Edwin N. Wilmsen
Boston University
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Featured researches published by Edwin N. Wilmsen.
Science | 1986
James Denbow; Edwin N. Wilmsen
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.
Reviews in Anthropology | 1983
Edwin N. Wilmsen
Richard B. Lee (1979), The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1–526.
Journal of Southern African Studies | 2017
Edwin N. Wilmsen
42.50 hardcover;
Ethnoarchaeology | 2016
Edwin N. Wilmsen; Anne Griffiths; Phenyo C. Thebe; David Killick; Goitseone Molatlhegi
11.95 paper. Lorna Marshall (1976), The !Kung of Nyae Nyae. Cambridge (Massachusetts), London: Harvard University Press. 1–433.
Botswana Notes and Records | 1990
Edwin N. Wilmsen
20.00. George B. Silberbauer (1981), Hunter and Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert. Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1–330.
Annals of the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History | 2013
Wynand Van Zyl; Shaw Badenhorst; Elene Taljaard; James Denbow; Edwin N. Wilmsen
39.50 hardcover;
Botswana Notes and Records | 2009
Phenyo Thebe; Edwin N. Wilmsen; David Killick; Dana Drake Rosenstein
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.
The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology | 2015
David Killick; Edwin N. Wilmsen
18.50.
Science | 1990
Edwin N. Wilmsen
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.
American Ethnologist | 1990
Edwin N. Wilmsen
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.