The Politics of Food Collection in South Central Africa

Abstract

This chapter introduces the volume’s first case study. Archaeological and linguistic evidence for the history of hunting, fishing, and other forms of bushcraft illuminates the contingent values and articulations of food collection and food production in Iron Age central Zambia. Bushcraft emerged out of, rather than prior to, the transition to cereal agriculture, leading to a series of changes in subsistence and social organization. Produce collected from the bush was mobilized to sustain decentralized configurations of social influence as well as novel institutions of social organization, including bond friendships and matriclans. Technologies of bushcraft changed with such social transformations: large-scale chila hunts incorporated greater numbers of participants from the early second millennium at the same time that social networks of clans and bond friendships scaled up social ties. Finally, practitioners began to emphasize parallels in the geographies of spearcraft and metallurgy and in the social influence available to those who undertook such work.