Households, Community, and Crafting at Kanono: The archaeology of a 2nd millennium village in Western Zambia Zachary McKeeby a,* , Chisanga Charlton b , Hellen Mwansa c , Constance Mulenga d , William Mundiku e , Samuel Namunji Namunji f , Richard Mbewe g a Department of Anthropology, The University of Virginia, 1702 University Avenue, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA b National Heritage Conversation Commission, Mulobezi Open Air Railway Museum, Mulobezi, Zambia c Great North Road Academy, Lusaka, Zambia d Archaeology Division, Livingstone Museum, Livingstone, Zambia e Nkambo Secondary School, Masaiti District, Zambia f Mutomena Combined School. Mutala, Zambia g National Heritage Conservation Commission, South-West Regional Office, Livingstone, Zambia A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Household archaeology Settlement archaeology Geophysics Iron age Zambia Craft production ABSTRACT The Machile River and its surrounding tributaries in Western Zambia formed a significant locus of Iron Age life in Zambia and served as a conduit for the localized movements of people, things, and ideas in south-central Africa over much of the last two millennia. Within this dynamic corridor, the early 2nd-millennium CE Kanono site represents a short-lived but well defined Middle/Late Iron Age farming community that integrated local crafting practices with global and regional orientations, during a period of dramatic political and economic changes across southern, central, and eastern Africa. Combining high-resolution geophysical survey and the results of targeted excavations at Kanono, we trace the emergence, growth, and abandonment of the village between the mid-thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries CE. We argue that changes seen in the village relate to the formation of a bounded co-residential community built around unilineal descent, which may have leveraged prestige in iron working into other forms of prestige – namely wealth in people and access to exotic goods. Approaching the archaeological record at Kanono from the perspective of household archaeology and daily life allows for an evocative ‘peopling’ of south-central African political economies. 1. Introduction Archaeologists and anthropologists have been either implicitly or explicitly theorizing households since the origin of the discipline, although the meanings and connotations attributed to ‘the house,’ ‘the home,’ and ‘the household’ have fluctuated through time according the disciplinary, theoretical, and paradigmatic affiliations of writers (e.g., Bourdieu, 1973; Carsten and Hugh-Jones, 1995; Barile and Brandon, 2004; Robin, 2020). The post-processual turn of the 1990s focusing on actor-centered analyses and the cultural construction and maintenance of social categories and institutions has proved particularly fruitful in archaeology. For several decades these approaches have opened the door for to a globally cross-fertilizing range of actor-centered questions about the intersections between craft (Brumfiel, 1998; Costin, 1998; Hirth, 2009a, 2009b; Carballo, 2013; Knight, 2017), identity (Stewart- Abernathy, 2004; Johnson, 2007; Voss, 2008; Marshall, 2012), house- hold structuring (Dueppen, 2019), political economy (Gokee, 2014; Dueppen and Gallagher, 2016, 2023), community (Canuto and Yaeger, 2000; Varien and Potter, 2008; LaViolette et al., 2023), and daily life (Hodder and Cessford, 2004; Scattolin et al., 2009; Robin, 2013; 2020; LaViolette and Fleisher, 2018; Haines, 2020). This fruitful people-centric theorizing on houses, daily life, and community has been less frequent for the archaeology of Iron Age southern Africa, a period ranging from the early 1st to the mid-2nd millennium CE. With some notable exceptions (Hall 1998; Lane 1998; Fredriksen 2007, 2011; Antonites 2019; Chirikure et al., 2017; Moffett et al., 2020; Moffett et al., 2022) explicit archaeological theorizing of villages in southern Africa has been dominated since the 1980 s by discussions over the degree to which individual sites do or do not conform to a limited number of high-level ahistorical normative models * Corresponding author. E-mail address: zmckeeby@newsouthassoc.com (Z. McKeeby). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Anthropological Archaeology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaa https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101631 Received 15 November 2023; Received in revised form 14 June 2024; Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 76 (2024) 101631 Available online 3 November 2024 0278-4165/© 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.