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A context for the Luzira Head

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Andrew Reid  and
Ceri Z. Ashley
Andrew Reid
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London WC1H 0PY, UK (Email: a.reid@ucl.ac.uk)
Ceri Z. Ashley
Affiliation:
Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, CA 90095-1510, USA
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Extract

The Luzira head, a pottery figure discovered in a Ugandan prison compound in 1929, has remained curiously anonymous ever since. New archaeological work on the northern shores of (Lake) Victoria Nyanza has defined a formative period of political centralisation at the end of the first millennium AD. The authors show that this period of early to late Iron Age transition is where this remarkable object and related figurative material belongs. This has implications both for the formation of kingdoms in Uganda and for the story of African art more generally.

Keywords

UgandaLuziraAfrican artfigurineskingdoms
Type
Research article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 82 , Issue 315 , March 2008 , pp. 99 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 2008

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