As noted in Chapter 6, pottery designs and decorations are critically important in archaeology because they often reveal some aspects of the culture of the people who made them. This chapter presents local and imported ceramics as well as stone objects which the Chewa used for tasks that could not be accomplished using iron implements.

Local ceramics

Although the foreign ceramics are important in that they show the involvement of the Chewa in long-distance trade, emphasis will be placed on the local material because this was the handiwork of the Chewa themselves. Pots and bowls, illustrated below, dominated the local ceramics, with smoking pipes and spindle whorls following in dominance.

Pots and bowls

As shown in Table 8.1, one whole vessel and 45 850 potsherds were recovered at Mankhamba. Level 2 produced the largest number of potsherds, with over 40 per cent whereas Level 1 produced the smallest number, with only 9 per cent of the total potsherds. The first step in trying to obtain information from the potsherds was to sort them with an eye to finding fragments that had been parts of the same vessel. The sole surviving whole vessel, recovered in Level 4, was a small shallow bowl that was missing a tiny section of its rim. Recovering a well-preserved whole vessel in an excavation characterised by heavy fragmentation was unexpected. In fact, whole vessels are rarely recovered at settlement sites, but are fairly common at burial sites where they were carefully placed in the graves as containers for burial goods. At the two Late Iron Age burial sites excavated so far in Malawi, Nkhudzi Bay and Mtemankhokwe 1, whole vessels were recovered.

Besides being small — and this was probably why it survived — the Mankhamba whole vessel was not decorated. It had a small hole with a diameter of 7 millimeters intentionally made at the bottom (see Figure 8.1 no i). Drilling holes in pots was a fairly common practice in the southern Lake Malawi area. At Nkopola Swamp, located along the western shores of the eastern arm of Lake Malawi, some potsherds were recovered which had several holes drilled in each one of them.