Interactions among Precolonial Foragers, Herders, and Farmers in Southern Africa (2024)

  • 1. James Woodburn, “Egalitarian societies,” Man 17 (1982): 431–451.

  • 2. Richard B. Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Richard B. Lee and Irving DeVore, eds. Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and Their Neighbors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); George Silberbauer, Hunter and Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Jiro Tanaka, The San, Hunter-Gatherers of the Kalahari: A Study in Ecological Anthropology, trans. David W. Hughes (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1980 [1971]).

  • 3. Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow, “Paradigmatic History of San-Speaking Peoples and Current Attempts at Revision,” Current Anthropology 31.5 (1990): 489–524.

  • 4. James Denbow, “Prehistoric Herders and Foragers of the Kalahari: The Evidence for 1500 Years of Interaction,” in Past and Present in Hunter-Gatherer studies, ed. C. Schrire (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984), 175–193; Carmel Schrire, Past and present in hunter-gatherer studies (Orlando, FL.: Academic Press, 1984); Edwin Wilmsen, Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Lawrence Robbins et al., “Recent Archaeological and Paleontological Research at Toteng, Botswana: Early Domesticated Livestock in the Kalahari,” Journal of African Archaeology 6.1 (2008): 131–149.

  • 5. Schrire, Past and Present; Jacqueline Solway and Richard Lee, “Foragers, Genuine or Spurious? Situating the Kalahari San in History,” Current Anthropology 31 (1990): 109–146; James Denbow and Edwin Wilmsen, “The Advent and Course of Pastoralism in the Kalahari,” Science 234 (1986): 1509–1515; Wilmsen and Denbow, Paradigmatic History; Wilmsen, Land; and Justin Pargeter et al., “Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of Southern Africa,” Antiquity 90.352 (2016): 1072–1079.

  • 6. Lee and Devore, Kalahari; Lee, !Kung; Solway and Lee, Foragers.

  • 7. Denbow and Wilmsen, Advent; Wilmsen, Land; Wilmsen and Denbow, Paradigmatic History.

  • 8. James Denbow, The Archaeology and Ethnography of Central Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); James Denbow, Carla Klehm, and Laure Dussubieux, “The Glass Beads of Kaitshàa and Early Indian Ocean Trade into the Far Interior of Southern Africa,” Antiquity 89 (2015): 361–377; Christopher Ehret, “The Early Livestock-Raisers of Southern Africa,” Southern African Humanities 20 (2008): 7–35; Thomas Güldemann, “A Linguist’s View: Khoe-Kwadi Speakers as the Earliest Food-Producers of Southern Africa,” Southern African Humanities 20 (2008): 93–132; Joseph Pickrell et al., “The Genetic Prehistory of Southern Africa,” Nature Communications 6 (2016); and Enrico Macholdt et al., “Tracing Pastoralist Migrations to Southern Africa with Lactase Persistence Alleles,” Current Biology 24.8 (2014): 875–879.

  • 9. David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (New York: Harper, 1858), 73.

  • 10. David Livingstone, Livingstone’s Africa: Perilous Adventures and Extensive Discoveries in the Interior of Africa (Philadelphia and Boston: Hubbard, 1872), 88.

  • 11. Mabunga Gadibola, “Serfdom (Bolata) in the Nata Area (1929–1960)” (BA thesis, History Department, University of Botswana, 1993); E. S. B. Taggart, Report on the Conditions Existing among Masarwa in the Bamangwato Reserve of the Bechuanaland Protectorate and Certain Other Matters Appertaining to the Natives Living Therein (Pretoria: South Africa Government Press, 1933); Robert Hitchcock, Kalahari Cattle Posts: A Regional Study of Hunter-Gatherers, Pastoralists and Agriculturalists in the Western Sandveld Region, Central District, Botswana (Gaborone, Botswana: Ministry of Local Government and Lands, 1978); and Silberbauer, Hunter and Habitat.

  • 12. Andy Chebanne, “Shifting Identities in Eastern Khoe: Ethnic and Language Endangerment,” Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies 16.2 (2002): 147–157.

  • 13. Alan Barnard, Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 131.

  • 14. Sibel Kusimba, “What Is a Hunter-Gatherer? Variation in the Archaeological Record of Eastern and Southern Africa,” Journal of Archaeological Research 13.4 (2005): 337–366; Aaron Mazel, “Changing Fortunes: 150 Years of San Hunter-Gatherer History in the Natal Drakensberg, South Africa,” Antiquity 65 (1992): 758–767; Peter Mitchell, “Anyone for Hxaro? Thoughts on the History and Practice of Exchange in Southern African Later Stone Age Archaeology,” in Researching Africa’s Past: New Perspectives from British Archaeology, eds. P. Mitchell, A. Haour, and J. Hobart (Oxford: School of Archaeology, 2003), 35–43; and Pargeter, Primordialism.

