By Eben and Kristi van Tonder, 1 October 2025

Companion to our earlier article: From Sacred Home to Sacred Factory

Companion to our earlier article: From Sacred Home to Sacred Factory: Rethinking Industrialisation in Africa. In that piece, we argued that African industry falters where the sacred was stripped out of work. This follow-up presents fresh archaeological evidence and sharpens the path forward.

What changed in the evidence: Zvejnieki, Latvia

What changed in the evidence: Zvejnieki, Latvia

The Stone Age cemetery of Zvejnieki lies on the northern shore of Lake Burtnieks in Latvia. The site was first recognised in 1964 when gravel extraction exposed ochre-stained burials. Francis Zagorskis then led systematic excavations from 1964 to 1978, during which more than 300 graves were revealed. Later campaigns in the early 2000s expanded the record and clarified its chronology, showing that the site was used for millennia (Zagorskis, 1987; Larsson, 2006).

A recent multiproxy study has now reshaped our understanding of the grave goods. It shows that flaked stone tools were placed with women and children as often as with men. Many were unused, some were deliberately broken, and others appear to have been made specifically for burial (Petrović et al, 2025). By the 4th millennium BCE, these toolkits became larger and more symbolically charged, in step with other ritual elaborations such as ochre deposits, collective burials and the probable use of masks (Petrović et al, 2025).

This evidence points to a worldview where the implements of food production were seen as supremely meaningful, worthy of travelling with the dead into burial. Scrapers, blades, and points were not simply instruments for obtaining food, but objects that carried identity, obligation, and memory. To bury a tool was to acknowledge its sacred weight.

For us, this is significant. In our earlier thesis, we argued that work becomes durable only when it is morally and ritually framed. Zvejnieki provides an ancient example of exactly this: a community where the means of food production were tied to sacred duty. Maintenance and making were not chores of survival but acts of honour and continuity.

Interpreting the tools

The stone implements from Zvejnieki cannot be read as simple reflections of daily labour. Their condition and context tell a more complex story. Some pieces were unused, showing no marks of wear. Others were deliberately broken before burial. Many appear to have been made expressly for funerary purposes, never intended to enter the cycle of everyday work (Petrović et al, 2025).

Archaeologists interpret these patterns as signs that tools were more than implements. An unused blade, sharp and perfect, may have symbolised purity, readiness, or protection for the dead on their passage. A broken tool may have been ritually “killed,” a gesture to withdraw it from practical use and transfer it into the realm of the ancestors (Bradley, 1990; Chapman, 2000). To snap a scraper or blade was to sacrifice its economic value to release its symbolic power.

Placed in graves with men, women, and children alike, these tools were not badges of role or gender but tokens of belonging to the community. They stood for identity, for memory, for the obligations that bound the living to the dead. In the same way that ochre, amber, and traces of masks framed the body in colour and ornament, the flaked stone artefacts framed it in the language of technology turned sacred.

What emerges is a vision of a society where the means of food production itself were sanctified. To produce a tool only to lay it in a grave was to acknowledge that making had a value beyond survival. Tool-making was a form of offering, a way of weaving the everyday craft of life into the deepest rituals of death. Technology was not external to the sacred but embedded within it, a material bridge between household subsistence and cosmic order.

This interpretation is vital for us. It shows that maintenance and making were not simply chores but acts of meaning. When tools are framed ritually, they are treated with care. Where the link between tool and meaning is lost, neglect follows. Zvejnieki gives us a prehistoric example of a principle we continue to see today: the durability of work depends on its moral and ritual framing.

Reading Zvejnieki through our lens: from “tool-use” to “tool-meaning”

The finds at Zvejnieki ask us to reconsider what a tool was in ancient life. Archaeology has often assumed that grave goods mirrored daily labour: the man as hunter, the woman as cook, the child as apprentice. Yet the evidence here resists that story. Tools were buried across the spectrum of sex and age, suggesting they symbolised belonging to the community rather than a strictly male identity (Petrović et al, 2025).

The condition of the artefacts underscores this. Some were unused, others deliberately broken before burial. This is the ritualisation of technology, where effort was spent on objects never destined for practical use. Their function was symbolic, serving as bridges between the living and the dead. Over time, the symbolic charge increased as tool deposits grew, ochre became more common, and burial rites expanded. Technology was folded into ritual, not separated from it (Petrović et al, 2025).

This caught my attention because it resonates with the insight Kristi and I developed earlier, that the sacred precedes the secular. Technology itself was sacred! When ritual frames work, habits of order and respect become embedded and continue running in the background even when overt rituals fade. Where the link with that past is lost, the continuity of those habits also weakens. Urbanisation, colonisation and rigid rank systems often severed this connection. In places with entrenched caste-like structures, the division of tasks became rigid, while in societies shaped by slavery or imported hierarchies, attitudes towards work and maintenance were marked by status rather than shared honour.

