ARCREATE.

This study region is located in Zambia in Central Africa and stretches between the Kafue and the Zambezi Rivers. Our primary focus is on the period 500–1500 CE. This broad region is home to speakers of the Botatwe languages, a sub-branch of Bantu. From the early first millennium CE, Botatwe speakers lived in a territory that constituted a frontier surrounded by multiple and changing heartlands of political, linguistic, economic, and technological innovation and population movement. Encircled by far larger, more hierarchically organized societies by the mid-second millennium CE, the region remained a ‘central frontier’ as a sequence of industrial centres, production ateliers, polities, and trading hubs were forged and dissolved on its periphery.

The study region was homeland to a succession of eastern Botatwe protolanguages that extended into the area from the north displacing and absorbing other Bantu-speaking Iron Age communities. Languages diverged rapidly, providing the fine-grained linguistic stratigraphy needed to trace changes in ceramic technologies, sensorial modalities, trade networks, and political innovation during this ‘chapter’ of the continental-scale process of Bantu language expansion.

The study region allows ARCREATE to carry out longue durée analyses of variations in ceramic technology and sensorial modality, the interaction of learning networks, and the production of social memory through the making of material culture. All case studies in Central Africa have the same overall objective: to develop a regional synthesis of changes to learning networks and local engagement with the mineral world.