These Iron Age people lived in huts built of clay, and stored their grain in hardened clay bins.
As the first agriculturists of the Iron Age of southern Africa, they relied heavily on rainfall.
The communities often responded to times of drought with rituals of cleansing that involved burning mud granaries.
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Clay used to make pottery contains small amounts of magnetic minerals, such as magnetite. When the clay is heated to make a pot, its magnetic minerals lose any magnetism they may have held. Upon cooling, the magnetic minerals record the direction and intensity of the magnetic field at that time. If one can determine the age of the pot, or the archaeological site from which it came (using radiocarbon dating, for instance), then an archaeomagnetic history can be recovered. The researchers teamed up with archaeologists to sample Iron Age village sites that dot the Limpopo River Valley, bordered today by Zimbabwe to the north, Botswana to the west and South Africa to the south
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