Mumbwa Heritage Sites- Early Man The Mumbwa Caves, on the outskirts of Mumbwa, play a proud role in the uncovering of prehistory in Africa. Archaeological excavations at this site were among the first to question the wrong perception that human evolution in Africa lagged behind that in Europe.   The first controlled excavations were undertaken in 1925 by F.B. Macrae, a District Commissioner in the colonial administration, who had been given a brief background to archaeology before being posted to Africa. Among other objects, Macrae found large heavy tools comparable to coup-de-poings of the Acheulian, named for Saint-Acheul, a town in northern France. The apparent discovery of an African Acheulian phase changed the world, which believed that human evolution in Africa was second-hand to that in Europe. Accordingly, in 1930, an international team led by Commander A. Gatti was dispatched to establish the true parentage of the Acheulian and its successors. Extraordinarily, two beehive-shaped stone enclosures were found. Built against the cave wall, the enclosures turned out to be tombs containing fragmentary human remains. These tombs are unique in the archaeological record of southern Africa - despite the uncertainty about the contemporaneity of the burials with the deposits. An intrusive origin from later periods of occupation cannot be dismissed. The international team also found proof of the cave being used as a furnace for smelting iron. Large blocks of apparently burnt refuse containing stone, ash and clay lay outside the cave entrance. Oval features within the cave defined by burnt limestone blocks were recognised as individual smelting area. It seemed that Later Stone Age people has learned the craft of smelting from in-coming iron workers. J. Desmond Clark - later to become the most influential and productive archaeologist who ever worked in Africa - was the first professionally trained archaeologist to excavate the Mumbwa Caves. He arrived in North Rhodesia to be curator of the new David Livingstone Memorial Museum and Secretary for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute for Social Anthropology. Clark placed trenches near the two entrances previously investigated in 1925 and 1930, and a single season of excavation in 1939 provided proof of a sequence of StilIbay (Middle Stone Age), Rhodesian Wilton (Later Stone Age), and Iron Age seasonal occupations. By the mid-1970s, Mumbwa Caves had slipped into academic obscurity, and the caves were left alone until the early 1990s, when developments in dating techniques along with the rapidly improving political climate in the region made re-excavation of the Mumbwa Caves interesting. L.S. Barham has worked on site from 1993 to 1997, and he has documented a gradual transition from Middle to Later Stone Age at the Mumbwa Caves. Indeed, this site continues to assist in filling out the holes in prehistory of south central Africa. The local people, the Kaonde, believe there are witches, in the forms of owls and jackals, living in the caves, and the site is the heart of the Musaka Jikubi Ceremony, involving offerings of chickens and beer to placate the ancestral spirits and to celebrate the arrival in the area of the Kaonde. Submenu Early Man The First Copperbelt Hot Springs Limestone Formations