Sheltering experience in underground places: thinking through precolonial Chagga Caves on Mount Kilimanjaro

Author: Clack, Timothy

Source: World Archaeology, Volume 41, Number 2, June 2009 , pp. 321-344(24)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

Questions centring on the significance, occupation and renovation of subterranean features have remained largely unasked and unanswered by archaeologists. This is cause for great concern considering the importance of 'underground' elements in archaeological landscapes of diverse periods. This paper examines how insights derived from ethnographic and ethnohistoric study among the Chagga of Mount Kilimanjaro, Northern Tanzania, who extensively utilized underground fastnesses in precolonial times, might be used to inform cave archaeologies. These features were used to shelter people and provisions during episodes of conflict between rival chiefdoms and patrilineages and were also ritually significant. Today these features have fallen into disuse but they retain significance in local traditions. It is posited that cave archaeologies should explicitly consider the meaningfulness of the 'cave experience' in their reconstructions of the past and also take advantage of such reconstructions to challenge the primacy too often afforded the ocular.

Keywords: Cave; Chagga; experience; Kilimanjaro; memory; underground

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438240902844434

Affiliations: 1: University of Oxford,

Publication date: 2009-06-01

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