Comparative studies of inequality based on archaeological data rely on universal notions of status or prestige that are not always meaningful across diverse cultural contexts. Here, the authors evaluate three broadly contemporaneous urban communities (Marothodi, Molokwane and Kaditshwene) in the southern African interior in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries AD. The study combines a statistical measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient, with insights from the rich ethnohistorical archives of African knowledge systems. The results suggest markedly different levels of inequality, but contextualisation points to divergent social strategies for settlement organisation and for managing sociopolitical insecurity. The findings raise important questions about cross-cultural indices of social inequality.

The GINI project investigates the dynamics of inequality among populations over the long term by synthesising global archaeological housing data. This project brings archaeologists together from around the world to assess hypotheses concerning the causes and consequences of inequality that are of relevance to contemporary societies globally.

Palaeoenvironmental data indicate that the climate of south-western Madagascar has changed repeatedly over the past millennium. Combined with socio-political challenges such as warfare and slave raiding, communities continually had to mitigate against risk. Here, the authors apply social network analysis to pottery assemblages from sites on the Velondriake coast to identify intercommunity connectivity and changes over time. The results indicate both continuity of densely connected networks and change in their spatial extent and structure. These network shifts coincided with periods of socio-political and environmental perturbation attested in palaeoclimate data and oral histories. Communities responded to socio-political and environmental risk by reconfiguring social connections and migrating to areas of greater resource availability or political security.

Archaeologists of East and southern Africa have long been attracted to large urban centres, such as those on the Swahili coast, and to the circulation of imported goods. Here, the authors aim to refocus attention on the diversity of objects that were produced and transformed by the inland societies of East and southern Africa during the Middle Iron Age (AD 750–1250). Recognition of the remaking, bundling and repurposing of small, portable objects emphasises the innovative practices that helped to bestow power on their makers. A socially embedded approach to studying objects and practices re-presents African communities as innovators and active transformers of non-local objects, and facilitates new narratives about the political economy of Africa at that time.

Common assumptions about the ephemeral archaeological signature of pastoralist settlements have limited the application of geophysical techniques in the investigation of past herding societies. Here, the authors present a geophysical survey of Luxmanda, Tanzania, the largest-known settlement documented for the Pastoral Neolithic era in eastern Africa (c. 5000–1200 BP). The results demonstrate the value and potential of fluxgate gradiometry for the identification of magnetic anomalies relating to archaeological features, at a category of site where evidence for habitation was long thought to be undetectable. The study provides comparative data to enable archaeologists to identify loci for future investigations of mobile populations in eastern Africa and elsewhere.

A multi-disciplinary research project in north-western Zimbabwe focuses on the Nambya state of the Zimbabwe Culture. The new research suggests that the development of the Nambya state was contemporaneous with other Zimbabwe Culture states and not the result of a direct migration from the Great Zimbabwe state.

The Southern African Radiocarbon Database (SARD) is a new online, open-access database of published radiocarbon dates from southern African archaeological contexts. Compatible with the calibration, Bayesian modelling and mapping functionality of the OxCal software, the SARD will greatly assist in the documentation and analysis of chronological trends across the subcontinent. This article introduces the database and presents two case studies that demonstrate its utility and its integration with OxCal, comparing the temporal distribution of radiocarbon dates in two archaeologically well-investigated regions, and assessing the timing of Middle to Later Stone Age technological developments across the African subcontinent.

Archaeological indicators of inequality at major historic centres of power have long been poorly understood. This paper is the first to address the archaeology of class and inequality at Great Zimbabwe (AD 1000–1700) from an African-centred viewpoint. Data from new excavations, combined with insights from Shona philosophy, practice and ethnography, suggest that the categories of ‘elite’ and ‘commoner’ were situational and transient, and that they require a more robust theorisation than that currently adopted for the site. The results provide a valuable study for the comparative archaeology of ancient cities, differing in many ways from established interpretive frameworks in global archaeology.