A Reconsideration of Rwandan Archaeological Ceramics and their Political Significance in a Post-Genocide Era

This paper reviews Rwandan ceramic typologies and integrates these with recent regional ones through the consideration of four new ceramic assemblages dating to three distinct phases across the past 2,000 years. In addition to providing a synthesis of ceramic approaches as a research resource, it also suggests that ceramics previously termed type C might now better be understood as a transitional form of Urewe. In so doing, it both describes how previous accounts of Rwanda's archaeological ceramics reproduced a contested ethno-racial colonial construction of Rwandan society and suggests the replacement of these with non-ethno-racial explanations of material culture change proposed elsewhere for comparable circumstances in Great Lakes Africa. Finally, as the government seeks to reintroduce secondary school history teaching using archaeological narratives, it discusses the contemporary political significance of this and other research in post-genocide Rwanda, arguing that archaeology, whether framed in technical language or not, has contemporary political referenc

Deposition of modified human remains as evidence for complex mortuary treatment in East Africa during the first millennium AD

In 2019 partial, disarticulated human remains with evidence of perimortem fractures and tool marks were excavated from the site of Kabusanza in southern Rwanda (first millennium AD). The nature and location of these modifications demonstrate that some elements were subject to intentional dismemberment and defleshing, whereas the arrangement of the remains in the burial feature indicates that natural skeletonization had also occurred before final deposition. Human remains with similar patterns of modification and deposition have previously been recovered from the same site, and here we consider the potential behaviours that may have produced this suite of evidence. By comparing the remains with assemblages that have been produced through violence and through ritual activity, we demonstrate that the evidence from Kabusanza is more consistent with complex, multistage mortuary practices than other forms of processing. This may have involved some initial reduction of the body, followed by the retention or circulation of the disarticulated remains before their eventual deposition