Great Lakes Area

The Interlacustrine area is flanked on both east and west by important freshwater lakes; Lake Victoria, L. Tanganyika, L. Kivu, and L. Albert. It is stretched over the eastern boundary of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Northern Tanzania, and the western fringe of Kenya. Several important Stone Age sites have been excavated at Matupi cave, Katanda sites of the Semliky valley, as well as Munyama cave in Uganda. Late Stone foragers using microliths were spread out in small groups over this vast area.

The arrival of iron-using Bantuspeaking farmers in the first millennium BC triggered significant long-term increase in settlement size and density. The volcanic soils in this highly humid area are fertile, productive, and support some among the highest population density of Africa today. Evidence for iron smelting dating from the first half to the middle of the first millennium BC (900-500 BC) is documented at Gasiza I and Mirami III in Rwanda and the BuHaya region in Northwestern Tanzania.

These Urewe farming communities were later joined by livestock herders from the Nile watershed. Bananas and other Southasian species took root and prospered in the fertile Interlacustrine zone. Bananas, one of the Malayo-Polynesia plants, were thought to have reached Africa during the first millennium BC or very beginning of the first millennium AD. Bananas (Musa sp.) phytoliths from a core drilled at Munsa in Uganda and dated to the fourth millennium BC point to an earlier than thought introduction (see Africa, Central: Foragers, Farmers, and Metallurgists; Sudan, Nilotic).

The Great Lakes region and the Savanna-land south of the equatorial rainforest witnessed the development of complex chiefdoms and kingdoms during the second millennium AD. In the Great Lakes region, the development at Ntusi, Munsa, Bigo, Kibiro, Mubende, and other earthworks sites is remarkable. Large-scale cattle husbandry is documented at Ntusi. Kibiro witnessed an impressive intensification in the production of salt from the local brackish springs.

An agricultural colonization took place in western Uganda. However, tracing the precise evolutionary trajectory of any of the Great Lakes, past polities is still hampered by the lack of sustained long-term archaeological research and terminological uncertainties. Archaeological survey, and the analyses of the ceramic material collected was used by Robertshaw to develop a model of the development of social complexity.

Four areas, Nyantungo in the west, Kibale in the north, Munsa/ Kakumiro in the Northeast, and Kasambya in the southeast, were sampled to document variations in settlement patterns and pottery shapes, design, and decoration. Most of the surveyed sites (>90%) are small homesteads/hamlets measuring less than 1 ha in size.

Large sites without earthworks seem to have been positioned at defensive locations. While, with a certain range of variation, earthworks sites may have been part of small and competing polities. After the sixteenth century AD, these rival and competing polities came to be united under the rulership of the Bito dynasty that created the Nyoro kingdom in Western Uganda. Rwanda and Burundi on the western side of the Interlacustrine zone also developed rival but small chiefdoms. In general and all over the Lacustrine zone, iron working was strongly associated with rulership.