ABSTRACT
For many years Mozambique has been considered one of the blanks in African archaeology. Notwithstanding the early reports of rock paintings to the Portuguese Royal Academy in 1721, very little notice was taken of Mozambican prehistory before the beginning of the 20th century. From then on, despite sporadic, but in some cases excellent treatment of Stone Age sequences (e.g. Diás 1947, Barradas 1965), and a series of descriptive papers by D'Oliveira (e.g. 1960, 1963) and Barradas (1967), colonial archaeology can fairly be said to have almost completely neglected the excavation of sites from the more recent periods of the past. This did not apply to the same extent to the study of early Portuguese colonial relics, which became the central focus of the activities of the Historical Monuments Commission, the findings of which were published in the journal Monumenta. The main contributions to the archaeology of the later periods came from visiting scholars, notably Smolla (1976) and Dickinson (e.g. 1975).
