Early Iron Age and the Bantu
Sometime in the first half of the first millennium A.D. small groups of iron-using people, acquainted with agriculture, entered Tanzania and other parts of eastern and central Africa. These people probably spoke Bantu languages, a set of tongues spoken in historical times by most Africans living south of the equator and by substantial numbers north of it. There is considerable agreement that the ultimate point of origin of their ancestors (the pre-Bantu) lies in western Africa (probably southern Nigeria and Cameroun). The location of later centers of dispersal remains in dispute, but there is no doubt that those entering Tanzania came initially from a westerly direction whatever their point of entry into the territory.
All but one of the authenticated and dated early Iron Age sites in Tanzania have been found in the north. Those west of Lake Victoria are apparently part of a series of related finds in the interlacustrine area: southern Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Zaire; a similar site has been discovered on the other side of the lake at Urewe in Kenya.
Another set of sites has been excavated in the foothills of the Pare and Usambara mountains in the northeast and in the Digo Hills between Tanga in Tanzania and Mombasa in Kenya.
The only dated early Iron Age site farther south is that at the Uvinza brine springs not far from the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika. The pottery there, however, resembles that found in Zambia rather than that turned up in the interlacustrine area to the north. Early Iron Age sites have not yet been discovered in southern Tanzania, but it may be assumed that Iron Age Bantu-speaking cultivators reached some part 'of the area as they clearly did in northeastern-most Zambia immediately south of the Tanzanian border.
The early Iron Age Bantu, limited by the kinds of crops (mainly vegetables) available to them and apparently lacking cattle, settled chiefly in the moister, more easily worked areas. Those in the interlacustrine area stressed fishing rather than hunting as a supplementary source of food. All relied to some extent on gathering. It is unlikely that there was much contact or conflict between the Iron Age cultivators and the hunting and gathering groups on the one hand or the pastoralists on the other given what must have been a generally sparse population and the fact that each of these groups had adapted to somewhat different ecological conditions.
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