces to more specialized fireplaces in designated spaces implied that the cooking flames largely disappeared out of sight for those not directly involved in food transformation. This was both a consequence of the new pyrotechnology using stone and of its new spatial location in a separate hut. The ‘screening out’ of the combination of flames and meat preparation is significant and has implications for the earlier interpretations, which focused on the spatial changes to hearths without considering their materiality, except from the development from sunken to elevated. Another aspect should be added to the breakage between cool storage platforms and the hot food transformations in the firebowl. For when hearths moved into household spaces more exclusively associated with the female body, the association to open flames and meat for the hearths became less prominent. And the flames became less visible than they were in the multipurpose spaces where all members of the household met and interacted on an everyday basis. In other words, an aspect of food transformation broke away: the association between open flames and meat seems not to have followed the hearths that moved to the cooking huts.

processes (see 4.2). By knowledgeably understanding the habits and practices of the life in the house, each person is learning the basic schemes of which he or she is a part (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995:2). Inhabited space objectifies the classifications and organizing principles underpinning the wider sociocultural system (Bourdieu 1977:89), “invisibly tuning the bodies and minds of its inhabitants to its inner logic” (Comaroff 1985:54). Different household environments produce different cultural perceptions of social space. And perception is not only about what can be perceived, but also what can be screened out. Thus, people brought up in different cultures learn, without ever knowing that they have done so, to screen out one form of information while paying close attention to another (E. Hall 1969:44). What differences between the Early and the Late Moloko fireplaces are visible in terms of what was paid attention to and what was potentially screened out? A shift in hearth-centred activities Although discussing wider social contexts than domestic groups, Igor Kopytoff’s (1987) emphasis on the complexities of social relations as having been borne by kinship transactions, in various rights to persons, is of particular relevance to the household: The tendency throughout sub-Saharan Africa has been to elaborate rights to the things that people can offer, to keep these things flexible, separate, and divisible into subsidiary rights, and to transact in them in a great number of different ways. (…) Much of this elaboration ultimately stems from the elaboration of rights over the reproductive forces – namely, women and their fertility, through which progeny is acquired (Kopytoff 1987:44)

In order to reach an understanding of the implications of this breakage for social meanings of fire in household space towards the terminal Iron Age, it will here be drawn on comparative examples from the studies in Part II and relevant ethnography. The purpose of this discussion is to prepare the ground for a social chronology for fire practice at Olifantspoort.

Within changing social dynamics the most important resource is humans. And the importance of controlling production and reproduction – women and fertility – is expressed in material symbolism. In sub-Saharan Africa the link between female bodily experience and symbolism associated with the house, the fireplace and pots seems particularly strong.

Social fires and weighted spaces The comparative data on social practice involving fire from the material-culture studies in Part II suggests that an important factor in social weighting of household space (see 4.3) is the combination of where the fireplace is located and whether there is one or more fireplace regarded as central to the household. The social meanings associated with a fireplace are different according to its location (see summary in Table 8.1).

By experiencing the surroundings through the body, its potential orientation provides a framework which is imposed on the world that is linked to conceptualizations of social relations, space, time and cosmology. In this manner the body may also represent a bounded system, such as a territory, a social group or a house (Parker Pearson and Richards 1994:10). Tswana ethnography illustrates the symbolic connection between lived bodily experience and the house. An example is the term ntlo: by denoting the uterine house, both physically and socially, the metaphor is made explicit by the phrase go tsena mo tlung (to ‘enter the house’), referring to sexual relations within marriage (Comaroff 1985:56; see also S. Hall 1998; Lane 1998a; Morton 2007; 2.3).

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Material Knowledges MANICA

TSWAPONG HILLS

PONGOLA

hearth location

within one sphere of experience (central)

within two discrete spheres of experience (segotlo and lolwapa)

within one sphere of experience (central)

implication for social interaction

a meeting point for differing sexual identities

meeting points associated with either female or male bodily experience

a meeting point for differing sexual identities

fire symbolism

fireplace as female genitalia

fireplace as perpetual within its sphere of experience

fireplace as female genitalia

Table 8.1: Summary of main differences in hearth location, implications for social interaction and fire symbolism between the three case studies in Part II. In the Shona and Nguni contexts with one fireplace regarded by the household as central, symbolism was focused on female sexuality, whereas in the Tswana world the fireplaces were to a larger extent associated with their respective female or male domains. Their symbolical significance seems more linked to their role as transformative agents within their respective domains. While in the case of female spheres of experience the symbolism was linked to the transformation of cultivated and gathered food, fireplaces in male spheres were associated with meat, ancestors and the connections between the household and the political hierarchy of society. The implication of these aspects of social practice will be discussed in detail for Moloko household space, starting with the relationship between fire and sexuality.

sexuality. In addition, the white/red/black colour symbolism is emphasized (see 7.1). A concrete example is Raum’s observation of young male herders after milking cattle: [M]ilkers may not warm themselves at a fire with milkbespattered legs. The milk should be washed off. This is hlonipha “because you do not spill milk into the fire, never!” Throwing milk into a fire is obviously suggestive of the ejection of semen into the female organ (Raum 1973:151)

These examples suggest that the Early Moloko firebowl, situated in the centre of circular hut floors and often found with three firestones, may be interpreted as being linked to the sexual identities of the household members that were interacting with each other and the hearths through a symbolism elaborating on ideas intimately associated with the female and male bodies’ fertility and procreation.

Fire and sexuality There are many ethnographic parallels to the hearth with three stones placed in the middle of the hut floor, as found at Olifantspoort 29/72. Common for them is the strong and often rather explicit associations to sexuality, procreation and the fertility of the household members interacting around and with the fireplace. An example is Jacobson-Widding’s (2000) description of the Manyika Shona cooking hut as the centre of social life. The hearth in the middle of its circular floor is situated between the male area to the right and the female area to the left - and between the space of the ancestors at the back and that of the living near the entrance (see 5.1). The fireplace as symbol of life is found articulated explicitly among the Karanga Shona:

Big roaring flames and perpetual fires For the breakage in food transformation after the introduction of stone walling at Olifantspoort 20/71, where the association between open flames and meat preparation seems less emphasized for the designated cooking huts, it is of significance that there is a relationship between big fires with open flames, meat preparation and ancestor rituals in several different ethnographic contexts across Bantu-speaking southern Africa. Again, Aschwanden’s (1982) account of fire symbolism among the Karanga Shona is illustrative. In the case of an epidemic,

A fireplace consists of three stones. They symbolize the female genitals: two represent the minor labia and the third the clitoris. Lighting the fire is thus seen as a sexual act: one forces a stick into a piece of wood by twirling it until it ignites. The ‘sawdust’ or small chips resulting from the friction represent the semen. As contact between two things is necessary to produce a fire, so two human beings must come together to create a new life (Aschwanden 1982:209)

the most important medicine-specialist lights a big fire near the kraal of the chief and throws medicine into it. All the members of the tribe then extinguish their own fires and gather near the chief’s kraal. There they warm themselves and inhale the big fire’s fumes which are supposed to fight the disease. Then, every family takes a brand home – to light a new fire there. The fire each family puts out before they go to the big fire signifies the disease that must be eliminated, and the new fire symbolizes protection and life (Aschwanden 1982:209-10)

Similarly, looking to the Nguni world, the central fireplace with amaseko is found associated with 80

A change of hearths the political centre and the household (Comaroff 1985:57), where the fireplaces in the lolwapa and in the chiefly court were embedded in spaces of mediation between various levels of political organization.

However, Aschwanden (1982:210) continues, this symbolism of life and continued procreation is not limited to elaborate rituals during times of emergency. The reason is then said to be the securing of fertility. This is represented by the fire and is received from the ancestors, via the chief.

An illustration of the importance of the association between open and visible fire, ancestors and transformation into maleness is found in the bodika, the boys’ circumcision rites among the Kgaga (Fig. 8.5). An initiation lodge (moroto) is built in a secluded spot at the base of one the nearby mountain ravines. Before the rite begins, the fireplace is established. This is a long double row of stones stretching the full length of the lodge. The fire, thithipe, is of outmost ritual importance, as it comes from the capital where it has been kindled by the headman by means of a fire-stick (ba fêthla mollô). This fire burns the entire time the boys are in the lodge and must on no account be allowed to go out until the last day (Hammond-Tooke 1981:38-44, 78-82). This perpetual fire is explicitly linked to chiefly powers and ancestors, and is not for the cooking of food. As Figure 8.5 shows, there is a designated cooking fire and food table on the left hand side of the circumcision lodge, on the initiates’ side opposite the men.

As shown in chapter 7, within the Nguni hlonipha system avoidances were observed for the ‘big’ and ‘roaring’ fires lit when cooking sacrificial meat for the ancestors on top of the cattle enclosure. In contrast, no ‘small’, everyday cooking fires inside the kitchen huts were subject to any form of hlonipha. The flames were seen to attract the attention of ancestors, and should therefore be respected by avoidances (see 7.1). This association between open fire, men and sacrificial meat is also expressed by Raum: A new fire, and in particular the fire for cooking sacrifice meat, is kindled by the principal wife with ember from the fire of the Great Hut; the kraalhead builds it up into a roaring flame and nobody else may tend it (hlonipha). People avoid the fireplace in the yard on which only the kraalhead and his agnatic kinsmen cook sacrificial meat (hlonipha) (Raum 1973:150)

In conclusion, the spatial and material changes to fireplaces between Early and Late Moloko household spaces were associated with a general shift in elaboration of fire symbolism. And this shift was intimately linked to a transformation of everyday social interaction that included the bodily experience of household members and their material world. When the multipurpose firebowls were situated in the middle of multipurpose hut floors, symbolism was elaborating to a large extent around the differing sexual identities of the household inhabitants. The firebowl was a weighted spatial point for interaction between female and male bodies, and a reflection of this interaction was the emphasis on the relationship between fire and sexuality, which was found for the case studies among Shona- and Nguni-speakers. There was a particular fireplace perceived as the central one, often with three carefully placed firestones. The elaboration shifted in emphasis when the fireplaces moved and their physical appearance changed. An important factor was that certain actors in the bodily and symbolic interaction did not accompany the cooking hearths to the designated cooking huts. Rather, the intimate association between open flames, maleness and ancestors broke away and went in another direction: out into the front courtyard and the chiefly court.

The chronology for social practice involving fire, including symbolism associated with heat transformations at Olifantspoort between Early and Late Moloko, may now be summarized. The insights into weighted spaces for social practice centred on hearths will be used in order to define different spheres of experience. Changing spheres of experience The main implication of the changes is that the association between open flames, meat preparation, aspects of maleness and ancestors broke away from the Early Moloko sphere of experience, defined by the spatial intimacy between firebowl and back platform, when the fireplaces moved from the multipurpose spaces into the designated cooking huts. For the Late Moloko, the fireplaces and their locations should be seen in close connection with the spatial metaphor for Tswana social life, in which female and male identities also formed parts of a hierarchical order (see 6.1). The fireplaces now belonged to separate spheres of experience (see 6.2): the back courtyard (segotlo) and the front courtyard (lolwapa). These were contrasting foci associated with different bodily rhythms: women oscillated seasonally between household and fields, while men went between

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Material Knowledges

Figure 8.5: The bodika lodge and the thithipe fire (redrawn after Hammond-Tooke 1981).

8.5

culture played in social processes associated with households. Material culture should be conceptualized as something more than passive remnants of social interaction (cf. Geismar and Horst 2004:4-5), and the awareness of notions of reflexivity in understanding past life extended to the material world. Thus, interaction with nonhumans may indeed have important consequences for human intentionality. When building in stone was introduced in Moloko settlements, an unintended consequence was that social practice involving fire changed concurrently with the changes in location and materiality of hearths. This demonstrates the dialectic relationship between people and their immediate material world – the nonhumans in household space – in processes of socialization. From the perspective of socialization, what was paid attention to and screened out as culturally significant differed in the two examples from Olifantspoort. Key symbols in households changed; in particular the association between flames, meat, maleness and ancestors seems not to have accompanied the hearths when they moved into designated cooking huts and was transformed into stonepebbled hearths.

An unintentional outcome [L]ook for nonhumans when the emergence of a social feature is inexplicable, look for the state of social relations when a new and inexplicable type of object enters the collective (Latour 1999:209)

Returning to the opening remarks of this chapter, about the ambiguity of fire and the potential for a symmetrical perspective on the relationship between people and the material world, should fire and its associated materiality always be viewed as something that humans appropriate and take control over in household space? Are humans always ‘masters of fire’? Or may their intentional engagement with materiality have outcomes that are unintentional and uncontrolled? Does ‘culture’ or ‘society’ indeed hover over the material world or are they all – humans and nonhumans – mutually structuring constituents of the social? In other words, the question is whether we contend that intentionality works in unidirectional ways, from our thoughts and ideas to the material world, or whether we think of it as integrated into constantly ongoing dialectical processes in which humans are also being structured by the material world.

Concluding remarks

As was emphasized in chapter 3, it is not this author’s intention to provide the material world with intentionality similar to people (see 3.3). Rather, it is to include materiality in archaeological interpretation in a manner which takes into consideration the potentially active parts that the built environment and material

This chapter has emphasized the development in Moloko households from an internal hearth centrally placed in the hut floor to a spatial situation with at least two fireplaces, each associated with a relatively more discrete female or male sphere of bodily experience. It has been argued that the development, where changes are 82

A change of hearths marked by the introduction of stone walling, was from a comparatively high degree of elaboration on the differing sexual identities of the bodies meeting around the fire in the middle of the hut floor, to a situation with fireplaces located in more differentiated female or male spheres. In this latest phase, where differing sexual identities met to a lesser extent around fireplaces than was the case in Early Moloko phases, the hearths were spatially separated and had also undergone significant morphological and material changes. In contrast to the earlier sunken firebowl, made of the softer materials daga and clay and situated in the centre of the hut, the

Late Moloko households most often had elevated, stone built, mosaic fireplaces in spaces designated to either male or female activities. An important implication of the change of pyrotechnology and movement of cooking activities was that the association between open flames, meat preparation, aspects of maleness and ancestors broke away from the Early Moloko sphere of experience. How does this social chronology established for hearth location and fire practice relate to practice associated with clay and pottery? This is the topic for the following chapter.

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9.

