Earliest Evidence for the Ivory Trade in Southern Africa: Isotopic and ZooMS Analysis of Seventh–Tenth Century ad Ivory from KwaZulu-Natal

Abstract

KwaGandaganda, Ndondondwane and Wosi were major Early Farming Community settlements in what is today the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. These sites have yielded, among other remains, abundant evidence of ivory and ivory working dating to the seventh-tenth centuries AD, pre-dating by approximately 200 years the better-known ivory artefacts from sites in the Limpopo River Valley and surrounding regions. We report the results of carbon, nitrogen and strontium isotope analysis to explore the origins and procurement of this ivory, in combination with Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) to identify the species of animals from which it was derived. All of the ivory studied using ZooMS was elephant, despite the presence of hippopotamus remains on all three sites. Some ivory was probably obtained from elephant herds that lived close to the sites, in the densely wooded river valleys favoured by both elephants and early farmers. Other material came from savannah environments further afield. Ivory found at these three sites was drawn from different catchments, implying a degree of landscape/resource partitioning even at this early stage. These communities clearly invested substantial effort in obtaining ivory from across the region, which speaks to the importance of this commodity in the economy of the time. We suggest that some ivory items were for local use, but that some may have been intended for more distant markets via Indian Ocean trade. Afr Archaeol Rev (2016) 33:411-435

‘Phalaborwa where the hammer is heard’: crafting together the political economy of Iron Age communities in southern Africa, AD 900–1900

“…Future studies may address connections between the interior of southern Africa and coastal communities such as those occupying the Swahili coastal regions. Indeed preliminary observations indicate potentially interesting differences in the consumption of imports between coastal and inland communities (Wood 2012;Chirikure 2014;Coutu et al 2016).…”

New Directions in South African Archaeozoology of the Last 2,000 Years

“…Communication between specialists and archaeologists-in print-is a step towards raising awareness of the methodological issues that underpin our interpretations (e.g., Bousman et al 2016;Horsburgh and Moreno-Mayar 2015;Scott and Plug 2016). In this regard, confirming key taxonomic specimens through complementary analyses (Coutu et al 2016;Horsburgh et al 2016) and combining multiple lines of evidence (Antonites et al 2016;Coutu et al 2016;Grody 2016; see also Steele 2015) will go a long way to strengthen archaeozoological arguments.…”

“…Given the growing local demand and following global trends, this issue includes articles that approach archaeofauna from diverse analytical angles: ZooMS and isotopes (Coutu et al 2016), aDNA (Horsburgh et al 2016), use-traces (Antonites et al 2016), taphonomy (Grody 2016) and large-scale meta-analysis (Dusseldorp 2016). These methods hold tremendous interpretive advantages, yet their complications and limitations should also be acknowledged, a point which all of the authors discuss.…”

“…The articles in this special issue provide several such examples, including the first application of ZooMS in southern African archaeology (Coutu et al 2016).…”

“…Topics addressed include craft production and use of worked bone at K2 and Mapungubwe (Antonites et al 2016), earliest evidence for the ivory trade in southern Africa (Coutu et al 2016), intensive procurement and processing of wild animals by Early Iron Age agro-pastoralists (Grody 2016), importance of livestock in Later Stone Age hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies (Dusseldorp 2016) and, from a methodological perspective, evaluating the methods used in taxonomic identification (Horsburgh et al 2016). And, although none of the contributions to this issue specifically relate to the Late Iron Age/historical period, or involve other southern African countries, the questions and methods discussed also apply to these periods and areas.…”