Roger Summers

ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY IN SOUTHERN RHODESIA

Distribution maps and Gazetteers have long been a convenient way of summarizing archaeological data, and as long ago as 1906 geographers with an archaeological bent began to use these maps for interpreting the archaeological record. The pioneer work in England was undertaken in 1910 by Dr. 0. G. S. Crawford independently of somewhat earlier work in Germany. Since then many writers have made good use of this valuable weapon in the prehistorians armoury.1 Until recently this method has found little application in Africa for workers objected, quite rightly, to the geographical plotting of information in country which has been incompletely explored archaeologically, although Goodwin and Lowe published lists of sites in 1929 they did not map them.2 However, in 1941 the late Professor van Riet Lowe published a map showing the distribution of rock-paintings and engravings in the Union and adjoining territories and just before his death brought out a second edition. Van Riet Lowe was justified in making his first publication because rock-art was even then so widely known that gaps on the map did not represent significant gaps in a knowledge of these monuments. A comparison between the 1941 and 1956 maps shows how right he was.3 Apart from rock-art and other easily recognized monuments such as the Rhodesian Ruins,4 no geographical work was done and except in broad outline it received little attention in this Societys Method in Prehistory (pp. 146-50). A most useful distribution map of the Later Stone Age in the Transvaal has recently been published by Malan and van Niekerk.5 The Rhodesias, whose archaeological studies did not start until those of the Union had been under way for nearly half a century, naturally lagged behind in geographicalarchaeological work, but early in 1950 Dr. Desmond Clark published a map showing the distribution of the various facies of the Sangoan culture, while in the same year I published the first distribution maps connected with Southern Rhodesian Iron Age ceramics and mines, together with a fresh Ruin map.6 All these maps might justly have been criticized on the score that the areas depicted had been inadequately explored; it says much for the forbearance of reviewers that our temerity did not receive public rebuke. However, by the time of the Livingstone Pan-African Prehistory Congress, reconnaissance had been greatly extended so that well over half of Northern Rhodesia had been archaeologically explored, while, in the more closely settled and smaller territory south of the Zambezi, only about a quarter remained archaeologically unknown. Both Dr. Desmond Clark and I therefore produced new distribution maps, which showed some significant differences from the older ones. So far as Southern Rhodesia is concerned the production of these maps was greatly facilitated by records which have been maintained in the National Museum of Southern Rhodesia since 1948, and form the basis of an archaeological survey of the Colony. These records, which are kept on cards, have been compiled from a variety of sources-museum records (both in Bulawayo and Salisbury), Monuments Commission records, publications of a variety of sites, indexes of rock-paintings compiled by Mrs. E. Goodall and by the late Mr. Lionel Cripps, Geological Survey Bulletins, but above all from the personal communications of a great number of amateurs, some actively interested in prehistory, others being content to record their observation of a rock-painting or a ruin which they had seen in the veld.7 66