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Re-dating the Ingombe Ilede burials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2017

Susan Keech McIntosh  and
Brian M. Fagan
Susan Keech McIntosh*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Rice University, PO Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251, USA
Brian M. Fagan
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106–3210, USA
*
*Author for correspondence (Email: skmci@rice.edu)
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Abstract

Several burials excavated during 1960 at Ingombe Ilede in southern Africa were accompanied by exceptional quantities of gold and glass beads, bronze trade wire and bangles. The burials were indirectly dated to the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries AD, prior to the arrival of the Portuguese on the East Coast of Africa. New AMS dates on cotton fabric from two of the burials now relocate them in the sixteenth century. This was a dynamic period when the Portuguese were establishing market settlements along the Zambezi, generating new demands for trade products from the interior, and establishing trade networks with the Mwene Mutapa confederacy. These new dates invite a reconsideration of Ingombe Ilede's relationship to Swahili and Portuguese trade in the middle Zambezi. This article is followed by four responses and a final comment by the authors.

Keywords

ZambiaZambeziGreat ZimbabweSwahili tradePortuguese tradegoldcopper
Type
Debate
Information
Antiquity , Volume 91 , Issue 358 , August 2017 , pp. 1069 - 1077
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2017 

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