  • 15. Simon Hall and Benjamin Smith, “Empowering Places: Rock Shelters and Ritual Control in Farmer-Forager Interactions in the Northern Province,” South African Archaeological Bulletin, Goodwin Series 8 (2000): 30–46.

  • 16. David S. Thomas and Paul Shaw, The Kalahari Environment (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  • 17. Daniel McGahey, “Maintaining Opportunism and Mobility in Drylands: The Impact of Veterinary Cordon Fences in Botswana” (PhD diss., School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, 2008).

  • 18. Alec Campbell, “Traditional Utilization of the Okavango Delta,” in Symposium on the Okavango Delta, eds. D. Nteta and J. Hermans (Gaborone: Botswana Society, 1976); and Barnard, Hunters and Herders, 123.

  • 19. S. Dornan, Pygmies & Bushmen of the Kalahari; An Account of the Hunting Tribes Inhabiting the Great Arid Plateau of the Kalahari Desert, Their Precarious Manner of Living, Their Habits, Customs & Beliefs, with Some Reference to Bushman Art, Both Early & of Recent Date, & to the Neighbouring African Tribes (London: Seeley, Service, 1925), 106–109.

  • 20. James Denbow and Phenyo Thebe, Culture and Customs of Botswana (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006); and McGahey, Maintaining Opportunism.

  • 21. David Nash et al., “Provenancing of Silcrete Raw Materials Indicates Long-Distance Transport to Tsodilo Hills, Botswana, during the Middle Stone Age,” Journal of Human Evolution 64 (2013): 280–288.

  • 22. Phenyo Thebe, “Paradigms in Stone: Lithic Technology at Bosutswe and Matlapaneng” (MA thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, 2004).

  • 23. Lawrence Robbins et al., “The Advent of Herding in Southern Africa: Early AMS Dates on Domestic Livestock from the Kalahari Desert,” Current Anthropology 46.4 (2005): 671–677.

  • 24. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, “Animal Disease Challenges to the Emergence of Pastoralism in Sub-Saharan Africa,” African Archaeological Review 18 (2000): 95–139.

  • 25. Denbow, Glass Beads.

  • 26. Güldemann, “A Linguist’s View”; Thomas Güldemann and Edward Elderkin, “On External Genealogical Relationships of the Khoe Family,” in Khoisan Languages and Linguistics: Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium, January 4–8, 2003, eds. M. Brenzinger and C. König (Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 2010), 15–52; and Ehret, Early Livestock.

  • 27. Pickrell, Genetic Prehistory.

  • 28. Coelho et al., “On the Edge of Bantu Expansions: mtDNA, Y-Chromosome and Lactase Persistence: Genetic Variation in Southwestern Angola,” BMC Evolutionary Biology 9 (2009): 80; and Barbieri et al., “Unraveling the Complex Maternal History of Southern African Khoisan Populations,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 153 (2014): 435–448.

  • 29. Macholdt et al., “Tracing Pastoralist Migrations.”

  • 30. Henn et al., “Y-Chromosomal Evidence of a Pastoralist Migration.”

  • 31. Barnard, Hunters and Herders, 122.

  • 32. Pickrell, Genetic Prehistory, 3.

  • 33. Brigitte Packendorf, “Eastern Botswana: Shua and Tshwa,” paper presented at the conference “Speaking (of) Khoisan,” Leipzig, 2015.

  • 34. Rainer Vossen, “What Click Sounds Got to Do in Bantu: Reconstructing the History of Language Contacts in Southern Africa,” in Human Contact through Language and Linguistics, eds. B. Smieja and M. Tasch (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997), 353–366; Robbins et al., Advent of Herding; Robbins et al., Recent Archaeological; Eileen Kose and J. Richter, “The Prehistory of the Kavango People,” Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 18 (2007): 103–129; Eileen Kose, “New Light on Ironworking Groups along the Middle Kavango in Northern Namibia,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 64.190 (2009): 130–147; Andrew Smith, “Pastoral Origins at the Cape, South Africa: Influences and Arguments,” Southern African Humanities 20 (2008): 49–60; D. Pleurdeau et al., “‘Of Sheep and Men’: Earliest Direct Evidence of Caprine Domestication in Southern Africa at Leopard Cave (Erongo, Namibia),” PLOS One 7.7 (2012): 10; and Denbow, Archaeology and Ethnography.

  • 35. Karim Sadr, “Invisible Herders? The Archaeology of Khoekhoe Pastoralists,” Southern African Humanities 20 (2008): 179–203.

