Notes on some early pottery cultures in Northern Katanga

Abstract

The original draft of this article started with a quotation from O. G. S. Crawford: ‘… Irrelevant theorizing has been the besetting sin of the local archaeologist from the earliest times, and it is time it stopped …’ and continued by giving a rather detailed description of some pottery and metal objects found during the 1957 excavations of the Iron Age cemetery discovered at Sanga on the northern shore of Lake Kisale (northern Katanga). Especially for an area like the (ex-Belgian) Congo, where very little work indeed has ever been done on the protohistoric pottery cultures, we thought it essential first of all to give objectively as close a description as possible of the material remains of these prehistoric communities.