Copper does not occur in Malawi in commercially useful quantities — every one of the 377 copper objects found at Mankhamba had to travel a very long way to get there. The raw ore most likely came from the Copperbelt of Zambia and the Katanga Province of the DRC, or possibly from the Urungwe district of northern Zimbabwe, carried along the well-worn trade corridors that ran through the Zambezi River Valley. Once it arrived at Mankhamba, it was worked into beads, tools, and — in one extraordinary case — a single copper vessel, an object so rare it was almost certainly used for ceremonial purposes. No ingots were found, which tells us the metal came not in finished bars but as ore, smelted and shaped by Maravi craftsmen on site. In much of pre-colonial southern Africa, copper was considered more valuable than gold, and the sheer abundance of it at Mankhamba — combined with a total absence of gold — suggests the Chewa fully shared that view.

The tuyere pipes found at Mankhamba settle the question: iron was smelted here, or very close by. These ceramic tubes were pushed into the ng'anjo — the smelting furnace — so that men could bellow air into the fire and raise its heat high enough to work iron ore. Alongside the pipes, excavators found iron slag, the glassy waste that comes out of a furnace when the smelting is done. Together, they are proof of an industry. The 225 iron objects recovered tell only part of the story; many more corroded beyond identification in the soil. What survived includes hunting points, hoe and axe blades, razors, tangs for spears and tools, and a set of small mysterious objects that one researcher suggested could include a gun trigger mechanism — which, at a site known to have traded with the Portuguese, would not be a shock. Iron smelting was a huge undertaking: experimental work in northern Malawi showed it took a full tonne of charcoal and days of heavy labour just to produce four hoes. The Maravi did it at scale.

No site in southern Africa has ever given up so many ivory bangles in one place. The 78 fragments recovered at Mankhamba represent a minimum of 70 individual bangles — polished smooth on both sides, engraved with fine incised lines, and worn long enough by their owners that some had taken on a warm, yellowing shine that speaks of years of contact with skin. Half were unfinished; they had broken during manufacture, the waste of a busy workshop. Thousands of ivory shavings and cut-marked tusks surrounded them, the debris of craftsmen cutting bangles from raw elephant tusk in bulk. The Kalonga controlled the entire ivory economy: hunters used pitfall traps and iron-tipped spears to kill elephants in the forests around Kasungu and the lake shore; the tusks came to Mankhamba, where they were shaped into bangles and luxury objects; and then the finished goods — along with raw ivory — were carried south to Portuguese traders at Tete, or all the way to the Swahili coast, in exchange for cloth, beads, and copper.

One silver object. One lead object. Both tell a remarkable story. Neither metal occurs in Malawi in quantities worth mining, which means both items were brought to Mankhamba from somewhere else — and their exact origins remain unknown. The silver piece is a small pronged object, corroded but unmistakable. Its presence at the site is made more intriguing by a well-documented 1678 incident: a Portuguese captain sent his agent, Theodósio García, into Kalonga's territory to investigate rumours of silver deposits near Mankhamba. The Kalonga refused to show him the mines, but allowed a small sample to be extracted and sent back. No further investigation followed — the Portuguese captain died two days after García returned. Whether the silver at the site came from those local deposits or arrived via trade is not known. The lead object may be connected to the European gun trade that grew during the 18th century. Together, these two small fragments represent the outermost edges of a trading network that stretched from central Africa to the Indian Ocean and beyond.