TRANSFORMATIONS IN CLAY

[T]he small-scale setting of domestic life is the pre-existing context for the beginnings of all transformations that occur (Joyce and Grove 1999:4)

technology is indeed a social and ideological phenomenon (Barndon 2004:22), and the ceramic process involving heat is a transformative mediator which bridges the mental and the physical world. By integrating materiality in human ontology and cosmologies, artefacts are simultaneously integrated in the social practices which enable production of a common, meaningful world (Miller 1987:129-30; Barret 2001:147).

Contrary to traditional Western philosophical thought, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1982, 1999; Lakoff 1987) argue that reason is not independent of perception and bodily movement. All humans – indeed, all organisms – categorize, and categories are formed through embodiment. This means that the categories humans form are part of experience, and they are the structures that differentiate aspects of experience into discernible kinds: “Categorization is thus not a purely intellectual matter occurring after the fact of experience. Rather, the formation and use of categories is the stuff of experience. It is part of what our bodies and brains are constantly engaged in” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:19).

Ceramic containers may be seen as ontological metaphors. Fundamental human experience provides grounding for the concept of creating a physical object, which is also extended to abstract entities (Haaland et al. 2002:37). ‘The body as a container’ is a metaphor which seems particularly prominent in heat transformations (4.3), leading one to ask what makes a certain material, object or process a potential metaphor. The conceptualizations of ‘containers’ and ‘contained’ bring together intimate notions of people, architecture and ceramics: houses and pots are more than external trappings and are closely tied to the individuals that both make and live with them. The developmental cycles of both individuals and households may in this manner be expressed in material culture to a varying degree according to specific cultural context (Sterner 2003:116).

This places things and people within the same web of connections, and enables an understanding of their close relationship as governed by the same conditions of existence (cf. Gosden 2005a). Objects become a unity with the subject as an extension of the same (Jensen 2000:59), in a process where the body “unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis” (MerleauPonty 1968:136). An emphasis on embodied lived experience enables the capturing of the personal process between the human agent armed with a perceiving body and the objects in her environment. Within the familiarized environment of the household there is an intimacy between human and nonhuman entities. As sociologist Laurent Thévenot writes, material objects “are not detached from the personality which appropriated them; rather they enlarge his or her surface and secure his or her maintenance. Where the things we appropriate are customized, tamed or domesticated, they maintain our intimate being” (Thévenot 2001:69). This intimacy enables people to see things as a way of extending themselves in the world, as a way of acquiring knowledge about it and changing it (Tilley 1999:34-35). Such an understanding of materiality directs attention to bodily skills, habits and dispositions.

9.1

This intimacy between houses, pots and bodily experience will be explored in the following chapter, by seeking to understand the diachronic variation in hearth location and fire symbolism in relation to variations in the weighting of household spaces for the various stages in the life histories of clay and pots. While focus until now has been on combining the two main directions in studies of households (Souvatzi 2008:25-27), the interpretations of the previous chapter will here be integrated into a framework that emphasize culturally specific metaphoric aspects of clay practice in households. The discussion of hearth location and fire materiality at Olifantspoort before and after the introduction of stone walling demonstrated diachronic variation in the symbolism of fireplaces. And changes to the built environment correlate with a pattern of declining decorative intensity for the post AD 1700 Moloko ceramic assemblages, especially for ceramic bowls and their elaborate decoration with frequent use of ochre and graphite (cf. S. Hall 1998). But what were the ties between household members and the material world in terms of everyday social interaction that may help understand the transformations?

Metaphors in clay

As discussed earlier, ceramic technology can be seen as a temporally extended series of interrelated choices, or chaînes opératoires (e.g. Lemonnier 1992, 1993), where each step in the process is potentially subject to symbolic discourse or cultural pressures. Common for potting practices within a thermodynamic philosophy for subSaharan Africa is physiological, cultural or mythical transformation. Clay endures the same transformation processes as humans do throughout their life cycle and vice versa, and pots may implicitly or explicitly be associated with people (see 4.1, 4.3). This emphasis on intimate experience of parallel life cycles entails an understanding of ceramic style (see also discussion in 2.1, 2.2) as a process of becoming metaphorically conceptualized in bodily experience. Pre-industrial

In order to draw attention to certain factors deemed relevant, it will first be presented a recently excavated complex of Early Moloko hut floors from the Limpopo Province associated with the Madikwe ceramic facies (Huffman 2006). After discussing the meanings of the 84

Transformations in clay all areas of the village complex contained the same stylistic types. Bowls and beaker shapes decorated with alternating bands of colour separated by incision and punctuation were particularly common. These combinations of decoration are diagnostic for the Madikwe facies (Huffman 2006:61). As observed by several researchers the decoration is rich: multiple bands of diagonal incision or comb-stamping fill the necks of pots and the upper section of bowls, while arcades and chevrons are placed on the shoulders and bodies of pots. Decoration also includes liberal use of black graphite and red ochre that is applied both internally and externally (Mason 1986; Evers 1988; S. Hall 1998, 2000). The wide distribution of the same pottery, and the absence of any other, is further evidence of a single occupation phase at the complex. The discussion concentrates on the spatiality of two floors and their associated pottery, Houses 3 and 4.

ceramic distribution in relation to the established chronology for fire practice, the Early Moloko hut floors and pottery will be compared and contrasted with the Tswana household in the ethnographic present. The objective is to develop a diachronic framework for understanding the entangled developments of household materiality and social practice involving clay and pottery. Particular consideration is given to pollution ideas and the ways in which the Moloko dwellers engaged with their material dwellings through spatial problem-solving strategies. This approach requires a recapturing of the insights into the life histories of clay obtained from the three material studies in Part II. These data will be brought into effect for a comparative discussion of the household spaces and ceramic worlds for the Early Moloko sites and the aggregated Tswana town settlements. The particular account of changes to households arrived at towards the end of this chapter establishes a chronology of bodily experience within changing dwelling spaces. This chronology will serve to answer the key question: Is the endogamous marriage pattern found in the ethnographic present the end result of a process of changing social dynamics between household members and their respective associated ancestors?

9.2

House 3 was excavated within a 3x3 m square, and the smooth daga floor included a central firebowl with firestones in the bottom and a raised platform at the back, about 50 cm wide. About 12 broken vessels lay on the floor. The pottery was not plotted in detail, but the excavators note that most was found around the platform (Huffman 2006:55). Some 10 of the 12 vessels were decorated with red and white colour in addition to arcades and chevrons. Only two pots were undecorated or had just one single band immediately below the rim. House 4 (Fig. 9.1) was at least 2.5 m in diameter, with a daga floor underneath burnt daga rubble. It contained a central fireplace with three stones and a raised back platform. Several broken vessels (most probably 8) lay on the floor, with at least three upper grindstones. Not less than 4 of the vessels were decorated with red and white colours in combination with arcades and chevrons.

Moloko ceramics and spheres of experience

The first analytical step is to have a close look at archaeologically captured distributions of pottery in Early Moloko household space, which subsequently may be compared to the situation for the ethnographic present. Huffman’s (2006, 2007a:456-57) excavation of a LIA complex of homesteads (site 2724CB14) a few kilometres southwest of Thabazimbi, Limpopo Province, is chosen for the purposes of this analysis because the well-documented hut floors were covered by burnt daga rubble, indicating that all belong to a single-phase occupation (Huffman 2006:53, 55, 61). Consequently, the floors and the pottery are relatively undisturbed by later human activity and the amount and spatial distribution of the pottery should reliably reflect the situation when the site was abandoned. The distribution may therefore provide valuable insights for further discussion of the approach developed here.

Almost all pots in Houses 3 and 4 were found either around the firebowl, on the floor between firebowl and platform, or on the back platform itself. Hence, they were closely associated with the sphere of experience constituted by the sunken firebowl and the elevated back platform.

9.3

Pots, people and ancestors

A comparative discussion of the stages in the life histories of pots after manufacture, and perhaps particularly variation in spatiality of storage and cooking vessels, can provide useful insights for a social understanding of the differences in association between pottery and spheres of experience before and after the introduction of stone walling. The comparison may help establishing diachronic variability of differences in social practice relating to clay and pots in household space.

The complex included at least three homesteads marked by hut remains, middens and pottery. Five houses were identified, in addition to two iron furnaces. Charcoal from two houses is radiocarbon dated. The sample from House 1 is dated to 320 ± 40 b.p. (calibrated to AD 1525-1655). The sample from House 4 is dated to 400 ± 10 b.p. (calibrated to AD 1485-1615). The pottery from

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Material Knowledges

Figure 9.1: The distribution of pottery around the firebowl and back platform in House 4, site 2724CB14. Grey = daga; black = stone; P = pot; ugs = upper grinding stone (redrawn after Huffman 2006). separating the elevated back from the firebowl floor. This intimate connection suggests that the spatial location of at least certain vessels within this particular household sphere of experience was a relatively constant trait. The constancy for the dimples leads to the question of whether there was an equivalent element of regularity to the pots they contained or supported as well. At the 14 firebowl floors with documented pottery at Olifantspoort 29/72 the ceramic assemblage consisted of bowl and jar types. These were found around the firebowl, on the floor between firebowl and platform, or on the platform itself. Bowl types were represented with certainty in eight of them. In Hut S, with the four dimples arranged in a certain order, three of the four pots found near the dimples were bowls.

Maleness and the ancestral presence In Houses 3 and 4 at site 2427CB14 the vessels were to a large extent situated on or next to the elevated back platform. Compared to the total amount of vessels found on the hut floors this suggests a strong association between the particular space and storage of pottery. In this context the pot dimples from several of the huts at Olifantspoort 29/72 should be considered (see Fig. 8.1 and 8.2). If the depressions on the platform or immediately below it on the hut floor indeed were meant for having pots placed in them, the regularity with which they are organized deserves particular attention. Mason describes Hut S: The storage platform had four pot dimples arranged almost symmetrically to another four pot dimples. Three of them, next to the platform kerb, were arranged almost symmetrically with the four above it and on the platform (Mason 1986:261)

The intimacy between pottery and the raised back platform is corroborated by ethnographic examples, showing that the curb separating the platform from the firebowl floor marks off a private area at the rear from the front. It is a place associated with the ancestors and may also function as a storage area for the household’s

When vessels were placed in the dimples they would be standing in an organized manner along the curb 86

Transformations in clay 1985:115) and the snail. Through their association with rain and agriculture, they also refer to women. The moon and snail are depicted as full circles, and often decorate the foreskirt of initiated or married women (Vogel 1983). These same motifs are found on a wide range of other Tswana artefacts. Examples include beadwork, wooden porridge and meat dishes, drums and mural art (S. Hall 1998:252-53).

pots (S. Hall 2000:37; Huffman 2001). The spatial association between ceramic containers situated at the back and ancestors is prominent in the comparative fieldwork data from southern Africa presented in foregoing chapters, and substantiated by relevant ethnographic accounts. Observations of the differences in spatial distribution of clay vessels used as storage and cooking vessels are significant. For example, Shonaspeakers in Manica associated the back platform – the chikuwa – with aspects of maleness, ritual communication with the ancestors (midzimu), and storage of pots. Similarly, Nguni-speakers in Pongola approached the ancestors, the amadlozi, who resided in the male area at the back of all huts – in the umsamo. Thus, the associations between aspects of male identity and ancestors were intertwined with the elevated back of houses. And vessels kept in these areas seem to have been intimately linked to these associations. Simon Hall writes that the pots were “embodiments of a wide range of social and ritual processes” and, as such, they “embellish the sanctity of this space” (S. Hall 2000:37). What were the specific processes the ceramic containers and their materiality were engaged in symbolically at the back in Early Moloko households?

Thus, for the Early Moloko sphere of experience, consisting of the sunken firebowl and the elevated platform, there seems to have taken place a meeting of material elements that had different cultural connotations. The pottery, with its red and white colour symbolism, an association with the female body that may also have applied to the ceramic ware, was stored in spaces associated with maleness and ancestral links. The meeting between material culture and humans with male and female bodies in this particular sphere of experience is an important background on which to understand the stylistic intensity of the Early Moloko pottery, and that the changes to everyday experience characterized by the breakage into separate spheres with the introduction of stone walling was instrumental for the post-AD 1700 drop in stylistic intensity. Because it was not only differing material symbolism that came together around the Early Moloko firebowl, it was also bodies with differing sexual identities – and differing ancestral links.

The female body and ceramic colour symbolism The Madikwe ceramic vessels found in Houses 3 and 4 display a high frequency of colour decoration, especially the use of red and white, combined with triangles, arcades and chevrons. The colour symbolism among the Kgaga (Hammond-Tooke 1981:135) is interesting, where the most important colours were red and white (cf. S. Hall 2000:47). In addition to their obvious association with blood and fertility, they “always go together because they are the colours for the badimo (ancestors)”. They were not seen as opposites but as complementary. While white was ‘clean’, ‘attractive’, ‘like the badimo’, red was a ‘shouting colour’ that attracted the attention of the badimo. White purified, cooled and cleansed, while red intensified and consolidated, and black strengthened and protected (Hammond-Tooke 1981:137).

Meeting bodies – meeting ancestors Instructive for understanding the different facets of this particular meeting is Mary Braithwaite’s (1982) example of social practice concerning pottery among the Azande of southern Sudan. She shows that vessels used in spaces where women and men interact tend to be decorated, while those that are used in more secluded or private areas are not (cf. S. Hall 1998:249). Through the practices associated with them, the pots enter into activities of symbolic concern. In particular, the mixed transformation of ‘female’ and ‘male’ foods through cooking in a pot is of a potentially confusing nature. The symbolic significance of the use of raw and cooked food is dependent on a clearly defined contrast between the opposition of raw and cooked. A blurring of the categories would result in a less effective symbolic role in the definition of social relations. Consequently, decoration of pots is linked to the necessity of marking out and authorizing food transformations. Conversely, vessels that are not transgressing boundaries between domains to the same degree are kept more hidden and out of view in discrete spaces, and tend to be without decoration (Braithwaite 1982:83-84).

