Karim Sadr

THE NEOLITHIC OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

As the exception on the continent, southern Africa has no Neolithic period. In the 1920s, when the term came to mean Stone Age with food production, Neolithic was dropped in South Africa for lack of evidence for farming or herding in Stone Age sites. But since the late 1960s many sheep bones have surfaced in just such sites. Now, the continued absence of a Neolithic may say more about the politics of South African archaeology than about its prehistory. This paper describes food production in the southern African late Stone Age and argues in favor of (re-)introducing the term Neolithic to the subcontinent.

HERDERS AND FORAGERS ON KASTEELBERG: INTERIM REPORT OF EXCAVATIONS 1999-2002

Smith et al. (1991) proposed a model to distinguish the archaeological sites of Khoekhoe pastoralists from those of San. This model was based on information gathered from sites scattered over hundreds of square kilometres and several millennia. Between 1999 and 2002 we re-examined Smith et al. s (1991) model by excavating six neighbouring contemporary sites on the hill Kasteelberg. In a previous survey, three of these sites had been provisionally identified as pastoralist sites and three as forager sites. Here we present a brief comparison of the materials from these six sites. Although there are clear differences between the two sets of sites, the hypothesis that one set represents Khoekhoe herders and the other Bushman hunter-gatherers is not supported. Rather, one set of sites seems to represent a more mobile, herder-forager adaptation with a preference for inland resources while the other set appears to represent a more sedentary herder-forager adaptation with emphasis on shoreline resources. It remains to be determined how the occupants of the two sets of sites related to each other

Through Thick and Thin: Early Pottery in Southern Africa

Conventional wisdom has it that ceramic technology reached southernmost Africa with or just ahead of the so-called Iron Age, Bantu migrations of ca 2000 years ago. A review of the evidence suggests that the earliest ceramics in the subcontinent are thin-walled and smooth surfaced vessels, technologically quite distinct from the first thick-walled, coarse surfaced “Iron Age” ware of the subcontinent, and predating the latter by two to four centuries. There is no published evidence of a thin-walled ware to the north of the Zambezi, although undated examples are known from coastal Angola. It seems unlikely that the thin-walled wares in southernmost Africa represent a residue of some mass human migration in the distant past. It is more likely that the art of making fired clay pots reached the subcontinent through archaeologically invisible infiltrations by small groups, perhaps peripatetic artisans; or it may have been invented locally.

On Ceramic Variation in the South-Western Cape, South Africa

Diagnostic ceramics from the pastoralist site of Kasteelberg are sufficiently numerous to show stylistic variation through time, and can be potentially used as chronological markers. Three phases of the Kasteelberg ceramic sequence have been identified, beginning c. 18(X BP. A few vessels of the earliest two phases of the Kasteelberg sequence are also found on coastal forager sites. Later forager sites, both on the coast and inland mountains, contain ceramics with a different decorative style. The frequency of potsherds varies so tremendously between sites that they might be used to differentiate those groups which made the pottery from those who were just users. If so, the early coastal foragers probably obtained their pots from the pastoralists.

Livestock First Reached Southern Africa in Two Separate Events

After several decades of research on the subject, we now know when the first livestock reached southern Africa but the question of how they got there remains a contentious topic. Debate centres on whether they were brought with a large migration of Khoe-speakers who originated from East Africa; or whether the livestock were traded down-the-line among hunter-gatherer communities; or indeed whether there was a long history of diverse small scale population movements in this part of the world, one or more of which ‘infiltrated’ livestock into southern Africa. A new analysis of the distribution of stone toolkits from a sizeable sample of sub-equatorial African Later Stone Age sites, coupled with existing knowledge of the distribution of the earliest livestock remains and ceramics vessels, has allowed us to isolate two separate infiltration events that brought the first livestock into southern Africa just over 2000 years ago; one infiltration was along the Atlantic seaboard and another entered the middle reaches of the Limpopo River Basin. These findings agree well with the latest results of genetic research which together indicate that multiple, small-scale infiltrations probably were responsible for bringing the first livestock into southern Africa.

