Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa
Professor Shadreck Chirikure
Research Interests:
Archaeological science; ancient materials and technologies; history of science and technology; comparative state formation in the tropics; food, technology and political economy; material culture; community archaeology; heritage management; archaeology of colonialism and post-colonialism
Geographical Areas:
Africa; Europe; Central America; Indian Ocean Rim
Selected Research Activities
- Archaeometry and social formation in southern Africa (British Academy, PI)
- Hinterland and coastal southern Africa (National Research Foundation of South Africa, PI)
- Decolonial Archaeologies (University of Cape Town; PI)
Selected Editorial Project(s):
Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of African Archaeology (Editor in Chief)
Selected Research Awards:
Award for Best Paper Published in Antiquity, 2008 & 2019
Association of Commonwealth /universities Fellowship, 2017
British Academy Global Professorship, 2018
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Using DNA to determine the species and geographic origins of elephant ivory discovered in a 16thcentury Portuguese shipwreck
De Flamingh, A, Coutu, A, Chirikure, S, Sealy, J, Malhi, RS, Roca, AL2019|Conference paper|AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY -
New Perspectives on the Political Economy of Great Zimbabwe
Chirikure, S2019|Journal article|Journal of Archaeological Research© 2019, The Author(s). This review draws from old and new archaeological data and takes interpretive flavor from indigenous African concepts to demonstrate that, within a context of local and external interfaces, Great Zimbabwe’s political economy was a mosaic rooted more in a mix of seasonally specific, household-based, compositional strategies of production and circulation and less in the redistribution of archaeologically low-frequency exotics from the Indian Ocean. An ideology based on the hierarchical triad of land, ancestors, and belief in God underwrote custodial rights and extractive powers that at times enabled rulers to access a share of productive, allocative, and circulative activities in their territories. Simultaneously, households and communities freely participated in the economy, often inside and outside state control and influence, demonstrating the individual, collective, mixed, embedded, and capillary nature of the political economy. -
Are drylands marginal? The case of Mananzve, Shashi region, southwestern Zimbabwe
Nyamushosho, RT, Chirikure, S, Bandama, F, Manyanga, M, Mukwende, T2018|Journal article|Azania© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The general conviction in the Iron Age archaeology of southern Zambezia is that drylands such as the Shashi region are marginal landscapes that did not host any significant food producing communities in the past. Resultantly, for those communities that occupied these landscapes, their settlement histories have been always portrayed as short-lived, since their existence is mostly understood as by chance and not choice. However, new data recovered from Mananzve and other drylands sites we surveyed and excavated in the Shashi region of south-western Zimbabwe demonstrates that Iron Age communities had a long-term settlement history on the landscape and that, through various strategies, they maintained food security in the face of environmental and climatic adversities. At a broader scale, these findings show that these areas perceived today as drylands are resource rich and that Iron Age communities which occupied these landscapes had the capacity to adapt and utilise these resources to their advantage. This challenges the designation of drylands of southern Zambezia such as the Shashi region as marginal, since that term undermines their resource potential and the adaptive capacity of the communities occupying them consistently through time. -
Copper wire objects from Jahunda and Little Mapela: technology, value systems and networks in Iron Age southern Africa
Bandama, F, Manyanga, M, Chirikure, S2018|Journal article|Azania© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The present study explores the archaeometallurgy of flexible cuprous wound wires recovered from two precolonial Shona centres of power, Jahunda and Little Mapela, separated by 60 kilometres in Gwanda, southwestern Zimbabwe. Widely believed to have been fashion accessories, archaeologists have traditionally consigned such objects to appendices in site reports and other publications. Chronological and technological information gathered from this category of objects indicates that Jahunda exploited more tin bronzes than pure, unalloyed copper. The converse holds for Little Mapela. However, the presence of copper and its alloys brass (with zinc) and bronze (with tin), in a region with no known sources of any of the raw materials, poses important questions about the role and value of these objects in both their immediate societies and networked regional places. This study shows that as metal objects, flexible wound wires were an important component of the political economy and conjoined diverse worlds — healing, spiritual, decorative, technological and much more — that made their production, circulation and use a microcosm of resilient networks and changing societal values.
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Undergraduate
Undergraduate course lecturer for:
- FHS Core Paper 4 - Urbanisation and Change in Complex Societies
Post-graduate Teaching
Archaeology of colonialism
Lecturer for MSc in Archaeological Science