In Nigeria, I often encounter a culture of sharp competitiveness where every slight is answered, an aggressiveness that seems tied to long histories in which the sacred canopy around work was stripped away and replaced by contests of rank. By contrast, it seemed to me as if among indigenous groups in Southern Africa, where communal rites of work and production endured longer, attitudes to maintenance and collective order often remain more intact. I pose it as a statement, but the statement is really a question. Is aggression a hindrance to a spiritual understanding of work and the means of work – our technology and our tools?

Zvejnieki helps us imagine a different worldview. Food production and its tools were not divided into male hunting, female gathering and child apprenticeship. Instead, they were seen as part of a shared human identity, sanctified by ritual. The maker of tools was not a supplier at the margins but someone close to the rite. In such a society, maintaining tools was not an external demand but a spiritual duty.

The larger lesson is clear. Well, not even a lesson. Tools were seen as sacred. Sacred objects are revered. Cared for. So, tools and techniques, when seen as spiritual and ritually situated, are cared for. When stripped of meaning and imported as alien, neglect is predictable. Zvejnieki shows us how the ancients fused work and sacred duty. Our challenge today is to restore that connection in industry so that care, discipline and truth-telling around machines once again flow naturally.

When tools are honoured, work endures

The principle that Zvejnieki demonstrates, that tools become durable when framed within ritual, has echoed across many societies. It was never only about survival. When tools were seen as sacred, they carried order, respect, and meaning.

Japan after the war

In post-war Japan, the reconstruction of industry drew on cultural traditions of cleanliness and reverence that had long been shaped by Shinto and Buddhist practice. The now-famous 5S method (Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, Shitsuke), which took form in the late 1940s and early 1950s, required that machines and workstations be cleaned, inspected, and kept in strict order at the beginning of the working day (Imai, 1997). The 5S terms are all Japanese words beginning with “S.” Their standard English translations are:

• Seiri (整理) – Sort (remove what is not needed, keep only essentials)
• Seiton (整頓) – Set in order (arrange items so they are easy to use and find)
• Seiso (清掃) – Shine (clean the workplace and equipment)
• Seiketsu (清潔) – Standardise (establish standards and routines to maintain order and cleanliness)
• Shitsuke (躾) – Sustain or Discipline (maintain and internalise the practice through training and habit)

So the 5S system is often summarised in English as Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardise, Sustain.

At Toyota, such routines became central to the production system: workers were expected to wipe down and check their machines daily, and responsibility for equipment was framed as a matter of discipline and pride. A station left dirty or in disrepair reflected badly on the worker, not just on the product (Fujimoto, 1999).

The attitude toward machines was also reinforced through Shinto practice. Inauguration ceremonies for new factories, and sometimes for major pieces of machinery, were accompanied by Shinto blessings, a continuation of earlier customs of purifying and dedicating spaces and tools (Earhart, 1982). These rites treated industrial equipment as worthy of respect, not simply as inert steel. Engineers who studied Toyota’s system have pointed out that its reliability was sustained as much by this atmosphere of vigilance and care as by mechanical design (Fujimoto, 1999).

This ethic has deep historical roots. In Japan, Shinto, from its earliest centuries, taught that kami could inhabit natural objects and implements, and farming tools and weapons were regularly purified at shrines. In the West, Hesiod in Works and Days (8th c. BCE) warned farmers not to neglect their ploughs and tools. In China, Confucian and Daoist traditions encouraged careful ritual maintenance of implements, reflected in agricultural manuals. Across cultures and centuries, then, the care of tools has been linked to moral order. Post-war Japanese factories did not invent this idea but carried forward a long human tradition of seeing implements not merely as means to an end but as objects bound up with discipline, respect, and responsibility.

Europe and the guilds

In medieval Europe, guilds regulated not only workmanship but also the condition of tools. Ordinances in German and Italian towns set fines and penalties for neglect, including using dirty or poorly maintained equipment (Epstein, 1998). The statutes made clear that apprenticeship was about more than mastering technique: it was a moral education in discipline and care. Neglect of tools or work was treated as a breach of guild honour and punishable through guild courts.

A compelling instance of the guilds’ moral investment in tools is found in Frankfurt (14th–16th century). Here, guild inspectors held the authority to not merely fine negligent craftsmen, but to destroy bad tools and render defective wares unusable during formal shop inspections (Waren-schau). The guild record states: “Die Besichtigung der gewerblichen Betriebe ist durchaus Sache der Zunft. Ihre Organe haben Gewalt, schlechte Werkzeuge zu vernichten und schlechte Waaren unbrauchbar zu machen.” (Archiv für Frankfurts Geschichte und Kunst, Band 25 (Frankfurt am Main, 1899), – “Die Besichtigung der gewerblichen Betriebe … Ihre Organe haben Gewalt, schlechte Werkzeuge zu vernichten und schlechte Waaren unbrauchbar zu machen.)

This is not an allegory or rhetorical flourish: it is a legal enactment. The guilds treated tool maintenance and product quality not as private, technical matters, but as civic virtues enforced by institutional sanction.