However, as demonstrated in the Tswapong Hills case (see 6.2, Fig. 6.4), the symbolic significance of red and white may apply to the ceramic ware itself, and not only to its surface decoration (see also 2.2). The use of red/white need not be limited to the stages of manufacture where pots are being decorated. The potting clay was a product of bringing together the red clay and the white quartz sand used as temper from different sources. In addition to these ways of applying the colour triad, which is an explicit symbol in rites of transformation through potential harmful periods of liminality (cf. Turner 1967:59-92), to ceramic wares, the decorative motifs used on Tswana pottery are described in terms of female clothing and allude to female fertility (S. Hall 1998:252). Triangles and arcades are associated with the tips of the notched rear skirt of an initiated woman (Vogel 1983), while the chevron represents the vulva (Evers and Huffman 1988:740). Other terms for these motifs includes the swallow, the moon (see Krause

This point should be seen in relation to the interpretations of the diachronic variation in fire and hearth location in chapter 8. It was argued that the Early Moloko sphere of experience with a sunken firebowl was the site for everyday encounters between bodies with differing sexual identities. The contrast to the situation for the Tswana ethnographic present was emphasized, where hearth and platform had split up and belonged to 87

Material Knowledges area as a sphere of experience is that the pots were mediating between both human and nonhuman members of the household. While the fireplace was a meeting point between living bodies with differing sexual identities, the back platform was the space for the ancestors, and thus the storage pots seem to have mediated between the living members of society and their respective ancestors.

different spheres of experience. The ceramic distribution on the Madikwe hut floors adds to this contrast. In addition to the closely intertwined relationship between the firebowl and the meeting of male and female sexual identities, there is also the ancestral back platform where their respective symbolism came together. The ceramic vessels, of which bowls and beaker types are particularly common (Huffman 2006:61), mostly decorated with colours belonging to the white/red/black colour triad, reflect an interactional sphere where female symbolism was highly present on the platform, an elevated space otherwise linked to maleness and ancestors. Therefore, another facet to the Early Moloko sphere of experience may be emphasized. In addition to the everyday experienced interaction between female and male bodies around a central fireplace, the pots at the back, where bowl shapes, red and white colours, arcades and chevrons were prominent features, constituted the presence of female fertility. The vessels represented wives’ roles in production and reproduction of the household – and their links to the ancestral world.

This author’s preliminary interpretation of the pots and dimples along the curb on Moloko hut floors was that they mediated between the transformations associated with the hearth and the ancestors. The reason why decoration intensity declined and bowl types for a large part disappeared, along with the pot dimples, from the platform or immediately below it after the introduction of stone walling was the separation of firebowl and back platform (Fredriksen 2007:137). In addition, however, it should be emphasized that this also had to do with the firebowl and platform as an experiential sphere for intimate interaction between differing embodied sexualities, bringing their respective ancestor links with them. Hence, there were two intertwined meetings in this sphere: living members of the household met and interacted around the firebowl while their respective ancestors came together at the back platform. The meeting at the back was one between ceramic containers, with symbolism associating the sexual identity of the female body with her ancestral links, and the back platform, which was associated with male identity and ancestors. The spatial problem-solving is here reflected by the intensity of colour symbolism and female patterns in ceramic style, and the presence of bowls. An important implication of these interpretations is that the spatial and material changes after the introduction of stone walling should be seen as intimately connected to changes in social dynamics between household members. What were the culturally specific changes that occurred to the meanings of clay containers in relation to the dynamics between women and men? In order to approach this question a shift of focus is needed; from manufactured pots to the social practices involving clay before firing.

The condensed symbolism attributed to the Early Moloko sphere of experience may also be viewed in association with the degree of interaction between human and nonhuman members of the household taking place within the sphere. And the significant decline in stylistic density – particularly the use of colour decoration and bowl types after AD 1700 – may be linked to the introduction of stone walling and the breakage of the intimacy between hearth and platform into separate spheres of experience. When the intimate connections between the two material features were severed by being split apart, the symbolic load carried by the ceramic vessels became comparatively less heavy than before. These interpretations corroborate Judith Sterner’s (1989:458) observation about ceramic style; the decoration is ritually essential to the vessel fulfilling its role, but it does not have to be visible to everyone. The important point is that it is known to exist. Culturally specific messages are conveyed to the users of the vessels and, importantly, to the spirits. In this manner, the pots at the back of the Madikwe huts, although clearly not visible to everyone, reinforced principles of social structure and reified aspects of the cultural world view (cf. Kramer 1985:88). Following Eugenia Herbert’s refinement of the equation between pots and people (see David et al. 1988), we may contend that “the definition of ‘people’ must expand to include ancestors, nature spirits, and other divinities, the whole dramatis personae with whom humans share their ceramic world” (E. Herbert 1993:213 orig. emphasis).

9.4

Pollution ideas and clay symbolism

By shifting focus of attention from fired vessels and their spatial distribution to the stages where clay is still unfired, the aim is to throw light on aspect of social dynamics between household members, and their interaction with the material world, that are found relevant in order to understand the changes to the Moloko ceramic sequence. Emphasis on unfired clay allows the inclusion of pollution ideas and their associated problem-solving strategies as an aspect of social practice that potentially demonstrates diachronic variation. As was demonstrated in the three materialculture studies in Part II, problem-solving strategies in household space differ according to their culturally specific context.

The vessels along both sides of the curb separating the platform from the firebowl floor may now be interpreted. The aspect of constancy or permanency that the pot dimples from certain huts at Olifantspoort 29/72 indicates for pots’ association with the back platform should not be overlooked, and perhaps in particular for the combination of female bodily symbolism and open bowl types. The implication of the link between decorated bowls and beakers and the firebowl/platform 88

Transformations in clay boundary between the bush and the domesticated space of the town was fundamental in Tswana cosmology (Comaroff 1985:54). However, this was not only about people: the process of transferring and transforming food into household spaces was a process where the transformation of the potentially damaging essences and forces from field and bush was carefully observed (S. Hall 2000:43).

In order to clear the ground for comparative analysis of the spatiality of clay practices, certain important differences in elaboration of pollution ideas in household space will first be drawn out, and then the significance of these contrasts in terms of dynamics between household members is emphasized. Comparing pollution ideas At first glance the list of pollution ideas for the three studies (Table 9.1) clearly demonstrates the similarities in pollution ideas between different Bantu-speaking groups in southern Africa (see also Evers and Huffman 1988). The most prominent feature is the female body’s relationship to clay and the evident analogy to human reproduction. The pollution ideas confirm Eugenia Herbert’s (1993:215) articulation of potting as located “within the nexus of sexual, menstrual and pregnancy taboos”. Also, the potential danger represented by people associated with death appears to be of importance. Thus, the metaphoric association is to human life cycles. Indeed, to borrow phrases from Lakoff and Johnson (1982) and Barley (1995), clay pots are metaphors we live by and die by.

As seen in chapters 6 and 8, the spheres of experience associated with female and male respectively – each with its own fireplace and a fire symbolism focused on perpetuality – were spatially discrete and in important respects their transformational attention went in opposite directions. These contrasting interactions with materiality brought them into intimate contact with different forms of household transformation: while men were associated with the ability for stable transformations of the plant foods from field and bush into controllable and lasting value, embodied in the image of cattle (Comaroff 1985:57, 80-81), women were engaged in the unstable and repetitive transformations of seasonal production, feeding, birth and death. Associated with a lack of physical closure, with a condition as receptacles for polluting heat (see 1.1, 6.1) the female body should be seen in close relation with an engagement with the material world where the rhythmic seasonality of agricultural labour was crucial. For in the Sotho/Tswana world heat was paired with the everpresent possibility of drought on the inland plateau and the highveld (Hammond-Tooke 1993:182). The materialculture study in the Tswapong Hills documented a double peril associated with breaching taboos during potting that was not observed in the other two cases: pots could crack and the rain could be driven away (see 6.1, 6.2). This dual attention for the problem-solving in relation to pollution links female bodily heat with drought as a danger to agricultural fertility and crops. The primary concern of the pollution ideas was the work of the female body within agricultural cycles and the fertility of cultivated soil. It therefore makes sense that clay’s material associations were to water and aquatic animals.

However, although these similarities demonstrate variations in Sub-Saharan thermodynamic philosophy, there are two particular aspects of the listed pollution concepts that are implicated in social interaction between household members in potentially contrasting ways: 

the seasonal restrictions on clay activities in the Tswana world



the relative mild emphasis on menstruation and pregnancy in the Nguni world

Before discussing these aspects in detail, attention should be drawn to the comparison of material and spiritual associations to clay for the three studies (see 7.2). There seems to have been comparatively more emphasis on clay as linked to aquatic animals and beings in the Shona and Tswana examples than in Pongola. In the latter case, the defining character of the pollution ideas associated with clay was that they found their place within the wider hlonipha system of avoidances. The following discussion emphasizes the implications of this particular contrast between the Tswana and the Nguni world for social interaction in household space.

Finally, the seasonal taboos set the Sotho/Tswana world somewhat apart from the other two examples in another manner. The life history approach reveals that clay practices and their associated problem-solving strategies were not engaged in pottery manufacture alone, but included the uses of clay in construction of houses as well. Houses and pots are intimately tied to the individuals that both make and live in them. Pots and people reside in houses that can also be regarded as containers (Sterner 2003:116). In this way, the seasonal restriction on both potting and hut building adds a pertinent aspect to the relationship between the containers: through their very materiality they were conceptually the same. They were both ontological metaphors in clay.

The importance of heat and drought Among Tswana-speakers, women were the main medium through which pollution could be transferred (S. Hall 1998:241; see e.g. Schapera 1971, 1979). There was an ambivalence associated with their agricultural work and gathering of undomesticated food plants – in other words, with their work with and within nature. This is reflected in their spatial constraints to the outer ring of the homestead (see also 8.5). The concern over the

89

Material Knowledges MANICA

TSWAPONG HILLS

PONGOLA

sexual intercourse

sexual intercourse

sexual intercourse

pregnancy

pregnancy

pregnancy (mild)

menstruation

menstruation

menstruation (mild)

infants before first teeth

mourners

mourners

people carrying money

clay activities during rainy season

infants under 3 months

Table 9.1: Overview of pollution ideas from the three case studies in Part II. patterns: while the Nguni were exogamous, the practice of preferential cousin marriage among the Sotho had the effect that there was no sudden arrival within the homestead of an outsider bride21 (R. Herbert 1990:469).

The relative presence of the dangerous female body Pollution ideas in the Nguni world are expressions of the hlonipha system of avoidances and taboos (see 7.1), and the case study from Pongola in chapter 7 demonstrated the uses of household space in relation to the various stages in the life histories of clay. The study gave particular attention to the social dynamics between the potter, her mother-in-law and potential other wife/wives making pots. The status of the wives within the husband’s homestead seems crucial to an understanding of Nguni women’s avoidance behaviour, since they were often referred to as ‘outsiders’ or ‘strangers’ within the husband’s homestead. The long process of incorporating the wife was counterbalanced by a pervasive hostility towards her. Not only was she a stranger coming from outside the family, she was also associated with a different set of ancestral shades. Throughout her life, the wife maintained links with her birth community, returning home for various rituals and the involvement in decision-making concerning the affinal homestead. The ties with the birth community were thus not cut upon marriage, and they actually only disappeared with death when the woman was finally incorporated into the lineage of her husband. Thus, the wife was a threat to the general well-being of the homestead (R. Herbert 1990:466-67; see also Hammond-Tooke 1962).

Consequently, since the Sotho bride was not an outsider, she was not a danger on account of her ambiguity to the same degree as Nguni brides were. In preferred marriage unions, the bride did not represent a threat to the peace of the husband’s homestead – she may even have been born in the same homestead as her husband. Most important, her ancestral spirits would be the same as her husband’s. Thus, the practice of hlonipha was different between Southern Sotho and Nguni (R. Herbert 1990:470). A defining characteristic for the social dynamics in relation to pollution ideas was the degree to which the member’s ancestral links were seen to represent a threat to the rest of the household. An important factor for understanding how pollution ideas take part in social practice in household spaces is therefore the marital links between the potter as wife and other members of the household, particularly her husband, mother-in-law and, in a polygynous household, other wives. Two directions In the Nguni example, the pollution ideas relating to clay seemed to be accommodated within the wider and more encompassing hlonipha system of avoidances. Consequently, female bodily states were relatively less important sources of danger to clay. In this particular sense, an important difference between the Nguni world and the other cases is that the system of pollution ideas and their problem-solving strategies were directed towards one particular human source of pollution. Notably, there is a difference in perception of the dangers involved when working with clay: whereas female bodily heat and the associated perils of drought were prominent among Tswana-speakers, the most

There were two factors which operated to impose the system of avoidances and taboos upon a younger wife: her ritual impurity as a menstruating woman and her status as an outsider, a threat to the social harmony of the husband’s homestead. The first derived from the female body, and the social strictures ended with the onset of menopause. The second factor, the status as an outsider, continued until death when the ties with the woman’s birth ancestral groups were finally severed and she became an ancestral shade within the husband’s lineage (R. Herbert 1990:467). Of particular interest here is the comparison between Nguni hlonipha and Southern Sotho hlonepha (cf. Kunene 1958). For although they are often equated in the anthropological and linguistic literature, the operations of hlonepha in Southern Sotho and the Nguni hlonipha were quite different. According to Robert Herbert (1990:469), the reason for the differences in practices of avoidance lay in basic differences of social organization between Sotho and Nguni marriage

21 Kuper (1982:127-28) points to another and closely related difference between the two marriage patterns; that while Nguni women are said to choose their husbands, in the Sotho world men do the choosing.

90

Transformations in clay pots stored on or next to the platform and with pot dimples along the curb separating firebowl and platform – can be associated with an elaboration of pollution ideas centred on the meeting between female and male sexual identities. A general development is seen where the meeting and interaction between differing household identities became of less significance around central fireplaces towards the terminal Iron Age for the Moloko settlements. The problem-solving in household space in relation to pollution ideas associated with clay shifted from a primary focus on the female body’s relationship to other household members to a relatively heavier emphasis on its relationship to agricultural cycles and the fertility of cultivated soil. Specifically, between the second phase of the Moloko sequence, represented by households associated with the Olifantspoort and Madikwe ceramic facies, and the last settlement phase, to which Tswana ethnography is directly relevant, the elaboration of pollution ideas linked to clay and fire seems to have become more intimately connected to concerns with the potential dangers of heat and drought.

important source of danger to clay in the Nguni world was found in the personhood of the wife coming from outside and, above all, her ancestral links that were brought into the household. An implication of this interpretation is that in contexts with less strict exogamous or endogamous marriage preferences, the danger represented by an outsider wife would be less prominent and social practice in household spaces would look different. Indeed, Robert Herbert’s (1990) comparison of Nguni hlonipha and Southern Sotho hlonepha demonstrates this point. For in the endogamous Tswana world wives were not necessarily outsiders. Kinship was confounded or mystified, and this created overlaps in kinship categories so that agnates may also be affines (Sansom 1972; Preston-Whyte 1974; Hammond-Tooke 1981; Kuper 1982; S. Hall 1998). This comparative framework can offer valuable insights for understanding the developments discussed for Moloko households. Simon Hall (1998) notes the possibility that the Tswana emphasis on endogamy developed as the aggregation into town structures proceeded, and therefore is a relatively recent development. And, furthermore, the preference in Tswana elite marriage was for a cousin on the agnatic side (see Schapera 1957, 1963). This preference “may have been emphasized more as aggregation progressed as a strategy by elite men to recirculate cattle within their own line, thereby centralizing the medium of social power” (S. Hall 1998:255).

