Exploring an early-second millennium mass burial in southern Tanzania: a quest for a multidisciplinary approachThomas J. Biginagwa and Elgidius E.B. Ichumbaki

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Abstract
In 2003, an old man from southern Tanzania travelled over a thousand kilometres to inform archaeologists at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) that a bulldozer had exposed human skeletal remains of more than twenty individuals during road construction. The skeletons were crammed into a confined space in Lupilo forest, where the road was being constructed. In response to this news, in 2015, archaeologists from UDSM authenticated local accounts through test excavations. The excavation exposed additional skeletal remains alongside other cultural materials, including ceramics and glass beads. The orientations and piling of skeletons suggest a catastrophic event that probably killed the entire population at this settlement. Radiocarbon dates derived from a charcoal sample and a human tooth place the site and death event in the early second millennium AD. Our talk will discuss the archaeology of the site, contextualise major findings in sub-Saharan Africa, and outline prospective research questions to guide skeletal remains examination through the lens of a pandemic. A fuller understanding of the hypothesised catastrophic event that caused mass deaths at the site warrants a multidisciplinary approach. The envisioned research has the potential to provide a temporal depth of catastrophes and the consequences of the social, biological, and environmental factors that trigger them. Such knowledge is necessary for understanding catastrophes that are occurring in contemporary human populations and that will inevitably occur in the future.

Biography

Elgidius E.B. Ichumbaki is President of the Pan African Archaeological Association (PAA), a not-for-profit professional society whose members are archaeologists and heritage professionals from across the world but working in Africa. Dr Ichumbaki is based in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam where he works as a Senior Lecturer. He is also affiliated with the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, as an Associate Professor. The research focus of Dr Ichumbaki, as Editor of the Journal of Heritage and Society, includes community archaeology, public history, and the decolonisation of research practice and data interpretations.

Thomas John Biginagwa is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam. He received his Ph.D. from the University of York, UK, in 2012. His thesis, supervised by Professors Paul Lane and Terry O’Connor, examined the animal economies practised by local communities against the context of the nineteenth-century caravan trade expansion in the Lower Pangani River Basin, north-eastern Tanzania. Biginagwa’s principal research interests lie in historical ecology, exploring human-environmental interactions, trade and exchange for the last two millennia.