Africa and the sacred tool

Among the Yorùbá of Nigeria, tools and machines are directly linked to the worship of Ogun, the deity of iron, war, and technology. Blacksmiths, drivers, and mechanics continue to honour Ogun with offerings made on or around their implements. Palm oil, snails, dogs, or other sacrificial items are given to sanctify the tools and secure protection from accidents. These practices reflect the Yorùbá understanding that iron carries sacred power and that work with metal is inseparable from ritual acknowledgement (Adeoye, 1996; Ojo, 2010).

For the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, agricultural implements are bound into the rhythm of the Iri Ji (New Yam) festival, the annual ceremony that marks the beginning of the harvest. Until the first yams have been dedicated to God and the ancestors, no yam may be eaten and no hoe or harvesting implement is used in the fields. This prohibition ensures that tools only enter the harvest cycle once the proper ritual of thanksgiving has been performed. It sacralises the act of farming by placing the hoe and the harvest under the guardianship of divine and ancestral order (Okafor, 1997).

In Southern Africa, ethnographic records describe comparable respect for tools among Bantu-speaking communities. Among the Zulu and Xhosa of South Africa, hoes were carefully stored after use, never abandoned in the soil, and sometimes ritually cleansed before planting. Colonial observers of the 19th century noted that the hoe was associated with fertility and ancestral blessing in Zulu households. In Zimbabwe, among the Shona, agricultural tools could be incorporated into seasonal ceremonies: ritual beer was brewed at the start of planting, and hoes were symbolically present as part of ensuring a fruitful harvest (Gelfand, 1962). These practices were documented in the late 19th and 20th centuries, but oral traditions indicate that they extend back into precolonial farming life. Across these societies, the hoe was not a neutral object but part of the moral and spiritual order that governed food production.

China and the craftsman’s virtue

In China, both Confucian and Daoist traditions tied the care of tools to moral discipline. Classical texts praised the craftsman who kept his knife sharp and his bench in order. The story of Cook Ding in the Zhuangzi, whose knife never dulled because he cut with spiritual alignment rather than brute force, became a parable not only of skill but of virtue. Archaeological finds from Neolithic China show ritualised deposition of polished axes and blades, many broken before burial, echoing the same “killing of objects” seen at Zvejnieki (Bagley, 1999). Here again, food production tools were sanctified in story and in soil.

Then what happened in Africa?

If the sacred tool is so widespread, why does African industry today often suffer from weak maintenance and poor care? Why do we encounter the sharp discontinuities that Zvejnieki warns against? This now becomes the central question. We have shown with a few examples that the “spiritual” tradition of tools and work (means of income and survival) was linked closely to spirituality and ritual. At least in a few key examples. Many more can be given, but I think I made my point. The question is, why do we find such a different attitude towards work today in Africa?

The easy and quick answer is that the key lies not in some timeless cultural flaw but in history.

The argument is that across much of Africa, colonialism and the slave trade severed the continuity between craft and sacred life. That enslavement reduced people themselves to tools. Factories and plantations imposed alien equipment, alien routines, and a managerial tone stripped of ritual. The argument is that in West Africa, especially, hierarchies hardened under centuries of warfare and raiding. Social orders rooted in rank, slavery, and clientage reframed work as compulsion, not service. The sacred canopy over tools was punctured. Where once a hoe had been honoured before harvest, now imported machines were treated as foreign property, belonging to others, carrying no ancestral tie.

A Compelling Alternative

Kristi and I have been reflecting on this question for months. It is central to my time in Nigeria, where everything about Africa stands in sharper relief. From our work, we are developing a more productive theory, one that aligns more closely with the evidence from Europe and Asia. We will present this theory in detail as it takes shape. For now, it is enough to say that explanations which rest on slavery, on a supposed collapse of social order, or worse, on claims about African attitudes toward ownership, miss the mark. Such arguments are dismissive, as if Africans lack the resilience shown by every other people who have faced history’s upheavals.

The real answer, we believe, is both more dramatic and more hopeful. At Zvejnieki, the burials reveal an understanding of equality that embraces men, women, and apprentices, our even children, as participants in the work of community. Their careful placement of tools shows us that implements were not marginal but central to how life and meaning were held together. That insight is not a relic of prehistory. It is part of the answer we are looking for today.

Conclusion

Zvejnieki gives archaeological depth to what we still see in factories, slaughter floors, and spice rooms: tools are never just tools. Where they are honoured, people rise; where they are stripped of meaning, people drift. This is true. It’s part of the answer!

The fact is that the challenge of Africa is not explained by blaming culture or history. Those answers fall short. Was there never slavery in Europe? Or in the East? Was there no Feudal landowner system? Were communities in Japan and China never displaced? Homes broken up in Europe and Asis? They had all the challenges that Africa faced, but they overcame them! Why and how!

NO! There is a far better answer! Kristi and I are working toward fleshing out a more concrete explanation, one that is grounded in reality, and it so happens that truth offers a far more hopeful future for Africa’s path forward. For now, Zvejnieki reminds us that equality, responsibility, and meaning have always been bound up with the way humans handle their tools. To dishonour the tool is to dishonour ourselves and to re-attach work to meaning is where renewal begins. But its only the beginning!

References

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