Chitambo

Chitambo occupies the southern approaches to the Bangweulu wetlands, where open miombo woodland meets a floodplain whose seasonal waters spread across the ground. The site lies about a hundred kilometres southeast of Lake Bangweulu, with the Lulimala River to the south and the permanent swamps farther beyond. The country is defined less by any single place than by its waterways and the changing edge of marsh.

This was the country of the Lala and neighbouring Bemba, whose ancestors came from the Luba–Lunda lands to the northwest. They cleared woodland by the chitemene system, lopping branches and burning them to fertilise millet fields, and moved their villages as the soil tired. Bisa traders carried ivory and copper along the paths that crossed the plateau toward the Lunda ruler Kazembe, and on to the Portuguese and Swahili traders of the east, so that even small chiefly settlements here lay on a network of paths, streams and seasonal crossings west of the floodplain.