Mmopi le Mmopa: Making Pottery in Botswana Today and c.1000 Years Ago Phenyo Thebe * , Edwin Wilmsen § , David Killick ª , and Dana Drake Rosenstein ¨ Pottery-making has been widely thought to be a dying craft in Botswana (Massey 1973:14; Campbell 1980:371), and certainly hand-built potting is not done on the scale it was a century ago. As part of a large study of prehistoric and modern pottery, however, we have learned that a significant number of traditional potters are still active in the country. Indeed, Thebe found that some women have recently learned the craft, at places like Lekgaba Training Centre in Francistown (Figure 1) and Kgetse ya Tsie in Larala, in hopes of earning an income from it. The larger study was initially focused on Early Iron Age (EIA) pottery made around 1000 years ago, that is between about AD 900 and AD 1200. A number of glass beads called Zhizo were found with this pottery at a few sites, in largest number at Nqoma in the Tsodilo Hills; several were also found at Bosutswe near the Khama Rhino Reserve, with smaller numbers at Matlapaneng on the Thamalakane River near Maun and two sites, Mmadipudi and Taukome, near Bosutswe. 1 These beads were made in southwest Asia (today’s Iran-Pakistan-India) (Robertshaw et al, 2003) and brought to the east coast of Africa by traders sailing in dhows and then carried overland to the Botswana sites about 2000 kilometres from the coast. This is clear evidence that Botswana was linked to an early form of globalization carrying goods across vast distances of land and sea. Botswana Notes & Records, Volume 41, 2009 25 ___ * Phenyo Thebe, Archaeology Unit of the Department of History, University of Botswana. ! Edwin Wilmsen, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. " David Killick, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona. • Dana Drake Rosenstein, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona. 1. All of the archaeological sites mentioned in this paper were excavated by Wilmsen and James Denbow (Denbow and Wilmsen 1986); Jim was Director of the archaeology section of the National Museum in the 1980s. Figure 1: Lekgaba Training Centre signboard in Francistown.