To browse Academia. This paper deals with the interpretation of archaeological and linguistic evidence. It also attempts to sketch important important processes and structures of history of Mozambique and neighbouring areas.
On the basis of this reconstitution the visibility of political and social processes in the archaeological record between AD and AD is commented. The explanation of the visibility rests on the concepts of predatory expansion and migration and the lineage state which dominated in the area in various periods and includes a kind of class formation and binds together culturally autonomous communities. A better understanding of institutions and dynamics of the lineage state and the processes of predatory expansion will help archaeologists or even modern historians not familiar with these institutions to understand certain mechanisms and process sequences.
Among the causes of internal dynamics are differences between richer and poorer in a political community as well as pressures to exploit more local resources which led to specializations and regional trade. Having been developed within a thematic cartographic project it is not surprising that it started on the basis of mapping precolonial lineage states and language groups and part of the reasoning comes from the study of distributions, just as partly in historical linguistics, archaeology, historical anthropology, geography and history.
The history presented here has in part been reconstructed on the basis of information based archaeological research, inferences from linguistic and ethnographic evidence, observations given by travelers and colonial officials between ca.
The area of the Gaza province and the Lundu-Marave systems in the north are also focussed. In the south we can trace movements of groups identified as having originated in "Baatwa" or Nguni and Sotho, "Kalanga," or Venda areas. Linguistic and historical data and oral tradition permit to hypothesize that in the Tete area there are traces of Nguni and Makonde and a probable Mongalo dynasty linked to the Marave-Zambezi system. The conclusion is that the larger lineage and conquest states are often not archaeologically visible due to their internal structure.