An ageless view of first millennium AD southern African ceramics

In southern Africa, the Later Stone Age and the Early Iron Age are generally treated as separate archaeologies, as if they really were different periods. In fact, the entire Iron Age overlaps with the last part of the Later Stone Age, and it is argued here that at the sub-continental scale the archaeology of one ‘Age’ might be better understood with reference to the other. The point is illustrated by plotting the distribution of all first millennium ceramics on the same map, regardless of their ‘Age.’ This sheds new light on the history of interactions and perhaps population movements in the sub-continent during the first millennium AD.

FAUNAL REMAINS IN THE TRANSITION FROM HUNTING TO HERDING IN SOUTHEASTERN BOTSWANA

Because foragers became pastoralists so late in southern Africa, their well-preserved remains can help us better understand the original herders of this world. The dominant thinking is that becoming herders is hard. Hunters share meat, herders keep it to themselves. Perhaps only a few hunters ever bridged this gap: the socially important habit of sharing meat may have held the rest back. Following this line of thinking, herding must have reached the southern tip of Africa with migrating herders because, otherwise, too many hunters would have had to bridge the gap for sheep to arrive by diffusion. This paper explores the opposite view: that becoming herders may not have been so hard. Faunal remains from two rockshelters in southeastern Botswana suggest that hunters could have first treated domestic stock as socially unimportant meat, not subject to rules of sharing. Continued hunting and sharing of large and medium game could have fulfilled social obligations, while privately owned domestic stock

THE VISIBILITY AND INVISIBILITY OF HERDERS' KRAALS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA, WITH REFERENCE TO A POSSIBLE EARLY CONTACT PERIOD KHOEKHOE KRAAL AT KFS 5, WESTERN CAPE

The Europeans who landed on the shores of the South African Cape from the late 15 th century onwards encountered local herders whom they later referred to as the Hottentots (now known as the Khoekhoe). There are written references to the settlements and livestock of these pastoralists, but archaeologists have not had much success in discovering any such sites. This absence of archaeological evidence for recent Khoekhoe kraals has been interpreted by some scholars as an indication for a general archaeological invisibility of nomadic pastoralist sites. This article reports on the archaeology of an extensive, low density surface spread of artefacts, KFS 5 (Western Cape), which possibly represents a Khoekhoe kraal dating to the time of the first contact with Europeans. Data are compared to other archaeological evidence of cattle pens in southern Africa and the issues of the visibility of prehistoric and historic kraals are re-addressed.

The Origins and Spread of Dry Laid, Stone-Walled Architecture in Pre-colonial Southern Africa

Pre-colonial stone-walled structures (SWS) are some of the most visible and accessible archaeological remains in southern Africa. Great Zimbabwe is the best known, but there are many tens or even a few hundreds of thousands of other SWS scattered throughout the subcontinent. What is their origin? Did this architectural style and concept arise from a single source or several independent ones? There are different views on these matters and they are described in the first section of this article. In the second part, I suggest that one of the roots of SWS in southern Africa lies in the Later Stone Age (LSA) cultures from the western half of the subcontinent. The article concludes with a brief report of an ongoing project to discover the sequence in the development of SWS in the high plains from the Witwatersrand to the Vaal River.

Firing Pots in Contemporary South-Eastern Botswana

ABSTRACT For many years, archaeologists in Southern Africa have equated pottery “style” with archaeological “cultures” and modern ethno-linguistic groups. In order to investigate this association, we undertook an ethnoarchaeological study of 41 contemporary potters in south-eastern Botswana to observe what social groupings of potters correlate with their preferences for a particular style of making and decorating pots. This paper presents and analyses the firing stage of pottery manufacturing in contemporary south-eastern Botswana and looks for social boundaries in the preference for firing techniques. Unlike a study completed half a century ago, we find that firing technique preferences are village based and reflect the common technique used by potters in that locality, regardless of their linguistic affiliation, ethnic group membership, gender, age, religious persuasion or the network in which they learnt their craft.