habitations were not preserved because of the
materials used to build the houses, but materials
made of the iron that was used in these sites were
preserved. Therefore, the graves provide incredi-
ble information about the nature of the culture of
the Kisalian people.
Well-developed pottery with spouts and han-
dles appear alongside hoes, axes, arrowheads,
curved knives, spearheads, barbed harpoon heads,
fishhooks, necklaces, and link chains. In addition,
bangles, anthropomorphic bottles, copper
bracelets, and ivory carvings were recovered from
the graves. Researchers have also found copper in
the form of croisettes used as ingots and currency.
Consequently, it is probably true, as some believe,
that extensive trade occurred between the villages
of the copperbelt of Central and East Africa. The
old Kisalian culture revealed items of trade that
could have existed along the route of trade with
people from the Indian Ocean coast.
ReligiousImplicationsIt appears that fishing was the principal activity of
the people of the Kisalian culture. Because it was
the way they subsisted, it is likely that fishing was
centrally located in their cultural practice. There
were so many fishhooks and harpoons buried
with the dead and so many bones of fish inside the
grave pots that the idea of fishing as the core of
the culture does not seem to be off the mark.
The graves also held remains of goats, chickens,
elephants, antelopes, and crocodiles.
Studies done on the graves also reveal that
there was a relationship between the age of the
person and the burial of the corpse. Infants
were buried in shallower graves than children,
and children were buried in graves shallower
than those of adults, who were buried the deep-
est of all. They were all buried decubitus dorsal,
meaning lying on their backs, and their feet
were pointed downstream in relation to the
river. The pottery in the Kisalian graves was
often used for funerary purposes, much like
that of ancient Egypt.
It is impossible to determine the precise prac-
tice of the Kisalian grave culture people. However,
it is possible to see how the Baluba are related to
these people, their ancestors, as people who relied
heavily on fishing and the cultivation of the land
near the banks of the river. This is one more piece
to add to the complicated narrative of the African
contribution to human civilization.Ana Monteiro-FerreiraSeealsoIlé-IfèFurtherReadings
Asante, M. K. (2007).The History of Africa. London:
Routledge.
Kent, S. (Ed.). (1998).Gender in African Prehistory.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Phillipson, D. (2005).African Archaeology. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.KUMINA
Kumina, also known asKalungaorKaduunga, is
a Kongo-based religion primarily found in the
Parish of St. Thomas in the eastern part of
Jamaica. It is quite likely that Kumina emerged
there as a consequence of the presence of large
numbers of Africans from the Congo-Angola
region. Although other African religions existed
there as well, the numerical superiority of the
Africans from the Congo-Angola region allowed
their religion to be dominant and to integrate
aspects of other African religious traditions. The
practice of Kumina is also attested in the Parish of
St. Mary and St. Catherine, but to a lesser degree.
Although the origin of the wordkuminais still
debated, one likely source iskambinda, the name
of a particular Bantu people.
Although Kumina followers believe in the high-
est God,Oto, also calledKing Zombi(from the
word Kikongonzumbi, meaning “spirit, God”),
their religion evolves most critically around ances-
tral spirits and veneration. Those ancestral spirits,
namedzombi, are called on during ritualistic cer-
emonies to inhabit the bodies of living humans
and deliver messages through them. Adepts of
Kumina believe that when a person who had once
been mounted by a spirit while dancing during a
ceremony dies, his or her spirit would join the
ancestral world and would come back to Earth to
mount someone. Otherwise, on dying, their soul370 Kumina