Households, Community, and Crafting at Kanono: The archaeology of a 2nd millennium village in Western Zambia

The Machile River and its surrounding tributaries in Western Zambia formed a significant locus of Iron Age life in Zambia and served as a conduit for the localized movements of people, things, and ideas in south-central Africa over much of the last two millennia. Within this dynamic corridor, the early 2nd-millennium CE Kanono site represents a short-lived but well defined Middle/Late Iron Age farming community that integrated local crafting practices with global and regional orientations, during a period of dramatic political and economic changes across southern, central, and eastern Africa. Combining high-resolution geophysical survey and the results of targeted excavations at Kanono, we trace the emergence, growth, and abandonment of the village between the mid-thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries CE. We argue that changes seen in the village relate to the formation of a bounded co-residential community built around unilineal descent, which may have leveraged prestige in iron working into other forms of prestige – namely wealth in people and access to exotic goods. Approaching the archaeological record at Kanono from the perspective of household archaeology and daily life allows for an evocative ‘peopling’ of south-central African political economies.