Once a thriving center with commercial links to the Indian Ocean, what remains of Great Zimbabwe is its monumental architecture. Its rise and decline have long been linked to environmental changes in southern Zimbabwe, beginning in the second half of the 13th century with agropastoralists thriving in the region's well-watered granite hills and valleys, and culminating in a vast urban and trading society. Later, c.1550 AD, it is argued, drying climate, land overexploitation, and changing regional trading patterns would lead to the decline of Great Zimbabwe. A review of this model is necessary since Great Zimbabwe and communities living around it survive in a region constantly threatened by water crises. However, we still know very little on the forms and uses of water and how these have influenced its development and demise. This article offers a multilayered review of available information on water, including new records on environmental sequences, modern water sources, and provisioning models from in and around Great Zimbabwe. The integration of both old and new datasets allows us to follow the history of people-water interaction from early times to the present. We argue that understanding of the local environment was vital in managing both water excesses and shortages in the past, and show that some of this knowledge survives among indigenous communities linked to the site and living in the surrounding landscape. While nearby Masvingo town has persistently lived under water-emergency conditions, farmers around Great Zimbabwe mitigate shortfalls of modern water provision through a balanced and mutually vital interaction with natural water resources such as springs and soil moisture.

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Numerous doctoral degree holders were trained in African archaeometallurgy in the Global North as well as on the African continent. African archaeometallurgy continues to attract a significant number of researchers from Europe and North America. This paper is based on our lived experiences as resident African archaeometallurgists. We argue that out of frustration because of unequal power relations and lack of access to archaeological science laboratories and funding, most African archaeometallurgists are now pursuing other research areas and careers altogether. We propose some solutions to ensure sustainability in the training and practice of archaeological scientists on the African continent. We conclude that African scholars need to develop home-grown and long-term research capacities and strategies.

The largest African migrant communities in Sweden come from the Horn of Africa region, namely, Somalis, Ethiopians and Eritreans. These communities came to Sweden during the long years of war, which resulted in the independence of Eritrea and anarchy in war-torn Somalia and drove millions of people out of these countries. Other significant numbers of African migrants in Sweden are from The Gambia, Nigeria, Morocco and Egypt. In recent years, Sweden has witnessed an increase in the number of refugees from the Central Africa region, mainly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi. In addition, during the 2015 migration crisis, Sweden received 163 000 refugees. A majority of them came from Syria and the Middle East. However, a significant number amongst them came from Africa, through different routes across the Mediterranean to Southern Europe, from where they found their way to Scandinavia. Prior to the crisis, Sweden had maintained a policy of family reunification; therefore, the African diaspora in Sweden continued to grow slowly but steadily. Currently, a significant 25.9 per cent of the population in Sweden has "an immigrant background", including people born in Sweden with both or one parent identified as "foreign-born". 3 By December 2020, the African diaspora in Sweden was estimated to be 237 000. 4 On arrival in Sweden, migrants find themselves in a completely new system, with different values and ideas about individuals and their relationships with the family, schools and a myriad of agencies that are linked together by the provision of social services, and the society at large. When refugees and migrants join language classes to learn Swedish, they are also told about life in Sweden, parti cularly how to access the social services. This is based on an underlying assumption that people coming from fragile and conflict-affected societies are not familiar with Sweden's super-organised system. They need help to learn and to be integrated into the Swedish society, and relevant policies have been put in place for this purpose.

Iron, critical for its utilitarian and ceremonial functions, was the staple metal in the socioeconomic, political, and environmental transformations of the prehistoric settlement of Great Zimbabwe during the first and second millennium of the Common Era (ce). Great Zimbabwe is the largest and one of the earliest settlements associated with social complexity, urbanism, and statehood in the southern African region, established by people with an agro-pastoral, mining, metalworking, and trading lifestyle. The size of the Great Zimbabwe settlement and its significance as a political, religious, and international trade center would have required considerable supplies of finished iron tools and other metal objects, particularly during its fluorescent urban phase spanning the 11th and 16th centuries ce. Since the early 1990s, research within and around the drystone-walled urban center of Great Zimbabwe reveals that from at least the end of the first millennium ce, the settlement experienced significant transformations in its iron production technologies in the broader hinterland. These changes corresponded, presumably, with other technological and sociopolitical developments at the drystone-built urban center. Forms of evidence including tap slags, tuyeres fused in multiples, and natural draft furnaces (one with a long base), clearly indicate that the people of Great Zimbabwe employed remarkably complex and varied designs and approaches to produce iron from its ores. Again, evidence of primary and secondary iron production activities at Great Zimbabwe’s domestic and specialized settings outside settlements illuminate more significant spatiotemporal complexities and ambiguities in the organization of iron production than previously thought. Within domestic contexts, the smelting of iron would have offered an inclusive social space, which made possible the transformation of not just materials, but also women and children into active social agents of technology. This way of looking at iron provides an alternative and more socially embedded perspective of Great Zimbabwe and its daily material practices.