of the nationals. One area of immediate concern was the restructuring of history departments and curricula in order to give more emphasis to local history, the existence of which had hitherto been denied by the colonialists. The major focus of this restructuring was along the lines of evidence that could be used to reconstruct African history. Evidence comprised oral traditions, linguistics, and archaeology among other disciplines.

In archaeology, the period that mattered most was the Iron Age because it was thought that it was the only period that could provide evidence that was directly linked to present-day societies. During the period following independence, there was thus a proliferation of writings by indigenous historians whose main focus was on marrying the oral traditions, archaeology, and local histories (e.g., Muriuki 1974). Within archaeology itself, the pioneering work on the Iron Age was undertaken by the British Institute in Eastern Africa, which was established in 1960 for the sole purpose of conducting research into the later prehistory of East Africa. In 1966, the institute established the Bantu Studies Research Project (BSRP), and its aim was to elucidate, using archaeology, the expansion of Bantu speakers into the region, as had been proposed by linguists.

Using ceramics and the evidence of iron smelting from most early–Iron Age sites, the BSRP gave credence to linguistic arguments that it was the Bantu-speaking people who were responsible for the introduction of iron working techniques into East Africa (Phillipson 1976a, 1976b, 1977a, 1977b). However, the ceramic groups that were thus used had subjective affinities such as key attributes like decoration and shape. These affinities led to the delineation of typological ceramic sequences, which were later grouped together by time and space to postulate linear sequences of population movement. For example, it was argued that all early–Iron Age ceramics had the same decoration, techniques, motifs, and pottery shapes and that this fact was an indication that these ceramic entities had been manufactured by Bantu speakers (Phillipson 1977a, 1977b, 1985; Soper 1971a, 1971b). These studies were based on a naïve concept of culture that argued that style or culture was determined by society (linguistic group). This argument overlooks the fact that despite having the same socialization process, individuals within a given society or culture have their own tendencies that may affect the way they make their material culture.

The tendency to rely on ceramics as the main basis of studying the early Iron Age started to change in the late 1970s when the American researcher Peter Schmidt turned his attention to the study of the technological process of iron smelting. His main task was to reconstruct the techniques used in smelting, and the construction of the furnace and fuel used within both ethnographic and archaeological contexts, in order to understand whether these techniques could have been imported from elsewhere. The same approach was used by H. Kiriama (1986). Results from both studies indicated that during the early Iron Age, preheating a furnace enabled the production of carbon steel and that, in fact, this process had not been done anywhere else (Kiriama 1987; Schmidt 1978). These studies tried to negate the concept that ceramics can be equated with cultural entities and that, therefore, Bantu speakers were responsible for the introduction of iron work into the region. Instead, it was argued that ceramics and their styles are entities that, first and foremost, have utilitarian functions, and that when they are used to negotiate social relationships, it is done not at the societal but at the individual level. Groups of individuals at the village or craft level may use the style of their ceramics to show their relations with one another and not necessarily to indicate their ethnic affiliations.

It has also been shown that the various Bantu-speaking groups had different attitudes and norms toward iron smelting and toward smelter and iron implements so that it becomes impossible to group these societies into a broad cultural group (Kiriama 1992). The overall argument in these studies is that the technological and social realms within which the ceramics and iron smelting and tools were made and used should be studied and critically analyzed before any theories as to their origins are advanced.

The so-called later Iron Age has not been exhaustively