Ivy is an addon of sorts for ant that does dependency management (e.g. libraries, etc.) It sort of jacks the Maven dependency resolution bits and leaves the rest. It's definitely not a 'system for managing build artifacts' (and it's pretty java-focused) but you can set up your own repository and have a build target fetch them, put them in the right place, etc.

I wouldn't necessarily advocate this since you'd inevitably end up having to build some system around it, but conceptually it seems like what you'd want. YMMV, I've only used it for pretty straightfoward Java stuff.