Importantly, an understanding of social interaction should not be limited to living members of the household. It was not only female and male sexual identities that came together around the central hearth, but also potentially differing descent lines. When people met, their ancestors met as well. The increased compartmentalization in the stonewalled settlements contributed to a relatively lower degree of interaction between household members within the same spheres of experience in everyday life, which means that there was also less interaction between ancestors.

It may now be returned to the key question of this chapter: Is the endogamous marriage pattern found in the ethnographic present the end result of a process of changing social dynamics between household members and their respective associated ancestors? And, to specify further, is the elite marriage preference a social phenomenon that belongs to the latest Moloko town phase? In order to answer this question the problemsolving strategies associated with clay in household spaces will be compared with the framework for diachronic variation in hearth location and fire symbolism developed in chapter 8.

9.5

The changes to household materiality and elaboration of pollution ideas seem to be linked to a specific shift in social dynamics within the household, namely a development where the relative presence of the dangerous outsider wife became gradually less prominent towards the latest Moloko phase. This implies that the specific marriage preferences found in the Tswana ethnographic present (Schapera 1957, 1963; Comaroff 1985:49-54) may be seen as the outcome of a process of changing social dynamics between female and male bodies in household space, and that the relationship between their respective ancestors played an important role. The possibility that the specific emphasis on endogamy among the Tswana developed as aggregation proceeded (S. Hall 1998:255) should be considered. For, as demonstrated in this chapter, the Moloko elaboration of pollution ideas shifted from a pattern with traits that are found to a higher degree in the exogamous world, to the endogamous pattern known from the ethnographic present.

The spatiality of clay and fire

A core argument running through this work is that people’s intimate interaction with their immediate material world is an important factor to consider for understanding changes to social practice in households. The sphere of experience consisting of the sunken firebowl and elevated back platform discussed for the Early Moloko pre-walling Olifantspoort 29/72 and the Madikwe homestead complex appears to be associated with different forms of social interaction around the fireplace than was the case for the Olifantspoort 20/71 and the Tswana ethnographic present.

It should be emphasized clearly that the interpretations presented here do not imply that the Early Moloko hut floors demonstrate evidence for exogamous marriage preferences similar to those known from the Nguni world. Rather, it is argued that there are elements of prewalling household materiality that should be seen in

The analysis of the hut floors and associated ceramics shows that the centrally placed firebowl and its relationship to the raised back platform – with certain 91

Material Knowledges firebowl is clearly different from the inner sleeping chamber of the house in the Tswana ethnographic present. The latter has little or no evidence for back platforms, firebowls or clay seats, or any form of food transformation. It was either undifferentiated or contained a conjugal chamber, and was viewed as the locus of the procreative union of male and female (Comaroff 1985:58). The two last chapters have shown that the problem-solving in relation to pollution ideas in household space changed diachronically in correlation with hearth location, which indicates an intimate connection between the social dynamics of household members and their relationship to the material world. Are there indications that this intimacy between humans and nonhumans on a household level may be related to more general changes in the relationship between people living in Moloko settlements and their surrounding environment with the introduction of stone walling?

connection to social dynamics that have comparatively less to do with the endogamy of the Tswana ethnographic present. Thus, along a sliding scale of marriage preferences, with the strict Nguni exogamy at the one end and the endogamous pattern in the Tswana world at the other, the analysis reveals that relatively more elements of the Early Moloko household are comparable to social dynamics in the Nguni world than is the case for post-AD 1700 Moloko household space. The containers and the contained The interpretations suggest that certain changes to social practice of importance in everyday life have occurred towards the terminal Iron Age. Following Moi’s (1999) reading of Beauvoir (1989), the female body is understood as a situation. A potential for understanding social change is found in emphasizing the female body’s encounter with society, rather than merely viewing the body as subject to external societal pressures. According to Moi, attention should be directed towards the values and norms the female body, including her sexual identity, come up against in its meeting with society (see 3.3). An example of social change which may be seen as an outcome of such active engagements is found in the general shift of meaning associated with clay containers as ontological metaphors: the meaning of pots and houses and what they contained.

The interpretations here particularly emphasize two main different forms of problem-solving, in which hearth location plays a prominent role. The elaboration of pollution ideas associated with clay shows variation according to whether there is a fireplace perceived as the focal point where all household members meet and interact on a daily basis, or whether fireplaces are central to discrete female and male spheres of experience. An important difference between these two forms of spatial arrangement may be pointed out by comparing the associations to clay as building material in the Nguni world with those found among Tswana-speakers. Raum (1973:147-48) discusses Zulu taboos and avoidances for hut building. The documented prohibitions relate to the brewer of work beer and to the thatcher climbing the roof. No observances seem to have been made for the clay and earthworks involved. As will be remembered from the Tswapong Hills case, seasonal restrictions applied equally to potting and to hut building. This contrast indicates a comparatively strong emphasis on the links between the female body, pollution ideas, clay and the fertility of cultivated soil in the Tswana world. With the changes to Moloko households in mind, there is thus the possibility that these links were evaluated somewhat differently in the Early Moloko, and that they have been intensified by the introduction of stone walling.

The ceramic assemblages clearly underwent changes, demonstrated by the pattern of declining decorative intensity in the post-AD 1700 pottery associated with aggregated town settlements. Significantly, the decline in ceramic classes and the use of decoration included the colour triad. The ceramic ware also underwent changes, by inclusion of muscovite mica in Late Moloko pottery (Rosenstein 2002). But it was not only the physical appearance of the pots that changed. Their spatiality changed as well. Whereas a large number of pots are recovered from within the huts in the Early Moloko, vessels are found more scattered around Late Moloko households (S. Hall 1998:249). As shown in this chapter, the pots stored at the back platform in the Early Moloko sphere of experience, in combination with the platform itself, were symbolically laden, daily reminders of the presence of both female and male ancestral links. What these pots contained was, from the point of view of cultural symbolism, different from the largely scattered pottery from Late Moloko households.

A discussion that relates containers and contained in Moloko households to their wider environmental and social context requires an understanding of the household within the domains of agricultural production and regional political economies, two central topics for the next chapter.

These changes in meaning for pottery according to spatiality imply that meanings associated with the house as container of people and pots underwent changes as well. The multipurpose hut floor with its multipurpose

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10.

ENGAGING THE LANDSCAPE

The forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagements with their surroundings. In short, people do not import their ideas, plans or mental representations into the world, since that world is the very homeland of their thoughts. Only because they already build therein can they think the thoughts they do (Ingold 2000:185-86)

held a different cultural attitude to landscape from that of earlier Iron Age farmers. This is perhaps expressed in the agropastoralists expansion onto the Grassland Biome by AD 1650 (S. Hall 2007:166-67; see Mitchell 2002:1819). What distinguish Late Moloko sites from Early Moloko are a change in settlement location, with a preference for hillsides and spurs, and an increase in the use of stone. In the Marico area, the later phase most probably began around AD 1675 (Boeyens 2003:68) and emerged from an earlier phase of settlement without stone walls (see 2.2). As previously discussed, stone walling is absent from most Early Moloko sites, none of which has been discovered beyond the 1500 m contour line defining the highveld regions (Vogel and Fuls 1999). The agricultural expansion and population movements involved new forms of interaction where people had to renegotiate the relationships with their surroundings. One should keep in mind that the grasslands were not devoid of people. Farmers renegotiated relationships with hunter-gatherers. Relationships took on different forms, including trade or barter and ritual sanction. More subservient clientship arrangements developed, particularly among the western Sotho/Tswana (S. Hall 2000, 2007). These communities of the western cluster moved into the RustenburgPretoria area around AD 1700, where previously communities of the southwestern cluster had lived (Huffman 2002:17-18, 2004a:107, 2007a:433-37; Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005:228-29).

An important implication of Ingold’s dwelling perspective (see also 4.1) is that the being-in-itsenvironment is taken as the point of departure, rather than the self-contained individual of Enlightenment thinking (see 3.2). This leads to the understanding that children grow up in environments furnished by the work of previous generations, as they come to carry the forms of their dwelling in their bodies, in specific skills and dispositions (Ingold 2000:186-87). A postprocessual landscape archaeology necessarily connects with Ingold’s perspective. There is a tension between the distanced visual landscapes theorized in Western systems of knowledge and the landscapes which are experienced. The central concern for an ‘archaeology of dwelling’ would be with how a landscape was occupied and understood, and how it provided a context for the enactment of human projects. It becomes crucial to approach an understanding of how people relate to a landscape in different contexts of engagement (Thomas 2008:301-5). Such an approach also has implications for how architecture is understood. What if architecture is not defined exclusively in terms of the construction of an object-like structure that is then used, but is considered as a medium of action? Architecture should be considered as existing through practices of making. In treating building and architecture as elements of landscape engagement, architecture thus becomes practice rather than object and researchers take an approach in which material culture, architecture and landscape are seen to have intersected in the lives of past people (McFadyen 2008:309, 313).

10.1

Keeping in mind the changes to Moloko households discussed in chapters 8 and 9, what differences in people’s practical engagement with dwellings and landscapes are found between Early and Late Moloko? Among the motivations that drove the expansion onto the highveld, it is suggested that it correlates with a warmer and wetter period within the Little Ice Age between AD 1425 and 1675 (Huffman 1996:58; Boeyens 2003:68; Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005:229). These warmer conditions would have facilitated cereal cultivation (see 1.2, 2.3). However, it is also pointed out that the highveld grasslands should have been possible to cultivate at any time, considering what is known about cattle management and the tolerances to fluctuation in temperature and rainfall bred into African cereals (S. Hall 2007:167). This indicates that changes to culturally specific conceptualizations of landscape should not be overlooked as factors to be considered.

New landscape – new meaning

With the dwelling perspective as a point of departure, making household members’ practical engagements with their surroundings a primary focus of attention, the following chapter emphasizes the household as a social process interacting with other forces within society (cf. Souvatzi 2008:18-20). A change of landscape Early Moloko sites are generally located differently from what was preferred in the Early Iron Age. Referring in particular to the Marico area, Jan Boeyens (2003:65) finds them usually to be located at the foot of hills or on flat lands not far from hills and often not too distant from small streams. Contrary to Early Iron Age sites they are not found on river banks. Tim Maggs (1995:141) suggests that early Tswana and Nguni settlers’ avoidance of riverside locations was informed by a cosmology where rivers and banks were regarded as sinister and even dangerous places. Thus, LIA farmers seem to have

The consolidation of Tswana farmers in the area in and around the Magaliesberg and the extension of Tswana agriculturalists southwards onto the highveld coincide with the introduction of stone walling, which made good sense on the grasslands, where wood was a limited 93

Material Knowledges development is the increased time pressures on women’s labour, and efforts by men to emphasize control over production (see also Pistorius and Steyn 1995; Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005:229).

resource and fundamental to several key energy needs. However, homesteads in areas where wood was more plentiful were now also built in stone, which suggests that the innovation had more to do with conserving wood from rapid exhaustion in these areas. It seems that the number of farmers in the landscapes of the Magaliesberg valley and the hills and ridges of Gauteng steadily increased through the 17th and 18th centuries. The more intensive use of stone may therefore have underpinned a continuous re-evaluation of sustainability (S. Hall 2007:168). As Boeyens writes, this development may have

It has been demonstrated in this work that household materiality was actively engaged in problem-solving in relation to pollution ideas for clay and pottery. When one sees changes to the organization and use of space, one also sees changes to people’s mnemonics of everyday bodily experience and objects of socialization. In other words, the material and social aspects of the house are inextricable (cf. Morton 2007). Changes to the material environment imply changes to the social universe, and vice versa. And the culturally specific skills and dispositions of its inhabitants link the household to the wider sociopolitical context. Thus, a dialectic relationship between the household and the larger societal framework will be emphasized in the following. In line with such a dialectic perspective, as the ways the household interacted with the wider cultural context changed, the politics articulated within the household perimeter changed as well. Female bodies’ active engagement with the material world thereby contributed to change the ways in which key social ideas were articulated materially.

accentuated stone’s durability, suitability and practicality as an alternative building material. In addition, wood resources became depleted at an ever faster rate as a result of the increasing demand for fuel for smelting, smithing, pottery production and cooking, as well as through the impact of land clearance and periodic droughts (Boeyens 2003:70)

In addition to these pragmatic considerations, the adoption of stone walling is also seen as symbolic, serving to substantiate claims to the land in a contracting and more densely populated landscape (see 1.2, 2.3). Institutions in stone

10.2

Availability of the new material had consequences for the location of stone settlements. Most were built within 100 metres of a suitable source, since the greatest effort was not so much the building itself as the process of obtaining rocks. Loose stone was the main source, but in some cases extensive quarrying was needed. All agricultural communities in southern Africa with stone architecture had the circle as the primary geometrical element. And the three categories found in most settlements – the cattle enclosure, the hut and the granary – are therefore almost always circular in plan (Maggs 1997:232-33; Boeyens 2003:69).

A change of scale

What was the wider societal backdrop for the transformations detected throughout the Moloko sequence? How may the changes in household materiality be linked to social processes at the level of regional economies in southern Africa, such as changes to the scale of political power associated with the aggregation into town structures and increasing control over productive and reproductive labour during the 18th century (cf. Sansom 1974; Huffman 1986b; Boeyens 2003; S. Hall 1998, 2007; Hall et al. 2006, 2008) and the roles of female and male social identities in these processes?

