Baubles, Bangles and Beads: Commodity Exchange between the Indian Ocean Region and Interior Southern Africa during 8th–15th Centuries CE

Abstract

When material objects are recovered in a place different from their presumed place of origin, archaeologists usually fix attention on those objects and places themselves. Material objects do not, in themselves, however, have intrinsic value, and underlying the material variables of objects and their loci of origin and deposition is a more fundamental actuality of their translocation, the regimes of value in which things were assessed and in which they moved. Fundamental to this is that things have exchange value as well as consumption value and may also have spiritual value in specific circumstances. I argue that these are particularly important considerations when material objects are translocated from a distinct socio-geographic region, with its internal regime of values, to another quite different region, with probably diverse local regimes of value, as is the case when Early–Middle Iron-Age (300–1300 CE) sumptuary goods, mainly glass beads, moved from the East African Indian Ocean sphere to interior southern Africa, which had its own distinct regimes of value. In this article, I present data for this movement and premises regarding regimes of value, to address the trajectory of such beads into the southern region. I suggest that marine gastropod shells, cowrie and conus, are equally significant markers of interior–coastal associations, and their presence at 7th–11th-century southern sites with no glass beads suggests that different regimes of value were held by southern African peoples. This offers clues to bead and shell distributions. Several concrete instances demonstrate the point.

Keywords:

• southern Africa
• Early–Middle Iron Age
• Indian Ocean trade
• glass beads
• marine shells
• regimes of material value

Acknowledgements

I am in debt to Ted Pollard for inviting me to participate in the panel he organised for the JSAS meeting at Livingstone in 2015 and for his patience with my tardiness in submitting a publishable manuscript. An early version of this article was presented as a keynote address at the symposium ‘Advancing a Sustainable Future: Strategies for Cross-Disciplinary Practice around the Indian Ocean’, held at the University of Technology, Sydney, in 2010. I am extremely grateful to Haripriya Rangan and Heather Goodall for inviting me to the symposium and for their expressions of support for my work. Anne Griffiths, Gavin Whitelaw and Marilee Wood read various drafts and made significantly improving comments. I thank Alex Dysenhaus for putting the citations and references in JSAS style.

Notes

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² M. Wood, ‘A Glass Bead Sequence for Southern Africa from the 8th to the 16th Century AD’, Journal of African Archaeology, 9, 1 (2011), p. 77.

³ J. Chapman, Travels in the Interior of Africa (Cape Town, Balkema, 1971), p. 127.

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⁵ The Tawana kgosi (chief) at the time.

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⁷ ‘Denen sie für Kleinigkeiten, wie Glasperlen, Tabak und so fort, Elfenbein, Wachs, Honig und gedörrtes Wildfleisch austauschen’; L. Magyar, ‘Petermann’s Georaphische’, Mitteilungen, 6 (1860), p. 228.

⁸ Chapman, Travels in the Interior of Africa, p. 77.

⁹ E. Wilmsen, ‘For Trinkets such as Beads: A Revalorization of Khoisan Labor in Colonial Southern Africa’, in T. Falola and C. Jennings (eds), Sources and Methods in African History (Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2003), pp. 80–104.

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¹³ Miller, Kings and Kinsmen, p. 60–1.

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¹⁵ Wood, ‘A Glass Bead Sequence for Southern Africa’, p. 75.

¹⁶ Wilmsen, ‘The Regulation of Commodity Exchange in Southern Africa’; Wilmsen, ‘Myths, Gender, Birds, Beads’.

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⁶⁶ Wilmsen, ‘The Regulation of Commodity Exchange in Southern Africa’, pp. 177–94.

⁶⁷ Wood, Dussubieux and Robertshaw, ‘Glass Finds from Chibuene’.

⁶⁸ The 30 glass beads from the small Zanzibar site, Fukuchani, are not considered in my discussion.

⁶⁹ M. Wood, S. Panighello, E. Orsega, P. Robertshaw, J.T. van Elteren, A. Crowther, M. Horton and N. Boivin, ‘Zanzibar and Indian Ocean Trade in the First Millennium CE: The Glass Bead Evidence’, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (2016), pp. 1–23. These numbers are from the 2011 excavation; Wood, pers. comm., notes that the 2012 excavation recovered an additional large number of beads.

⁷⁰ A. Juma, ‘Unguja Ukuu on Zanzibar: An Archaeological Study of Early Urbanism, Volume 3 of Studies in Global Archaeology’ (PhD thesis, Uppsala University, 2004).

⁷¹ Wood et al., ‘Zanzibar and Indian Ocean Trade’, p. 19.

⁷² D. Phillipson, The Later Prehistory of Eastern and Southern Africa (Heinemann, London, 1977).

⁷³ Denbow, Klehm, Dussubieux, ‘The Glass Beads of Kaitshàa’.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 368.

⁷⁵ David Killick and Edwin Wilmsen, laboratory notes.

⁷⁶ E. Wilmsen, D. Killick, P.C. Thebe and J. Denbow, ‘The Social Geography of Pottery in Botswana as Reconstructed by Optical Petrography’, Journal of African Archaeology, 7, 1 (2009), pp. 3–39.

⁷⁷ Wilmsen, ‘Myths, Gender, Birds, Beads’, p. 401.