Pre-colonial mining in southern Africa

Mining, as defined by Stocks and Down is the ‘removal of minerals from their natural geological environment and their transport to the point of processing or use1’. As so defined mining has, in one form or another, been providing essential raw materials for tens of thousands of years. Although metal ores were first mined in southern Africa (south of 15°S) approximately 2 000 years ago, minerals such as ochreous haematite, specularite, and pyrolusite were sought for use in cosmetics millennia earlier2. It is not uncommon for pigment minerals to be found in Middle Stone Age contexts3, and dates as early as 40 000 BC have been suggested for the oldest of these mines4. Because metal working had far-reaching social, economic, and technological effects on human life in pre-colonial southern Africa, research on the mining and metallurgy of the period is interdisciplinary in nature. It has attracted a diverse range of researchers, from those focused on the socio-cultural and ethnographic aspects, to archaeometallurgists analysing ancient artifacts, to archaeologists documenting their finds of ancient mines, furnaces, and smelting sites. In spite of these efforts, achieving a holistic picture of past mining and metallurgy in southern Africa is like solving an old puzzle: one places various pieces together only to discover that many pieces are still missing. This is especially true with regard to mining. Although the field of archaeometallurgy is rapidly improving our knowledge of smelting and smithing technology, our understanding of early mining is still far from complete5. Smelting operations have often left behind tangible evidence in the form of a product that is perceived to have some cultural or historical value, for example an ingot or the remnants of a constructed furnace. The perceived value of many ‘ancient’ mines, however, has been predominantly that they indicate the location of deposits and thus they (and the evidence they contain) have often been destroyed by colonial prospecting and mining6. Compounding this problem of destroyed evidence is the fact that the southern African region lacks an indigenous written historical record and much of the knowledge conveyed through the oral tradition was truncated with the coming of colonialism7. Thus, we must rely on archaeological insights gained from the survey and excavation of surviving sites (see Figure 1) to help reconstruct the past, supplemented by descriptions from early missionaries, prospectors, and mining engineers. One troubling aspect of this lack of evidence is that it opens the door to unfounded theorizing which can fail to acknowledge the innovations and achievements of indigenous metal workers. There is absolutely no evidence of the physical presence of foreign miners in southern Africa during the Iron Age8. Pre-colonial mining in southern Africa