Edwin N. Wilmsen

Advent and course of pastoralism in the kalahari.

It has long been thought that farming and herding were comparatively recent introductions into the Kalahari and that it has been a preserve of foraging Bushmen for thousands of years. Agropastoral Bantu-speakers were thought to have entered this region only within the last two centuries. However, fully developed pastoralism and metallurgy are now shown to have been established in the Kalahari from A.D. 500, with extensive grain agriculture and intracontinental trade added by A.D. 800. Archeological, linguistic, and historical evidence delineates the continuation of mixed economies in the region into the present. Consequences of this revised view for anthropological theory and for policy planning concerning contemporary Kalahari peoples are indicated.

The ecology of illusion: Anthropological foraging in the Kalahari

Richard B. Lee (1979), The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1–526.

Baubles, Bangles and Beads: Commodity Exchange between the Indian Ocean Region and Interior Southern Africa during 8th–15th Centuries CE

42.50 hardcover;

Moijabana rocks-Pilikwe pots: The acceleration of clay formation by potters employing simple mechanical means

11.95 paper. Lorna Marshall (1976), The !Kung of Nyae Nyae. Cambridge (Massachusetts), London: Harvard University Press. 1–433.

The real Bushman is the male one: labour and power in the creation of Basarwa ethnicity

20.00. George B. Silberbauer (1981), Hunter and Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert. Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1–330.

The Archaeofauna from Xaro on the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana

39.50 hardcover;

Mmopi le Mmopa: making pottery in Botswana today and c. 1000 years ago

14.95 paper. Jiro Tanaka (David W. Hughes, trs.) (1980), The San, Hunter‐gatherers of the Kalahari: A Study in Ecological Anthropology. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press; 1–200.

Ceramic petrography, historical linguistics and the Bantu expansion: tracking the arrival of the first pottery-using peoples in northern Botswana

18.50.

The San Historicized. (Book Reviews: Land Filled with Flies. A Political Economy of the Kalahari.)

When material objects are recovered in a place different from their presumed place of origin, archaeologists usually fix attention on those objects and places themselves. Material objects do not, in themselves, however, have intrinsic value, and underlying the material variables of objects and their loci of origin and deposition is a more fundamental actuality of their translocation, the regimes of value in which things were assessed and in which they moved. Fundamental to this is that things have exchange value as well as consumption value and may also have spiritual value in specific circumstances. I argue that these are particularly important considerations when material objects are translocated from a distinct socio-geographic region, with its internal regime of values, to another quite different region, with probably diverse local regimes of value, as is the case when Early–Middle Iron-Age (300–1300 CE) sumptuary goods, mainly glass beads, moved from the East African Indian Ocean sphere to interior southern Africa, which had its own distinct regimes of value. In this article, I present data for this movement and premises regarding regimes of value, to address the trajectory of such beads into the southern region. I suggest that marine gastropod shells, cowrie and conus, are equally significant markers of interior–coastal associations, and their presence at 7th–11th-century southern sites with no glass beads suggests that different regimes of value were held by southern African peoples. This offers clues to bead and shell distributions. Several concrete instances demonstrate the point.

Land and Society in Contemporary Africa. R. E. DOWNS and S. P. REYNA

Throughout the history of potting in Botswana, from about CE200 to the present, potters have used a variety of clays. Alluvial clays are favored by most potters today, but petrographic analyses show that prehistoric potters preferred primary clays directly derived from granite and basalt. Fortunately, a few potters in the region today still use granite-derived clays. We trace the processes by which potters of Pilikwe village mine weathered granite from a source at Moijabana and transform it through a series of crushing, pounding, sifting, and wetting actions into a paste that can be used the following day to form pots. These mechanical operations accelerate natural rock weathering processes that form clays and in a single day achieve what in nature takes thousands of years. Successive stages of clay collection and processing were observed, recorded, and filmed; samples from each stage were subsequently analyzed by thin-section optical petrography. Fabrics of pots made from this processed clay were analyzed by identical means and compared with the raw materials.