Mapungubwe Beyond the Golden Rhino: Inferring Local Dynamics for Southern Africa’s First State through the Provenance of Copper and Bronze

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

For nearly 100 years, the South African site of Mapungubwe has been central to our understanding of the Iron Age in southern Africa. Its burials, first excavated in the 1930’s, were laden with gold, thousands of glass beads, and clear expressions of social hierarchy. These factors helped establish Mapungubwe as the capital of southern Africa’s first state, from 1220 – 1290 cal. CE, which was intensely connected to the Swahili Coast and Indian Ocean through trade. The relationship between Mapungubwe and external trade became one of its defining features, while our understanding of its relation to local dynamics within the subcontinent lagged far behind. New results from the Southern Africa Lead Isotope Project shed light on this gap and demonstrate intense, almost specialized, reliance on a specific supplier for copper and mark Mapungubwe as the origin point of a “Bronze Age” that quickly spread across the wider landscape of southern Africa.

Jay Stephens is a Visiting Assistant Professor at ISAW with a background in archaeology, materials science, and geochemistry, and applies interdisciplinary tools from each to study the history of mining and metallurgy, particularly within southern Africa. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona and was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR) from 2023-2025. For the last 10 years, Jay has co-directed the NSF-funded Southern Africa Lead Isotope Project, which applies isotopic, chemical, and microstructural methods to reconstruct the provenance, or geological source, for non-ferrous metals in southern Africa and the technologies with which they were produced. Rather than focus on one specific period or region, Jay’s research takes a macro and diachronic approach to understand how participating communities across southern Africa negotiated their access to materials in the face of diverse social changes.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

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