ARCREATE.

This study region is is located in the interior of southern Africa, stretching from the Limpopo region to the Magaliesberg valley in northern South Africa and further into the dryland margins of the Kalahari in Botswana. The processes to be studied occurred during the turbulent centuries leading up to the 1820s. Offering favourable conditions for cattle-keeping farmers, and rich in minerals such as iron and copper, the Magaliesberg saw several waves of settlement relocation. The area was an inland nodal point on long-distance trade networks and felt the effects of Indian Ocean trade as well as of Atlantic commerce via Cape Town.

Settlements agglomerated into dense stone-walled towns with populations of up to 16,000–20,000 people. In tandem with urbanisation, ceramic technology changed rapidly. This has been tied to transformations of household dynamics, specifically to changes in gendered labour and craft specialisation, within the overall demography of a rapidly transforming society.

Similarities and differences over time and space in both linguistic features and ceramics allow us to identify such processes of settlement, interaction, replacement and displacement, but they do little to help us understand how and why such processes occurred and what impact they had on technological knowledge. The ARCREATE project targets two main learning networks and their ancestry. Each of the two networks are associated with a type of pottery, known as Uitkomst and Buispoort, and widely different in their links to metalworking. The mixing of various tempers into the clay was a technological novelty of the 18th century CE and this technique, especially the inclusion of micaceous minerals, appears to connect people and places through material means in various ways.

All case studies in Southern Africa have the same overall objective: to develop a regional synthesis of changes to learning networks and local engagement with the mineral world.