Urewe

The Urewe culture developed and spread in and around the Lake Victoria region of Africa during the African Iron Age. The culture's earliest dated artefacts are located in the Kagera Region of Tanzania, and it extended as far west as the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as far east as the Nyanza and Western provinces of Kenya, north into Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi and south into Southern Africa. Sites from the Urewe culture date from the Early Iron Age, from the 5th century BC to the 6th century AD. The Urewe people certainly did not disappear, and the continuity of institutional life was never completely broken. One of the most striking things about the Early Iron Age pots and smelting furnaces is that some of them were discovered at sites that the local people still associate with royalty, and still more significant is the continuity of language.

==Chronology== This civilisation emerges in the region during the transition from the second to the first millennium B.C. and seems to have thrived in various sites well into the second millennium A.D. It underwent its greatest period of expansion, allied to an important metalworking activity, from the first to the sixth century A.D. and covered the Kivu region (in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to the west up to Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi in north-west Tanzania and south-west Kenya.