The contrast between the visibility of the Late Moloko stonewalled sites and a lack of spatial and material detail for earlier sites is a challenge to an understanding of the development of social practices and institutions found in Tswana ethnography. As Boeyens writes, there is as yet no definitive evidence for a separate kgotla space (court) next to a cattle enclosure, nor of a large kgotla midden. While this could be the result of research strategies, the absence of substantial midden deposits at Early Moloko sites most probably reflects an absence of larger political and decisions-making units. Added to this, it is also unclear whether homesteads or family-groups were combined into wards (dikgoro) in the Early Moloko (Boeyens 2003:65-66). Emphasizing this contrast between the lack of visibility in the Early Moloko and the later demarcation through stone walling, Simon Hall (1995, 1998) interprets the differentiation of cattle enclosures, households and homesteads as part of a development at the level of regional economies with increasing competition for land for cultivation and grazing and for trade goods. An aspect of this

Politics, trade and the space of cattle Interpretations of the significance of cattle in prehistoric economies of southern Africa (see 1.2, 2.3) often reach the conclusion that cattle was an important resource in the emergence of regional centres for more hierarchically organized farming societies (Segobye 1998:227). Tswana society in historic times was highly ranked and formal political power was based on unequal distribution of cattle, which was central to all political and ritual transactions. Men with cattle entered into various arrangements with other people to confirm their place in society; to acquire wives or to enter loan agreements where cattle was received in return for labour or political support. The chief (kgosi) was central in these transactions, being responsible for the fertility of the land and the well-being of the people. A successful chief could provide for many, and this established his basis for political support. It was therefore necessary for a Tswana chief to have large numbers of cattle, since cattle was the 94

Engaging the landscape According to Kuper (1982) the replacement of the cattle enclosure by the kgotla as the public gathering place is an indication of greater political complexity and the emergence of larger decision-making units among the Sotho/Tswana (Boeyens 2003:71). However, as will be recalled from chapter 2, an exclusive preoccupation with cattle as instrumental to male power has been questioned by Segobye (see 2.3). She has argued that narratives where cattle are seen to more or less determine power relations have led to conveyance of socioeconomic and political change as having been dictated by ruling patriarchs. While the projection of power relations in models such as the CCP (see 2.1), as reflected in gendered division of labour, production and space, may generally be true, the models have overlooked the significance of other activity areas relating to households. Segobye (1998:230-31) has therefore called for alternative approaches to production and reproduction.

primary means for regulating behaviour, and by which people established or altered their position within society (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997:190; Reid 2004:303-4; S. Hall 2007:169). For the Moloko sequence it seems that while the basic subsistence pattern of the Early Moloko is similar to that associated with the historic Sotho/Tswana, the accumulation of large cattle herds was a phenomenon belonging to the stonewalled settlements (Boeyens 2003:66). And differential wealth in these settlements has been archaeologically identified simply by measuring the size of the central cattle enclosures. In the early part of the 18th century there was little difference in the sizes of cattle enclosures between homesteads, indicating no great difference in wealth and political power (Huffman 1986a). The settlement population may also be assessed on the basis of the size of single homesteads or the number of homesteads that clustered together. As the 18th century progressed, homestead clusters increased in size (S. Hall 2007:169).

In order to enable an approach to the relationship between women and men and their immediate environment, a consideration of culturally specific understandings of landscape is needed.

Up until the 18th century chiefs exercised relatively low levels of political power and their status was frequently contested. Succession disputes could have been one mechanism that contributed to increasing settlement members, and thereby continually tempering agglomerating processes of power consolidation. The advancing colonial frontiers from the Cape and the southeast African coast seem to have been instrumental in the subsequent regional developments, as they were accompanied by a demand for trade goods. Attractive items for exchange included cattle, ivory, tin, copper, prestige furs, hides and ostrich feathers (S. Hall 2007:169-70). Chiefs competed for resources, labour and trade routes, and fighting and raiding became a characteristic trait. In this political climate, the success of a new chiefdom must have hinged on the combination of coming out on top in local conflicts and the ability to acquire and control resources for consumption and trade. There is a good correlation between this political process of increasing competition and the shift towards town living. In certain particular cases, substantial parts of a single chiefdom were found gathered at a single place (S. Hall 1998:242, 2007:171-72).

Interaction, abandonment and relocation Huffman (1986a, see also 2004a:197) has argued that the agglomerated towns of the late 18th and early 19th centuries developed in response to a particular set of circumstances, marked by military stress and defensive strategies. However, as in particular Boeyens (2003) points out, some towns such as Marothodi, Mmakgame and Molokwane were not situated at hills chosen for defensive purposes. While this obviously indicates political strength and confidence about regional power for these chiefdoms (S. Hall 2007:173), Boeyens argues that a combination of several factors for the aggregation process should be taken into account. These include conflict between chiefdoms, population pressure and periodic droughts, in addition to the accumulation of cattle and centralization of political powers by rulers (Boeyens 2003:71). The factors should also be considered for the many abandoned settlements noted by early European travellers. The settlements were clearly affected by the disturbances associated with the mfecane/difaqane (e.g. Hamilton (ed.) 1995), but their abandonment also reflect aspects of Tswana relationship to land, especially drought, exhaustion of pasture, fuel and water resources, and movement of capitals following succession disputes (Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005:22930). A reason for the spatial mobility could be that it gave a newly installed kgosi an opportunity to reorganize the capital in order to accommodate changes to relations

In Tswana towns such as Molokwane (Pistorius 1992, 1996) and Marothodi (Hall et al. 2006, 2008) the scale of political power is expressed in the homesteads (kgosing) of the chiefs. Their cattle enclosures are huge compared to the commoner homesteads, power being clearly associated with wealth in cattle (S. Hall 2007:172). It is usually easy to locate the core of these settlements, that is, the area in which the remains of the largest cattle enclosure, kgotla and an associated court midden have been preserved (Boeyens 2003:71). A division into three geographical zones, with the kgosing in the centre and an upper and lower division on either side, on the basis of Schapera’s (1953, 1970) account of some precolonial Tswana capitals, has been suggested for Molokwane and of the final occupation of Kaditshwene (Boeyens 2000). 95

Figure 10.1: Map showing location of major sites and the vegetation types in the Magaliesberg valley and adjacent areas. Types in green colours indicate Highveld grasslands (adapted from Mucina & Rutherford 2006).

Material Knowledges

96

Engaging the landscape and alliances after the power transfer (Boeyens 2003:6869).

Agricultural change As pointed out in chapter 1, the area in and around the Magaliesberg (Fig. 10.1) is given particular attention for the development of the Moloko archaeological sequence. It is suggested as a highly ranked area for agriculture in the LIA. The strip of mixed varieties of bushveld running from east to west along the northern fringe of the Magaliesberg, north-eastward from Rustenburg, through the Swartruggens and onto the Zeerust region show a high ecological diversity with a composition of soil types particularly favourable for subsistence agriculture (Hall et al. 2008:72-73). The movement of Nguni groups such as the southern Ndebele BaPô and Tlhako, whose origins lay in KwaZulu-Natal, into the northern fringes of the Magaliesberg, could have been motivated by the agricultural security of the region. These groups spoke Setswana, built their settlements and made pottery according to Tswana principles. This cultural change must have been a process underpinned by considerable intermarriage with Tswana neighbours (S. Hall 2007:169-70; Huffman 2004a:95-98).

The Rustenburg-Pretoria area provides an example of complex interaction during the LIA (see also 2.2). It was a meeting ground for several groups also before the mfecane/difaqane, including Sotho/Tswana groups of the southwestern, southern and the northern clusters, and Musi Nguni (Huffman 2004a:107; see also Hall et al. 2008). During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the oral histories of different Tswana lineages and groups (e.g. Legassick 1969; Manson 1995; Huffman 1986b, 2002) document the main incursions into Tswana territory by different non-Tswana peoples, such as the Ndebele and the Kolo, as well as documenting an increase in inter-Tswana warfare during the same period (Lane 2004:282). In addition, the Tswana chiefdoms of the Rustenburg and Zeerust area also had to deal with mounted and armed Kora and Griqua forces from the south (Huffman 1986b:292; S. Hall 1995:312). While struggle for power and domination should not be overlooked for understanding the changes that occurred throughout the Moloko sequence in this area, attention should not only be directed towards the motivations associated with conflicting interests within and between hierarchies when considering spatial mobility. Lane (2004) in particular has emphasized that settlement relocation should also be considered as integral to Tswana land use – as linked to a specific understanding of landscape and settlement ecology. Each relocation of a Tswana town must have had effects on the cultural geography of the landscape. When the capital shifted, so too did the outlying lands, cattle posts and possible hunting stations. Over time, Lane argues, the repeated rearrangement must have created “a palimpsest of overlapping categories of space” (Lane 2004:288). The movement did not just alter the subsistence geography but also transformed the spiritual and conceptual understanding of the land. Irrespective of whether politics, unrest, religion or resource exhaustion was the driving force to move, the tendency to relocate was also facilitated by a particular understanding of landscape. This understanding was, according to Lane, evident in the extensive nature of cultivation at the time when the first European observers arrived. Low value seems to have been placed on land and territory. Claims to land or disputes over possession were rare and therefore cultivators did not take great pains to demarcate boundaries. Rather, water resources, along with pasturages, seems to have been perceived as more valuable than the land itself, a point with which Lane associates the central importance of rainmaking and control of rain as a source of political power. On this basis, Lane (2004:289-90) argues that it was only in the post-mfecane/difaqane period that notions of territory became prominent, at least for the north-western Tswana (cf. Gulbrandsen 1993:562-64).

The arrival of the Nguni groups may have added extra pressure to a context of social transformation, with competition over control of space, people, resources and trade. In the agriculturally rich Magaliesberg, population would have risen progressively. Simon Hall suggests that a crucial threshold between arable land and agricultural production had already been reached in the first half of the 18th century, and this required more coordination between individual homesteads in managing agricultural production. The scale of production required to feed the large town populations must have been considerable. Although chiefs ritually coordinated the agricultural cycle, the individual homestead was responsible for its own needs (S. Hall 2007:174). The practice of cultivation, the most labour-intensive way of obtaining food, was largely organized by women. While excluded from pastoralism and the power associated with cattle, cultivation appears to have been a response to the need for food and not an activity dictated by male pastoralists (Jacobs 1999:365-66). Thus, the bottom line of town life was that communities had to feed themselves and everyday routines had to continue. Given the premium value placed on cattle, it is probable that these were also managed locally, rather than at distant cattle posts. And the extensive and rich soils in the immediate surroundings of the towns in the Rustenburg area suggest that fields were close. It is therefore doubtful whether women moved for several months to fields at some distance, as found among Tswana-speakers in more arid areas further to the west (S. Hall 2007:174; see also Jacobs 1999). While the increase in rainfall during the 18th century may have been favourable for an intensification of farming, the drought early in the 19th century may have caused additional problems. For this aspect, the maize debate (see below) is of relevance (cf. Marks 1967; M. Hall 1976; S. Hall 1995:312-13, 1998:245-46). The effects of drought on conflict would have been intensified if maize 97

Material Knowledges made a significant contribution to the diet, since maize requires higher rainfall than the African cultigens sorghum and millet. And, even if maize was not cultivated in the Magaliesberg region, the experiences of drought in the higher rainfall areas to the east could have been felt indirectly (S. Hall 2007:174).

(see also 4.3), food production among the Sotho/Tswana should be considered within the context of other practices, and practices of cultivation and foraging understood by relating them to the differences in experience of men and women and the position of women in Tswana society as a whole (cf. Jacobs 1999).

The increased pressure on crucial resources underlines the choice of using stone as a measure taken on the basis of an awareness of sustainability. However, as seen earlier for the microscale level of the household, the intentional introduction of stone also had unintentional outcomes for the interaction between household members and their various engagements with the material surroundings. Do we see parallel transformations of spiritual and conceptual understanding of landscape with the shift to stone walls and the changes to everyday life that the aggregated town dwellings represented? Lane’s (2004) emphasis on the relative importance of water over land is of particular interest here, drawing attention to the interpretations presented in chapters 8 and 9. May the development towards a relatively heavier emphasis on heat and drought in the latest Moloko phase reflected in the elaboration of pollution ideas and associated spatial problem-solving be seen as concurrent with an increased importance placed on rain and the fertility of the soil for the wider cultural landscape beyond the settlements?

Simon Hall (1998:247-48) argues that the parallel intensification and segmentation of both female and male activities makes it possible that women invested considerably more time on agriculture towards the end of the 18th century. Everyday life in the aggregated towns must have reduced the availability of conveniently close agricultural land. A consequence of this aspect, coupled with the imperative for dispersed fields, was that considerable travel time to fields was required, or even permanent residence when weeding and bird scaring became critical as the harvest approached. The development added extra weight to an already long and strenuous agricultural cycle, and was also intensified through other work routines. This was combined with the factor that men may have increasingly withdrawn their contribution to agricultural labour as their own priorities shifted to a greater preoccupation with cattle, raiding, defence and intensifying the acquisition of prestige commodities for trade. This development was potentially linked to the introduction of maize. For, as Hall (1998:248) continues, with reference to Jane Guyer’s (1991) ethnographic study, the farming of traditional African cultigens such as sorghum and millet is sacred and ritualized and their production is shared between men and women in a sequential set of tasks. It is therefore not the sole prerogative of women. It is with the introduction of New World staples that the ethnographic picture of almost exclusive female farming assumes prominence in Africa.

10.3

Female bodily experience and social transformation

The question of concurrent developments requires a discussion of changes to female bodily experience in relation to the agricultural landscape – of female work – and the implications for the personhood of women between the Early and Late Moloko phases.

Guyer (1991:266-69) describes the deep associations between specific fields and female life and labour. The field was a potential anchor to pivot women’s position within the general agricultural economy and ecology. Significantly, with changing rhythms of work and control over the production, changes also occurred to the spatial and temporal containment of associations between female bodily experience and cultivated fields. As the relative position of women and agricultural cycles within the wider societal framework changed, there were concurrent shifts in the scale of collective activity. Guyer describes the disappearance of the material embodiment as a serious loss to the women in her study. As she writes, such a renegotiation of claims “entails abstracting from their material representation and dealing with them in a conceptually explicit way” (Guyer 1991:269). In other words, changes in agricultural cycles or downright replacement of tasks, and even crop repertoire altogether, lead to a change in awareness to claims and the metaphoric associations between the female body and fields. Is a similar development between Early and Late Moloko settlements discernible?

