Unravelling the glass trade bead sequence from Magoro Hill, South Africa: separating pre-seventeenth-century Asian imports from later European counterparts

Site history and archaeological context

Between 2010 and 2012, a series of archaeological excavations were conducted at Magoro Hill, a prominent landmark in South Africa’s Limpopo Province (Fig. 2). Research at Magoro Hill forms part of the Five Hundred Year Initiative, a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary project aimed at exploring the material imprint of Europe’s interaction with African societies during the colonial era [11]. Oral historical accounts and cartographic records indicate that a pedestrian trade route, stretching from Delagoa Bay (Maputo) on the African east coast to present-day Zimbabwe, skirted Magoro Hill during early colonial times [12]. Magoro Hill’s occupation by Venda speakers also overlapped with that of the northernmost colony established by Dutch-Afrikaans emigrants from the Cape at the foot of the Soutpansberg mountain range in 1848 [13]. It was therefore anticipated that the Magoro Hill investigation would uncover material cultural remains, such as glass beads, that could shed light on the ever-expanding impact of European trade and colonisation in northernmost South Africa.

It soon became apparent, though, that Magoro Hill had a much more complicated settlement history, which implied that the glass trade beads retrieved from the site could not be summarily attributed to a nineteenth-century or colonial-period occupation. A site survey yielded a surface collection of Iron Age earthenware that can be assigned to six well-dated ceramic facies associated with African farming communities: Silver Leaves (c. AD 280–450), Mzonjani (c. AD 450–750), Kgopolwe (c. AD 1030–1350), Mutamba (c. AD 1250–1450), Tavhatshena (c. AD 1450–1600) and Letaba (post-AD 1640) [14].

The steep slopes of Magoro Hill, an inselberg rising nearly 200 m above the surrounding plain (Fig. 2), are lined with numerous stone-walled terraces that buttress platforms for the erection of residential and other domestic structures. With the possible exception of the Middle Iron Age Kgopolwe facies, subsequent excavations of a number of these terraces, as well as middens and a cattle enclosure, produced no evidence of a pre-Letaba settlement on the hill. Charcoal from an iron-working area on the eastern slope of the hill, close to where the majority of Kgopolwe sherds were collected, yielded a radiocarbon date (Beta-324,071) of 720 ± 30 BP (2-sigma calibration: AD 1260–1290). No in situ dwelling structures associated with the Kgopolwe phase were, however, uncovered. It is likely that Magoro Hill, similar to several other hills in northern South Africa, served as a location for episodic rainmaking rituals performed by African farmers [15, 16]. This would account for the surface collection of sherds attributed to Early Iron Age (Silver Leaves and Mzonjani) and Middle Iron Age (Mutamba and, possibly, Kgopolwe) ceramic facies.

Likewise, we have not been able to confirm any permanent settlement associated with the Tavhatshena ceramics facies, which is ascribed to ancestral Venda speakers. It is noteworthy, though, that oral traditions allude that the site formed part of the domain of the Ngona, the ethnonym for an elusive aboriginal Venda grouping, before the Rambau-Singo Venda clan of Magoro conquered the area towards the end of the eighteenth century AD and ensconced themselves on the hill [17]. It became clear from the associated material cultural remains uncovered by the excavations that the stone walls and the terrace deposits can be principally associated with the Venda occupation of the site, in particular the Letaba facies. Burnt house floors associated with pole-and-earth structures, dating to an August 1865 attack on the hill by a combined force of European settlers and African (Tsonga) auxiliaries, have preserved exceptionally well. During this encounter the Magoro chiefdom was almost wiped out. About 300 occupants, mainly adult males, were killed, while several women and 120 children were carried away, the former to be distributed among the Tsonga militia and the latter to be indentured to the Soutpansberg colonists as so-called ‘apprentices’ [18, 19]. A small and impoverished group of Magoro people returned to the hill in the late 1880s, where they remained till the 1950s, when they were relocated under duress by the South African government to make way for the Gazankulu ‘homeland’ for the Tsonga ‘nation’ [17]. During the post-1880s settlement phase the Magoro people mainly occupied the base of the hill except for a rectangular brick-built house, which was located higher up on the eastern side of the hill, probably to serve as the prestige dwelling of the then reigning chief. It was from a secure context inside this rectangular house that the selenium-coloured red beads referred to above was recovered [10]. No human settlement occurred on Magoro Hill after the 1950s.

Based on the complex history of Magoro Hill outlined above, it became clear that the glass bead assemblage could be derived from different periods of occupation or use of the site. Furthermore, as a result of the steep incline of the hill, soil deposits continually trickle downwards, especially during heavy rains or through the erosive impact of droughts, exacerbated by the movement of cattle and goats from nearby subsistence farmers who use the area for pasture. Most of the excavated terrace structures or features containing in situ cultural material were overlain by substantial soil deposits that had washed down or accumulated over many years. This stratigraphic quandary is compounded by the fact that glass beads are small and mobile and could easily filter deeper into underlying deposits, thus complicating an assessment of their contextual association. Additionally, it had to be considered that in order to gain entry into the existing lucrative bead trade market and to cater for the established preferences of African consumers, European bead-makers were obliged to emulate some of the beads that had earlier been imported from the East. Despite these caveats, a comparative analysis of the bead sequence from Magoro Hill potentially could shed new light on changing patterns in the availability, range, consumption and origin of glass trade beads imported into the northern interior of South Africa over many centuries.

In this paper we demonstrate the use and archaeological application of Raman and XRF measurements to separate earlier imported beads from later counterparts by identifying glass nanostructure, as well as pigments and opacifiers, which were not used in bead series pre-dating the sixteenth century AD. Recently we have developed a methodology combining visual classification based on morphology, X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and Raman spectroscopy to classify trade beads imported into southern Africa between the eighteenth and sixteenth centuries AD [6]. This methodology was based on our previous work on glass trade beads recovered from K2 and Mapungubwe Hill, the capital sites of southern Africa’s first state complex in the Limpopo River Basin [20–22]. In studying the beads from Magoro Hill, we follow the same experimental procedures for classifying beads imported up to the seventeenth century AD and extend this approach to beads imported after the seventeenth century, making use of the database compiled for more recent beads retrieved from Mapungubwe Hill. As has been shown, a substantial number of beads from the Mapungubwe Hill collection were found to postdate the heyday of the site’s occupation in the first half of the second millennium AD and were European imports [21, 22].