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 artifacts 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, and north into Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Sites from the Urewe culture date from the Early Iron Age, from the 5th century BC. to the 6th century AD.

Urewe is the name of the site in Kenya brought to prominence through the publication in 1948 of Mary Leakey’s archaeological findings. She describes the early Iron Age period in the Great Lakes region in Central East Africa around Lake Victoria.

This civilization 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.