Cultivation and female work As will be remembered from chapter 6, Comaroff (1985) describes a Tswana view of interaction between humans and their environment as a hierarchy with foragers in the bush at the bottom, women in the fields in the middle and cattle in the chief’s kraal at the top. Female reproduction and sexuality had the potential power to threaten production, particularly cattle, and thereby also men’s social achievements. Rituals sustained this worldview and reproduced a social order according to it (cf. Comaroff 1985:54-62, 67-68, 84-120; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997: 152-60). As Jacobs formulates Comaroff’s view, the “production of the symbolic ordering of men, women, the non-human environment and production corresponds to the way social difference determined who practiced which form of food production. For Comaroff, the worldview symbolised the inequality of society, and ritual managed the tension” (Jacobs 1999:372). Keeping in mind Eugenia Herbert’s (1993) exploration of transformation processes in subSaharan Africa, in which female reproductive capabilities are potentially dangerous to a variety of activities, including iron production, pottery and hunting 98

Engaging the landscape appear to have changed as the agricultural use of the landscape intensified and the agglomeration process led to an increased articulation with the landscape expressing permanence through stone walling. It may be argued that a change of awareness of the relationship between female bodily experience and the surrounding landscape accompanied this new articulation, a process similar to that described by Guyer. There was a shift in emphasis for the associations made between women and earth materials which had important implications for the production of containers made of these materials: pots and houses.

In the Tswana world of historic times, the entire arable cycle was metaphorically linked to the cycle of procreation, both being associated with instability and the threat of miscarriage: “There was an association between the earth and the female body, the construct of dark, moist and secreted generation being common to both” (Comaroff 1985:65). This identification of the uncertain process of gestation with crop maturation was further underlined by the fact that the failure of the latter was usually explained in terms of the malevolent burying in the field of an aborted foetus, the epitome of disrupted reproduction. This act was seen to ‘spoil’ the ground and prevent rain (Schapera 1971:107). The productive enterprise as a whole appears to have been exemplified by the meaningful contrast between controlled (male) against uncontrolled (female) sexuality (Comaroff 1985:65).

As will be remembered from the foregoing chapter, there was a change of meaning for clay containers and what they contained (see 9.5). The pots stored at the back platform in the Early Moloko sphere of experience, in combination with the back platform itself, were symbolically laden mnemonics of female and male ancestral links. What these pots contained was different from the largely scattered pottery found in Late Moloko household space. And, in addition, the meanings of the house as container of people and pots may have undergone concurrent changes. This development may be seen as contributing to a general shift in emphasis on the visibility of clay containers, not only within the perimeter of the homestead, but also for the surrounding cultivated landscape. As weighted spaces and spheres of experience in households underwent changes during the process of compartmentalization, the interaction between people and their engagements with the material world changed as well. From interaction around fireplaces perceived as central, where the sexual identities of the bodies were a crucial focus of attention, the engagement shifted towards relatively more preoccupation with the associations between the female body, clay and the fertility of cultivated soil. These alterations in conceptualization of household space and materiality also had the consequence that female work and technology were now visible in different ways than they had been before. Products of women’s work in clay and earth were not only confined to the presence of pots at the back platform inside the Early Moloko hut, they were also visible as another category of clay container, namely as houses.

As argued in the foregoing chapter (see 9.5), grounded in an understanding of the female body as situation (see 3.3), there seems to have been a general development towards the last phase of the Moloko sequence in which the meeting and interaction between differing sexual identities around fireplaces centrally located in the hut floors became of relatively less significance than was the case in the earlier phases. Problem-solving in household space in relation to pollution ideas associated with clay shifted from a primary focus on the female body’s relationship to other household members to a relatively heavier emphasis on its links to agricultural cycles and securing the fertility of cultivated soil. The elaboration of pollution concepts connected to clay and fire seems to have become more intimately linked to concerns with the potential dangers of heat and drought after the introduction of stone walling. Given the potentially deep associations between female bodily experience and cultivated fields, where changes to agricultural cycles or replacement of tasks necessarily lead to changes in awareness to claims and metaphoric associations to the cultivated landscape, it is argued that the development emphasized here for household space may be seen as intrinsically linked to transformations on a larger societal scale for the relationship between Tswana cultivators and their material environments. New landscape – new meanings to clay containers

In my opinion, the relative shift in pollution ideas associated with clay between Early and Late Moloko had important implications for the changes to ceramic technology after the introduction of stone walling. While the concurrent changes to the Moloko ceramic sequence and process of compartmentalization of dwelled-in spaces after AD 1700 may be linked to male anxieties over the growing importance of female labour, as Simon Hall (1998) suggests, the documented decrease in intensity of ceramic decoration should also be associated with a change in conceptualization of clay itself and what clay technology was: from being about making pots, it was now to an increasing extent a technology that conceptually included both pots and houses. The increased intimacy between the female body and agricultural soil and clay would also imply that the

Dwelling is what happens when traditions of practice find themselves at home in a landscape, producing a climate of expectations and assumption within which future projects can be devised and carried forward (Thomas 2008:305)

The arguments here are in concordance with Lane’s (2004:289) observation that settlement movement did not just alter the subsistence geography, but also transformed cultural and cosmological understanding of landscape, and particular emphasis was on rainmaking and the control of rain as a source of political power. However, while relocation may have been a longstanding aspect of Tswana land-use strategies, the conceptualizations of clay, soil, cultivated fields and rain 99

Material Knowledges introduction of maize to the Tswana, the establishment of large settlements and their destruction during the difaqane. Instead, the evidence suggests that Mzilikazi’s Ndebele introduced maize into the area. And, since the aggregation process had begun long before the 1820s, the growth and disintegration of settlements cannot be linked to the cultivation of, and dependence on, maize as a staple (Boeyens 2003:74-75).

presence of her ancestors was more dominant in the fields and household spaces associated with women. The process of compartmentalization, in which the use of stone for both internal boundaries and the outer limits of the settlement was prominent, may therefore be linked to another reason for male anxiety over female activity: the greater permanence of women’s technologies of clay (pots and houses) and soil (cultivation). This may be seen as a variation of the meaningful contrast, as observed by Comaroff for the Tswana ethnographic present, between controlled male and uncontrolled female sexuality.

After Boeyens’ article, Huffman (2006, 2007a) has published new arguments for an earlier introduction of maize into the area in question than what is found documented in written and oral sources. These arguments are of particular interest to the discussion in this work, since Huffman argues for the relationship between Madikwe villages, ochre mining, and early maize introduction with special reference to the excavations of site 2724CB14 near Thabazimbi (Huffman 2006), the archaeological material discussed in chapter 9 (see 9.2, Fig. 9.1). Huffman argues that the upper and lower grindstones found on the hut floors were for maize and that they are contemporaneous with the Madikwe houses of the second Moloko phase. He points to the parallel mining techniques between the Madikwe villagers’ extraction of red ochre and the techniques employed at the Rooiberg tin mines only 30 km away, and that maize grindstones also occur on Madikwe sites at Rooiberg. Thus, Huffman (2007a:45657) concludes, the Thabazimbi evidence demonstrates that maize appeared 100 to 150 years earlier than in KwaZulu-Natal, and the reason for this being a wellestablished trade connection to Maputo, involving tin as a central commodity.

These interpretations of the changes to the personhood of women during the course of the Moloko sequence emphasize social dynamics between household members, and their respective associations to ancestors, as being inextricably linked to people’s engagement with the surrounding material world. Not only did this engagement involve household materiality, but it was also a function of the female body’s changing relationship to agricultural cycles and spending longer periods in the fields. The maize debate The emphasis on the relationships between women’s bodies and the cultivated landscape, rainfall, agricultural cycles and fertile soil directs attention to the question of the introduction of the higher-yielding but less droughtresistant maize to Sotho/Tswana-speaking farmers. Maputo (Delagoa Bay) is the probable point of entry for the earliest maize into the southern African interior. Portuguese ships were calling annually at Maputo from at least the 1550s (Maggs 2008:180). Maize was cultivated in KwaZulu-Natal, including the northern parts, towards the end of the 18th century. This is well attested in the recorded oral traditions of the Nguni and in the archaeological record (e.g. Walton 1953; Maggs 1982; Boeyens 2003; Huffman 2007a). But what role did the cultivation of maize play in promoting population growth and pressure on environmental resources in the time period leading up to the mfecane/difaqane of the early 19th century?

Huffman (2009) also extends the argument of early introduction of maize to the realm of pollution ideas. By combining archaeological evidence with ethnographic observation, isotopic analysis and tree ring data, he argues that burnt daga structures are the results of cleansing rituals for drought, and are therefore to be seen as a cultural proxy. The foreign cereal, being less resistant to drought than its African counterparts, would have carried a great danger of pollution. Usually, agricultural misfortune is blamed on a breach in pollution rules regarding something new brought from outside. To overcome the pollution, it must be blessed before it is planted. If ignored, and a drought follows, it is thought the farmer ignoring the danger of pollution is to blame. While burnt daga structures are generally rare in the Iron Age archaeological record of southern Africa, Huffman argues that the number of burnt structures in any one settlement makes carelessness and accidents unlikely. And because maize was widely grown, many people had to burn down their grain bins and houses as part of the ritual cleansing when facing severe droughts. Burnt villages associated with Moloko pottery are known from Modipe Hill (Pearson 1995), in the Madikwe Game Reserve (Huffman 2001), Zeerust (Boeyens 2003), Thabazimbi (Huffman 2006) and Rustenburg (Mason 1986).

By combining archaeological and palaeoclimatic data, Huffman (1996) suggested that the increasing cultivation of maize under the wetter conditions of the later 18th century encouraged a dependence that was difficult to sustain during the severe droughts and crop and cattle epidemics in the early 19th century. However, dependence on maize was clearly not universal, and Boeyens (2003) finds that the widespread adoption took place only after Mzilikazi’s incursion into the area of western Tswana-speakers in the early 1820s. Hence, he convincingly demonstrates that the limitations of maize cannot everywhere have contributed to conflict and military tension in the early 19th century (Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005:231-32). Specifically, Boeyens’ argument is that the evidence from contemporary or near-contemporary written sources does not support the inference that there was a causal link between the 100

Engaging the landscape introduction of maize may potentially broaden our understanding of the relationship between female bodily experience and cultivation, perhaps especially for the technological changes implied in such an agricultural transition.

Especially since maize requires higher and more regular rainfall, and its cultivation therefore imply an increased preoccupation with the potential dangers of drought, it is interesting to view Huffman’s recent arguments in light of the interpretations in this work. The demonstration of a development with an increasing importance of the more drought-sensitive maize as a staple food among Sotho/Tswana farmers is potentially a valuable contribution to an understanding of the social transformations during the LIA. However, it should be kept in mind that the evidence of maize cultivation is as yet indirect and circumstantial. Arguments are informed by ethnographic parallels on the morphology of grindstones, where the different stones are seen as belonging to different technologies developed for different plants (Huffman 2006:68). The morphological observation is of lower grindstones as characteristically ‘birdbath-shaped’ (see e.g. Huffman 2007a:453), displaying the broad hollows usually associated with the preparation of maize (Maggs 1984) and elongated ‘twohanded’ upper grinders (Walton 1953), customarily used to pound maize kernels (cf. Boeyens 2003:74; Huffman 2006:67-68). Some researchers are reluctant to accept grindstones as a cultural proxy for maize, arguing that direct evidence in the form of carbonized cobs or similar material is needed. Examinations of grindstones for starch residue (Langejans 2006a, 2006b) have been unsuccessful, partly due to the similarity between sorghum and maize starch grains (see Huffman 2006:67).

Given the focus on the interplay between bodily experience and the specific surrounding agricultural environment for understanding diachronic variation in social dynamics in household space, it would be of interest to look at a concurrent example with similar variables, but situated in a different environmental setting. This may be helpful in understanding the extent to which the changes of Moloko household space in the Magaliesberg region was a unique development linked to a specific landscape. What would such a comparison and contrast reveal about the contextual specificity of social interaction and, importantly, the relationship between women and men? An instructive example may be found in the Mpumalanga Province.

10.4

A comparative example

More accurately, attention is directed to the uniquely dense area of precolonial stone ruins along the Mpumalanga escarpment (Fig. 10.2) separating the lowveld from the highveld, known as the Bokoni settlements (e.g. Delius and Schoeman 2008; Maggs 2008). Clustering between 1310 and 1830 m, most settlements are in montane grassland with relatively light rainfall (Fig. 10.3). The lower sites extend into savanna. Sites are located in river catchments and valleys, with a preference for lower valley slopes (Maggs 2008:173). While easy access to water is demonstrated as having been important (Coetzee 2005), the architecture and the ways in which the sites are articulated with the landscape also suggest that agropastoral concerns certainly were given priority (Delius and Schoeman 2008:139). Although the chronology remains imprecise, due to the combination of few available dates and the limited value of radiocarbon dates younger than about AD 1600, the evidence suggests that the sites flourished within the last 400 years (Maggs 2008:170; cf. Evers and Vogel 1980). Some walled settlements must first date before AD 1650, perhaps as early as 1600 (Huffman 2007a:448).

With Boeyens’ convincing demonstration in mind, that dependence on maize was evidently not universal before Mzilikazi arrived in the area of western Tswana-speakers in the early 1820s, it is important to note that the arguments here do not rest on the kind of cereal being cultivated. Rather, emphasis in this work is on the relationship between female bodily experience and cultivated fields. The changes in elaboration of pollution ideas discussed here are viewed as being linked to the increase in agricultural production and the accompanying changes to the surrounding landscape which are associated with the settlement agglomeration process and the new requirements of town living. They are not seen as necessarily linked to a shift to the New World crop. Nonetheless, future research of the

101

Material Knowledges

Figure 10.2: The distribution of Bokoni settlements (redrawn after Maggs 2008).

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Engaging the landscape

Figure 10.3: Vegetation types along the Mpumalanga escarpment (adapted from Mucina and Rutherford 2006).

103

Material Knowledges The settlements comprise a practically unbroken belt of 150 km with a population concentration22 that seems unparalleled elsewhere. The terraced fields and the road system are exceptional: the extensive terracing is the only precolonial field system of its kind to have survived in South Africa, and the road system is by far the largest and most complex. The extent of terracing suggests production that went beyond local needs and underlines the relative importance of farming. And the extensive cattle control measures indicate large numbers of cattle (Delius and Schoeman 2008:161). Excavations found enclosures and tracks for cattle and sheep/goat bones as evidence for animal farming, and indications of agriculture in the form of grindstones, iron hoes and metal sharpening wear patterns on terrace stones (Evers 1975; Marker and Evers 1976). Crop production was confirmed when Collett (1979, 1982) found sorghum seeds on daga hut floors. Regarding the question of introduction of maize, the sorghum grains are the only ones recovered from a Bokoni site. However, Maggs points out that it is likely that maize was of importance from an early stage for the settlements. The argument is based on the combination of the recovery of large ‘birdbath’-type lower grindstones and two-handed upper grindstones (see above), the early adoption of maize as a staple in KwaZulu-Natal, the Bokoni settlements’ geographic closeness to Maputo and the fact that the moist climate of the escarpment is not favourable to sorghum, while being good for maize (Maggs 2008:180).

