Early farmers at Nyungwe on the Chobe River in Botswana

ABSTRACT

The focus of this paper is on the functional and stylistic aspects of pottery from Nyungwe, a Dambwa Facies site in northern Botswana, showing the contrast between coarse kitchenware and finely crafted serving dishes and highlighting the remarkable degree of design variation present. The place of Nyungwe within the Shongwe Group and the spread of this cultural group along the Zambezi and Chobe Rivers and beyond are both discussed and a riverine adaptation indicated. Contacts with neighbours on the plateaux to the south in Zimbabwe and to the north in Zambia are examined and an attempt is made to understand the nature of this contact as far as this is visible in the ceramic data.

RÉSUMÉ

L'accent de cet article porte sur les aspects fonctionnels et stylistiques de la céramique de Nyungwe, un site du phase de Dambwa au nord du Botswana, montrant le contraste entre les pots de cuisine grossiers et les bols de service finement conçus, et soulignant le degré remarquable de variation de décoration present dans l’assemblage. La situation de Nyungwe dans l'histoire du Groupe Shongwe et l’expansion de ce groupe culturel le long (et au-delà) des fleuves Zambèze et Chobe sont discutées et une adaptation riveraine est indiquée. Les contacts établis avec des groupes voisins situés sur les plateaux au sud au Zimbabwe et au nord en Zambie sont examinés et une tentative est faite pour comprendre la nature de ce contact dans la mesure où il est visible dans les données de céramique.

KEYWORDS:

• Nyungwe
• Early Iron Age
• Botswana
• Dambwa Facies
• pottery analysis

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Charles Byron for reporting the site, Ronald Blackbeard for access to the pipe trench and field assistants Jasper and Charles van Waarden, the latter of whom also assisted with the illustrations. Permission to make the collections was received from the Department of the National Museum and Monuments (verbal permission 2004; permits NMMAG 12/9 XVIII(201)-2006 and NM 6/6/20 I(23)-2010). My thanks also go to Jim Denbow, John Kinahan and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments, and especially to Jim for allowing the publication of information from his test pit in this paper, particularly the dates and the figurine.

Notes on contributor

Catrien van Waarden studied at Trent University, Canada (BA, MA), and Binghamton University, New York (PhD). She has been a CRM archaeologist in Botswana since 1987, operating as Marope Research. Although dealing with the full range of sites from Stone Age through historic, her focus is on the Iron Age.

Notes

1 There is a caveat, however: once all variations of the pottery of a site occur in a sample, enlarging the sample will merely reduce the Index of Design Variation. For that reason these figures are only indicative.

2 Pottery from Divuyu in the Tsodilo Hills, Xaro along the Okavango River and Early Iron Age sites on the Kavango River in Namibia appears to show influence from Naviundu to the northeast and Spaced Curvilinear Ware from the Loango Coast of Atlantic Central Africa. Nqoma pottery in the Tsodilo Hills shows a Sioma affinity from western Zambia.