The debate over the identity of the inhabitants of the sites illustrates the complexity of the interaction towards the terminal Iron Age in the area. The discussion of the archaeological evidence focuses mainly on inter-group dynamics, but extends also to the domain of interaction between household members. An example is the difference between the Bokoni sites and the Ndzundza Ndebele sites from the upper Steelpoort valley, where Schoeman (1998a, 1998b) has also observed Marateng style decoration on sherds. Ndzundza capitals, such as KwaMasa, have the Moor Park variant of stone walling (Huffman 2007a:448), which is associated with Ngunispeakers. A characteristic of these Ndzundza Ndebele is the combination of material elements from the Sotho/Tswana and Nguni worlds: while using the same Moloko ceramics as their Pedi neighbours from before AD 1700, they built Nguni-style beehive houses and followed the distinct Nguni practice of capping middens with red earth, probably to prevent the ash deposited in them from being used in malevolent magic. Schoeman argues that the practices may have signalled unity with the Pedi with whom the Ndzundza were now aligned. The production of pottery in styles associated with Sotho- and Venda-speakers by Ndebele groups contradicts the association of ceramic style and language. The ceramics probably reflect the integration of Sotho/Tswana women into Ndebele society and possible tension between Nguni and Sotho perception of marriage. Women may in this way have challenged male cultural perception (Schoeman 1998a, 1998b; Mitchell and Whitelaw 2005:230).

According to Huffman (2007a:41), the type of stone walling at these sites is called Badfontein (Fig. 10.4), associated with Nguni-speakers characterized as ‘Sothoized’ and known as Koni (meaning Nguni in Sotho/Tswana). The associated ceramic style, Marateng (Collett 1982), is classified by Huffman as a development from the second-phase Madikwe facies of the western Sotho/Tswana cluster, forming a separate northern cluster of the Moloko sequence (see Table 2.2). Marateng is associated with present-day Pedi-speakers (North Sotho) living in the area. Oral traditions place Koni at the escarpment before the Pedi (Huffman 2007a:433-36, 448). Alex Schoeman (1997) first identified the site occupants as Koni, and subsequently Huffman (2004a:98) argued that the sites were the creation of the Koni, viewing them as a homogeneous Nguni group. However, Delius and Schoeman (2008; see also Makhura 2007) have recently argued that the assumption of the Koni as an ethnic group is wrong. Arguing for a wider comparison of the Marateng pottery between the Bokoni sites and sites occupied by the Ndzundza Nguni, Delius and Schoeman (2008) emphasize that the excavated Marateng ceramics is not only Pedi, but seems to have been used by most of the major groupings.

While the Ndzundza seem to have adopted the regional ceramic style as a result of women’s responses to exogamous marriage preferences, as well as to population fluidity in the area, for the Koni adoption of this regional ceramic style the dynamics overlap with the Ndzundza, but they are also different (Delius and Schoeman 2008:159-60). This was due to significant differences in social dynamics between household members: As with the Ndzundza (and the Pedi) the Koni were joined by large numbers of people from other groups (...), but like the Pedi they practiced cross-cousin marriage, ensuring that women’s mobility was more limited. Koni adoption of a regional ceramic style probably then speaks about population fluidity, but not internal gendered identities (Delius and Schoeman 2008:159-60)

22 Marker and Evers (1976) tentatively estimated that, if occupied concurrently, an area of the Lydenburg valley population must have reached somewhere between 19 000 and 57 000 in the period of maximum population.

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Engaging the landscape

Figure 10.4: A bokoni homestead with Badfontein walling (redrawn after Collett 1982). 3.

Like their Sotho/Tswana neighbours, the Koni practiced endogamy. And given the variables of this discussion – how social dynamics associated with marriage relates to household materiality, and in particular how the production and use of Moloko pottery was part of such dynamics – the Bokoni settlements are found to be of particular comparative interest in relation to the foregoing discussions in this Part III. In light of the interpretations of the Moloko ceramic sequence and associated settlements in the Magaliesberg region, the following three questions will be approached: 1.

2.

What were the associations between the social dynamics in household space and the wider societal and political context; with particular emphasis on the relationship between agriculture and pastoralism (see 10.3)?

In order to answer these questions a closer look is needed at the spatial organization of Bokoni settlements and at the inhabitants’ relationship to their surrounding landscape. Three unique stone features

How were the households organized spatially; with particular reference to the spheres of experience discussed in chapter 8 (see 8.4)?

Maggs (2008:173-75) describes the terracing and road system. Many of the field edges are marked by a single row of stones, but there are examples of substantial constructed walls a metre wide or more. These walls seem to mark the boundary between terracing and open grasslands. They were most likely constructed to keep animals off cultivated fields, and the open areas beyond probably used for grazing. The walling seems to follow

What does the household materiality tell about the social dynamics between its inhabitants; with special reference to pollution ideas associated with clay (see 9.4)?

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Material Knowledges

Figure 10.5: Sketch plan of a typical larger Bokoni homestead (redrawn after Maggs 2008). Turning to the homesteads, the Badfontein walling, according to Huffman (2007a:41), emphasizes the centre/side axis of the Central Cattle Pattern, expressed through concentric circles. The inner circle was for cattle, the next marked the men’s court, and the outer ring was the area for houses. However, Maggs (2008:175-78) points out that although the homestead layout broadly falls into the CCP, and the material culture and basic economy are typical for the LIA, the built settlement pattern is striking in comparison to all other known contemporary farming societies. It turns out to be a contrast to what we would expect from settlements associated with Moloko pottery and Sotho/Tswana-speakers. Importantly, Maggs’ account of the pattern of circles differs from Huffman’s in that

the landscape contours and could define individual fields. These are narrow, especially when steep, and generally quite small. Roads are defined by a stone wall on each side, connecting the homesteads with the open grasslands, thereby controlling the movement of livestock through areas of terraced cultivation. Roads to individual homesteads are usually narrow, allowing for the passage of only one animal at the time. The roads invariably lead up to the central enclosure of the homestead. They often join wider communal roads, which can be up to 4 km long. It is still unclear whether roads were used for cattle only, or whether they also were for pedestrians.

106

Engaging the landscape agricultural landscape for female work, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Thus, the elaboration of stone terracing and walling and the uniqueness of the passages and pathways in the Bokoni settlements may be compared to the interpretations of Moloko household space and the inhabitants’ relationship to the surrounding landscape. However, in order to enable such a comparison, a closer inspection is needed of Bokoni household materiality and spatiality.

instead of three concentric circles, he describes the pattern as comprising of two concentric circles: the inner most probably for cattle and the outer the dwelling area. And, in addition, there are a number of circles around part of, or even the whole of, the central circle. He draws attention to three unique features of this spatial organization (see Fig. 10.5). The first applies to the central or primary enclosure (cf. Maggs 1976). Whereas the primary enclosure of precolonial farming communities only has one single entrance, this has two entrances. In addition to, and directly opposite, the narrow road leading from the wider communal road, another passage leads into the household area. The second feature concerns the ring of enclosures arranged around the central enclosure – what Maggs describes as “the petals of a daisy” (Maggs 2008:178). As these adjoin the central enclosure, sharing parts of its wall, they are defined as secondary enclosures. Significantly, their entrances face outwards. Maggs writes that he knows of no other Iron Age homestead pattern like this one. Taken together, these two features articulate a unique pattern for dealing with cattle. The cattle pattern is actually reversed: the typical would be a ring of primary enclosures, each with a single entrance and opening inwards into a central and secondary enclosure. He finds it unlikely that the ring of outward opening secondary enclosures was developed for the daily movement of stock in and out of the homestead. Instead, he suggests that the arrangement was for stall feeding of livestock, where parts of the herd were kept in and stall fed over longer periods. Since homesteads were relatively dispersed through the terraced areas, such an arrangement would have facilitated the collection of the unwanted parts of crop plants as fodder, as well as the spreading of manure from stall onto adjacent fields (Maggs 2008:178-80).

Bokoni household space The excavations by Evers (1975; Marker and Evers 1976) and Collett (1979, 1982) show that houses constructed in the outer dwelling areas all were of the locally dominant rondavel-type. In contrast to the stonewalled monumentality of the terracing and road system, the houses were built of soft materials. An exception is the stone corbelled huts sometimes found in this type of settlement. These are normally associated with the distinctly different type V settlement (Maggs 2008:175; see Huffman 2007a:33). The houses had stone paved floors and clay-lined or plastered daga firebowls, sometimes with trio of firestones, and verandas. Marateng pots and grindstones were placed under the eaves (Evers 1975). Excavations have also added new data to the sequence of house construction (Marker and Evers 1976). The house floors were levelled with gravel on which stones were laid. The floors were then plastered, and a daga veranda and bench were built on the side of the house facing the cattle enclosure (Delius and Schoeman 2008:160). Quite detailed rock engravings depicting settlement plans have been found. The concentric homestead pattern is well emphasized, even though in a quite stylized manner (Maggs 2008:175). The excavated rondavel houses stand in contrast to the beehive houses depicted in the rock art (see Maggs 1995), possibly suggesting that the built houses were different from idealized depictions. While this contradiction can relate to diachronic variation, it could also, if contemporaneous, suggest multiple identities for the people living at the settlements (Delius and Schoeman 2008:160).

The third peculiarity is that the dwelling area seems to be separated internally by rows of stones. Importantly, most of these radial stone-lines stop short of the central complex of enclosures, leaving a passage between the inner limits of the domestic area and the ring of secondary enclosures. Maggs (2008:178) notes that such a passage would serve to protect household spaces, with their thatched and therefore edible house roofs, if livestock were penned in the secondary enclosures. This would explain the need for the second entrance to the central enclosure, which would thereby allow animals to move from the centre via the inner edge of the domestic area into the secondary enclosures.

Contrary to the stonewalled settlements associated with Moloko pottery in the Magaliesberg, the same degree of compartmentalization of household spaces in the Bokoni houses is not found. Rather, the materiality and spatiality of households is similar to the Early Moloko sphere of experience discussed for the Madikwe hut floors (see 9.3). This sphere consisted of a central, sunken firebowl, which was the site of everyday interaction between bodies with differing sexual identities, and which stood in a closely intertwined relationship to the ancestral back platform. As will be remembered, the transition to Late Moloko is defined by the introduction of stone walling. And, for the situation in household space, the shift is related to changes in elaboration of pollution ideas associated with clay; from a primary focus on the female body’s relationship to other household members to a relatively heavier emphasis on its relationship to agricultural cycles and the fertility of cultivated soil.

In this author’s opinion, understanding of this spatial organization calls for a perspective in which the elaboration of stonewalled pathways and passages are seen as part of a cultural logic where keeping cattle from eating thatched roofs is but one aspect of separation and avoidance associated with the dwelled-in settlement spaces. One should also consider the various aspects of the relationship between pastoralism and agriculture, and particularly the implications of engagement with the 107

Material Knowledges Between the second phase of Moloko (c. AD 15001700), here represented by the Madikwe and Olifantspoort facies, and the last phase (c. AD 17001840), elaboration of pollution ideas seems to have become more intimately linked to concerns with the potential dangers of heat and drought than with the dangerous female body coming from outside (see 9.5). And, as seen earlier in this chapter, these changes are also related to a change of political scale and to an increase in agricultural production associated with agglomerated settlements.

10.5

Politics in stone

The three unique features identified by Maggs are all related to the pathways and passages for cattle. These special solutions seem to having been linked to periods of stall feeding and to keeping animals separate from household spaces when entering and leaving the secondary enclosures. Thus, certain aspects of the relationship between the pastoralist domain and pollution concepts may be discerned. But how was pastoralism connected to the surrounding landscape of the Bokoni settlements, and in particular to the domain of agriculture? The thousands of hectares of terracing and hundreds of kilometres of roads represent a huge investment in land and cultivation and must be the result of a substantial mobilization of labour. The investment is on a scale, as Maggs formulates it, “that sets BoKoni apart from all other precolonial societies in South Africa” (Maggs 2008:179). With the earlier discussion of the personhood of women in this chapter in mind, it becomes of comparative interest to ask what role female bodily experience and cultivation played in social interaction and for the use of the surrounding landscape in this particular agropastoralist context.

Thus, when seen in relation to the interpretations of Moloko household space in this work, the excavated Bokoni households stand out. On the one hand, they show similarities to pre-walling, Early Moloko hut floors, associated with Olifantspoort and Madikwe pottery, in terms of a sphere of experience consisting of a spatial intimacy between a sunken central firebowl and a back platform. On the other hand, however, the households belong to stonewalled settlements associated with Late Moloko Marateng pottery. While the similarities to Madikwe hut floors add an aspect of comparability of social interaction in household space to Huffman’s classification of Marateng as having developed from Madikwe, it is also a reminder of the third and final question concerning the Bokoni settlements: What associations are seen between household dynamics and the wider context, with particular reference to the relationship between agriculture and pastoralism?

Implications of terracing Elizabeth Watson (2004) contrasts two examples of intensive farming from eastern Africa, the Marakwet in Kenya and the Konso in Ethiopia. This may be instructive for an understanding of the relationship between social organization and agricultural intensification in the Mpumalanga escarpment and differences in social dynamics from the Magaliesberg. Watson identifies the essential difference between the two cases as being the relationship to water and land: the Marakwet irrigation furrows on the one hand and Konso terrace walls and other conservation devices on the other, on which the intensive agriculture depended and whose construction required communal or extra-household labour. In Marakwet, organized labour was invested in the water furrows, which were publicly-owned structures that belonged equally to all who worked on them and used them. In Konso, on the other hand, much of the labour was used for the soil- and water-conservation structures – building terraces – on fields belonging to individuals or individual households. People possessing a certain degree of political skill, and more land and wealth than others, could turn the ‘labour exchange’ to further advantage by using it to improve their lands.

Before entering into this discussion in detail, it will briefly be returned to one particular unique feature of the three observed by Maggs (2008): that dwelling areas seem to have been divided internally by rows of stones. The rows would indeed, as Maggs suggest, serve to protect household spaces, especially the edible, thatched house roofs, by leaving a passage between the inner limits of the household and the secondary cattle enclosures. However, keeping the material and spatial similarities between Bokoni and Early Moloko households in mind, combined with the elaboration of pollution ideas associated with this particular sphere of experience, the perception of why spaces were kept separate may also be turned the other way around. Perhaps it was not only about preventing cattle from damaging the roofs, but also about avoidance? Could it not just as well be the animals that needed protection? Ethnographic accounts of both Sotho/Tswana-speakers (Hammond-Tooke 1981:123, 128; Comaroff 1985:6768; see also 6.2) and Nguni-speakers (Raum 1973:14445) attest that women were considered potentially dangerous to cattle, and were debarred from entering cattle enclosures and physical contact with the animals. Thus, since the cattle would pass near spaces with problem-solving elaborating on the interaction between differing sexual identities, the channelling of cattle near such spaces by stone demarcations may be seen as a physical measure to protect animals, while also protecting thatched roofs.

According to Watson, such arrangements tended to promote social differentiation, since terraced land lends itself relatively easily to exclusive use. The labour invested in building terraces was likely to be translated into increasingly exclusive rights to that individual patch of land (Watson 2004:66). For the Mpumalanga case, the implication of this would be that the terrace building may have encouraged social differentiation, and that unequal ownership to cultivated terraces was an important basis for difference in social status. The terraces would not only have signified the ability to 108

Engaging the landscape mobilize the necessary labour to construct them, but also the capability to provide agricultural produce beyond the needs of the household. Through their stone-built articulation and visibility, these significations were clearly articulated with the landscape surrounding the homesteads. Thus, by virtue of this visibility of terraced and cultivated fields, these stone-building communities display a significant contrast to earlier discussions of the domain of cultivation in this chapter: the articulation of wealth was relatively more in the form of agriculture in comparison to pastoralist concerns. And when wealth has become comparatively more visualized in terms of cultivated fields, the relative importance of female work and relationship between female bodily experience and cultivated soil has been valued differently as well.

pollution concepts associated with social dynamics in household space and with the general relationship between women and cattle among Bantu-speakers in southern Africa. The emphasis would entail an understanding of the domain of male pastoralism as having faced the perils of pollution associated with the female body from both within the household and from the surrounding landscape. While the potential dangers from polluting forces having to do with the sexual identity of a relative outsider were present from within household spaces, the personhood of women was also clearly present in the very physicality of the surrounding environment, in the terraced slopes. This landscape underscored the relative importance and contribution to subsistence from the domain of female work.

Comparing the two examples

Although it must be pointed out that the interpretations remain tentative, the approach to the particular situation for pastoralism may provide a contribution to further development of a framework for understanding the measures taken for the keeping of cattle in the Bokoni settlements. In this author’s opinion, the pathways and passages for cattle are found to be unique from other contemporary LIA farming communities because of a combination of two factors: 1) a problem-solving in relation to pollution ideas in household space centred on the meeting between female and male sexual identities; and 2) the terraced fields were, at least in certain respects, attributed with a higher social value in relation to cattle than was usually the case.

An important difference to the use of stone in the landscape between the Bokoni settlement and the Tswana towns further to the west emerges. The Tswana articulation with stone has largely been about demarcating wealth through cattle enclosures and homesteads, leaving cultivated fields as something less clearly articulated that lay beyond and outside settlement space. Here, cattle belonged inside the settlement perimeter while cultivation was situated on the outside. In the Bokoni settlements, on the other hand, articulations in stone included the domain of cultivation, and thereby extended beyond inhabited spaces. The potentially deep relationships between the female body and specific fields may have been important for women’s position within the general agricultural economy and ecology (cf. Guyer 1991), and the terraced fields thereby left female life and labour clearly visible in the landscape. In other words, the emphasis on what was viewed as socially significant for the accumulation of wealth, especially from a male perspective, must have differed considerably in the two cases.

Concluding remarks In conclusion, the extensive terracing has underscored, through everyday bodily experience and the visual presence of the cultivated landscape, a contextually specific value attributed to land and agricultural produce as sources of wealth. Thus, in line with the main tenets of the dwelling perspective outlined in the opening of this chapter, by considering architecture as something that exists through practices of making, we see that different engagements with the surrounding material world generate culturally specific meanings. Rather than treating the process of building as one of importing ready-made templates or mental representations into the world, people, by thinking the thoughts they do in a materially and socially specific dwelled-in world, create and recreate a distinctive architectural environment. Such a perspective contributes to an understanding of why the Bokoni settlements with Badfontein walling were different from all other versions of the Central Cattle Pattern: through the intersecting trajectories of people, animals, material culture, architecture and landscape a unique process of dwelling unfolded, one in which cultivated terraces became a source of social differentiation – together with cattle.

Thus, the difference in engagement with the surrounding material world generated two political situations where social wealth was articulated differently through landscapes of stone constructions. The Bokoni terraced fields is interpreted as a situation where the relationship between pastoralism and agriculture, and thereby men and women’s respective associations to social wealth, was different from the articulation of associations between cattle and male power through stone in the Magaliesberg region. Consequently, through intimate, bodily experienced engagements with the surrounding world the landscape changed, and the association became unique in the context of contemporary LIA stone-building farming communities. This emphasis on intimacy between bodily experience and materiality is an important factor for understanding the uniqueness of the Bokoni settlement pattern, especially if one includes

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11.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

The Earth existed without our unimaginable ancestors, could well exist today without us, will exist tomorrow or later still, without any of our possible descendants, whereas we cannot exist without it. (…) How did the change of perspective happen? By the power and for the glory of men (Serres 1995:33)

questions, of which three have addressed aspects of social transformation relating to the Moloko ceramic sequence (see 8.2). Each of these three have been devoted a chapter in Part III. With a particular interest in the microscale (see 2.3), the present synthesis has demonstrated a development between Early and Late Moloko household spaces which consists of diachronic variation in hearth location and meanings associated with fire, household materiality and social practice involving clay. The Moloko ceramic sequence underwent changes in decorative intensity and colour use, vessel types, ceramic ware and spatial distribution after AD 1700 that can be related to the intensified aggregation into town settlements and the introduction of stone walling. The spatial and physical layout of house and household changed, and the development is seen as closely linked to changing social dynamics between people inhabiting the dwellings. In addition, these transformations also involved subtle shifts in the connections between the living and their ancestors, and the material world that mediated between them.

Philosopher Michel Serres draws attention to certain aspects of the ways in which the material world is understood and which are emphasized in this work. His critical account of how materiality often is viewed may be related to the ontological position presented here (see 3.3): A symmetrical understanding of humans and nonhumans as sharing substance and membership in a dwelt-in world opens for a perspective of people and things as being grounded in the same conditions of existence, and thereby underscoring their dialectical and mutual co-existence. Thus, nonhumans may also be seen to have social lives and to undergo various life cycle stages. This ontology has informed the approach to the two key themes – the first being the meeting between differing material knowledges and the second the social dynamics of households, dynamics which include people and their immediate surroundings of material culture and built environment. In addition, Serres indicates how the view of culture as hovering over the material world (see 4.1, 8.1) has become hegemonic, namely through unequal power relations and a patriarchal ideology. With a focus on interaction between open-ended and continually changing knowledge systems, this work has presented a critique of and an epistemological alternative to the hegemonic view by combining two perspectives which call into question the underlying principles of Western social sciences that advocate neutrality: feminist critique asserting that all knowledge is situated and a philosophical contextualization of Western knowledge systems (see 3.2). Three problematic legacies of the Western knowledge archive have been given prominence in this regard: the nature/culture divide, the notion of abstract space and the understanding of cultural change. The critique concerning these aspects of knowledge has important implications for the ways in which one understands technology (see 4.1), personhood and substance (see 4.2), dwelled-in spaces (see 4.3), fire (chapter 8), clay containers (chapter 9) and landscapes (chapter 10). The epistemological standpoint thus relates to Appiah’s (2005:35) note on the failure of positivism as a methodology for the sciences, namely that no a priory rules exist to guarantee true theories. As such, this approach should be viewed as grown out of an ethical postprocessual archaeology, where the notion of the discipline’s subjects as being dead is viewed not merely as orthodox, but also as outmoded and unethical (Meskell 2005a:85-86, Meskell 2005c). There are indelible links between past, present and future, and present politics of the past will continually shape archaeological discourses.

When viewing the wider social context in light of these interpretations of the microscale, the present study emphasizes that social transformations occurred as results of people’s intimate engagements with lived-in landscapes. Focusing particularly on women’s bodily experience and female work (see 10.3), and following Moi’s (1999) treatise of Beauvoir’s (1989) concept of the body as situation (see 3.3), it is argued that women’s increased engagements with cultivated soil in Late Moloko was accompanied by a new awareness towards the material world and agricultural landscapes. Specifically, the intimacy lead to an elaboration of pollution ideas relating to clay and other earth materials where the female body’s potential danger to rainfall, soil fertility and agricultural cycles was articulated differently from what was the case during Early Moloko. Furthermore, by comparing the development of articulation with stone as discussed for the Magaliesberg region with that for the Bokoni settlements in the Mpumalanga escarpment, the study demonstrates the cultural uniqueness of people’s engagements with particular landscapes. While the Tswana articulation has been relatively more focused on the demarcation of male wealth through cattle enclosures and homesteads than the cultivated fields and naga beyond, the Bokoni terraced fields are seen as articulations with stone where women’s relative position within the economy and ecology was valued somewhat differently. In contrast to the example further to the west, in the Mpumalanga case one sees a clearer definition of the fields that lay beyond cattle enclosures and homesteads. Also, given the association to Moloko ceramics in both cases, and

The strategy for obtaining the main objective of this work (see 1.3) has been to approach four research 110

Summary and concluding reflections linked to the classification of the material as aquatic – thereby become intimately linked to rainfall cycles, cultivation of the land and movement in the agricultural landscape. Furthermore, within the broad categories of water and earth we may discern differentiations. For example, among Shona-speakers in Manica, who also link clay to water, it depends on whether the clay is found in rivers or pools, because rivers are seen as dirty while pools are clean. And whereas dirty rivers are linked to crocodiles, hippos and other aquatic animals, pools are associated with the snake and a potentially dangerous female being, namely the mermaid or nzuzu. In cultural contexts where clay seems to be classified with relatively more ambiguity in relation to earth/water, such as among Nguni-speakers in Pongola, social practice involving clay seems relatively less concerned with the material’s links to water and rain, and more with dynamics between household members belonging to different clan lineages.

Huffman’s (2007a, 2007b) classification of the Marateng pottery of the Bokoni settlements as having developed from the Early Moloko Madikwe, the arguments here for similarities in hearth location and household spatiality between excavated Bokoni households and Early Moloko hut floors is a potential topic for future research. The fourth research question concerns the theoretical and methodological implications of the comparative approach for archaeological understanding of people’s relationship to the material world. Regarding the meeting between non-Western knowledge systems and modernity as world system, it is important that researchers acknowledge the intimate relationship between the bodily experience of everyday life and the development and change of such systems. Grounded in an understanding of technology where the mutual becoming of people and things is emphasized (see 4.1), subSaharan clay practices are seen as relating to a thermodynamic philosophy, and a reflexive life history methodology (see 4.3) is followed. As argued for the introductory example of the experienced contrasts between the cases in the Tswapong Hills and Molepolole, the latter may be viewed as demonstrating a redefinition or change of apparently insignificant bodily habits, resulting in a breach of the previously inseparable link between the potter’s embodied identity and the various stages of manufacture – between the female body and the clay technology. For an engagement with the material world which has been so intimately connected to female bodily experience and the personhood of women, changes to bodily experience and the various technological stages seem to have had rather deep-reaching consequences. The ways in which cultural ideas were linked to social practice involving clay – the technological problem-solving in household space – have become substantially different. Therefore, from a methodological point of view, the contrasts between the two examples underline the importance of following the relationship between humans, nonhuman materiality and their movement in space throughout the entire life span of material objects, in order to be able to capture the potential cultural pressures significant at each individual stage.

Importantly, a note should also be made about what this life history approach does not yet do. As made clear in the methodology chapter, it is a deliberate choice to focus attention on the first four basic themes of the questionnaire. Thus, aspects belonging to the fifth point – secondary reuse, discard of pots and the formation of deposits – have been left out with the intention of conducting a comprehensive analysis at a later time. Potential topics for future research include the extent of reuse of old vessels to make new ones, the spatiality of reused vessels in households (Fig. 11.1), discard patterning, and discussion of the specific cultural connections made between the latest stages in the social lives of clay vessels and those belonging to human cycles of life and death. Finally, a few concluding comments may be offered on how the present study’s approach can potentially contribute to archaeological thinking. Lesley Green (2008:148-49) has recently pointed out two ironic aspects concerning the concept of indigenous knowledge. Firstly, the notion of ‘indigenous’ is itself a hybrid creation that has emerged as a counterpoint to the concept of ‘globalization’, while drawing on a romantic Western notion of culture as static and bounded, as discussed in chapter 3. Secondly, at the time when marginalized people began to use the terminology of modernism for political claims, the apparatus they have been using was rejected in the ‘centres’ of international scholarship. The two paradoxes are also noted by Michael Dove et al. (2007:130-31). However, Dove et al. add that modernity at one and the same time has been constructing and erasing the Western/non-Western divide. While modernity on the one hand has symbolically constructed the ideas of indigeneity, otherness and a fundamental difference between Western and non-Western societies, it has on the other promoted

A central argument in this work is that the various subsequent stages in ceramic manufacture and use cannot be viewed in isolation from the cultural categorizations and engagements with clay that are taking place even before it has been dug out of the ground and transported to the homestead. This aspect is particularly illuminated by the example from the Tswapong Hills, where social practice involving clay is not restricted to potting, but also includes the building of houses. Working with clay may potentially drive away the rain, and social practices involving the material –

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Transformations in clay

Figure 11.1: At a late stage. A pfuko pot reused as a washing basin in the homestead of Leonor José in Bairro Vumba, Ville de Manica, Mozambique. the dismantling of the divide by emphasizing the mixing and hybridization of elements on either side.

ontology of engagement’, to use Ingold’s terminology, this work may provide support to arguments that the engagement with other knowledges can and should influence archaeological thought and practice, rather than merely regarding local knowledges as supporting evidence to universalist versions of archaeological science. The crucial question is to what extent one is willing to allow the discipline to change as a consequence of the intimate interactions with these other ways of knowing the material world.

These ironies highlight the importance of a critical and enquiring attitude towards the modern condition and of concentrating on the interfaces, meetings and interactions between open-ended and continually changing knowledge systems. By privileging a combination of microscale analysis and a shift of weight from a ‘global ontology of detachment’ to a ‘local

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