  • 36. Andrew Smith, “The Concepts of ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Neolithisation’ for Africa,” Before Farming 1.2 (2005): 1–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/bfarm.2005.1.2

  • 37. Thomas Huffman, Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996); Thomas Huffman, “The Stylistic Origin of Bambata and the Spread of Mixed Farming in Southern Africa,” Southern African Humanities 17 (2005): 57–79; and James Denbow et al., “Excavations at Bosutswe, Botswana: Cultural Chronology, Paleo-ecology and Economy,” Journal of Archaeological Science 35.2 (2008): 459–480.

  • 38. James Denbow and Alec Campbell, “The Early Stages of Food Production in Southern Africa and Some Potential Linguistic Correlations,” Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 7.1 (1986): 83–103; James Denbow, “After the Flood: A Preliminary Account of Recent Geological, Archaeological and Linguistic Investigations in the Okavango Region of Northern Botswana,” in Contemporary Studies on Khoisan: In Honour of Oswin Keohler on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday, eds. R. Vossen and K. Keuthmann, 181–214 (Hamburg: H. Buske, 1986), 181–214; Lawrence Robbins et al., “Late Quaternary Archaeological and Palaeo-environmental Data from Sediments at Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana,” Southern African Field Archaeology 9 (2000): 17–31; Lawrence Robbins et al., “Archaeology, Palaeoenvironment, and Chronology of the Tsodilo Hills White Paintings Rock Shelter, Northwest Kalahari Desert, Botswana,” Journal of Archaeological Science 27 (2000): 1085–1113; Gill Turner, “Early Iron Age Herders in Northwestern Botswana: The Faunal Evidence,” Botswana Notes and Records 19 (1987): 7–23; Gill Turner, “Hunters and Herders of the Okavango Delta, Northern Botswana,” Botswana Notes and Records 19 (1987): 25–40; and Wynand van Zyl et al., “The Archaeofauna from Xaro on the Okavango Delta in Northern Botswana,” Annals of the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History 3 (2013): 49–58.

  • 39. Denbow, Archaeology and Ethnography.

  • 40. James Denbow, “Excavations at Divuyu, Tsodilo Hills,” Botswana Notes and Records 43 (2011): 76–94.

  • 41. Morongwa Mosotwane, “Foragers among Farmers in the Early Iron Age of Botswana? Dietary Evidence from Stable Isotopes” (PhD diss., Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010); Denbow, “Excavations at Divuyu.”

  • 42. Turner, Early Iron Age.

  • 43. Robbins, White Paintings.

  • 44. Duncan Miller, The Tsodilo Jewellery: Metal Work from Northern Botswana (Rondebosch: University of Cape Town Press, 1976); and Lawrence Robbins et al., “Intensive Mining of Specular Hematite in the Kalahari ca. AD 800–1000,” Current Anthropology 39 (1998): 144–150.

  • 45. Denbow, “Excavations at Divuyu.”

  • 46. Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow, “Early Villages at Tsodilo: The Introduction of Livestock, Crops, and Metalworking,” in Tsodilo, Mountain of the Gods, eds. L. Robbins, A. Campbell, and M. Taylor (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press), 72–81.

  • 47. Morongwa Mosothwane, “Dietary Stable Carbon Isotope Signatures of the Early Iron Age Inhabitants of Ngamiland,” Botswana Notes and Records 43 (2011): 115–129.

  • 48. Wilmsen and Denbow, “Early Villages at Tsodilo”; Denbow, “Excavations at Divuyu”; Robbins et al., Late Quaternary; and Robbins et al., Recent Archaeological.

  • 49. James Denbow field notes from 1984–1985 in possession of the author; the seeds were examined by Dr. J. M. J. de Wet, Department of Agronomy, University of Illinois, Urbana, with the species identified in an unpublished letter to Denbow in 1986.

  • 50. Turner, Hunters and Herders.

  • 51. Wilmsen and Denbow, “Early Villages”;Edwin Wilmsen et al., “The Social Geography of Pottery in Botswana as Reconstructed by Optical Petrography,” Journal of African Archaeology 7.1 (2009): 3–39; Joseph Vogel, “Kamangoza: An Introduction to the Iron Age Cultures of the Victoria Falls Region,” Zambia Museum Papers 2 (1971); Joseph Vogel, “The Early Iron Age Site at Sioma Mission, Western Zambia,” Zambia Museums Journal 4 (1972): 153–169; Joseph Vogel and J. M. Chuubi, A Guide to the Livingstone Museum (Livingstone: National Museums Board Livingstone Museum, 1975); and Brian Fagan, “The Iron Age Sequence in the Southern Province of Zambia,” in Papers in African Prehistory, eds. J. D. Fage and R. A. Oliver (Cambridge: University Printing House, 1974), 208.

  • 52. Thebe, Paradigms.

  • 53. Van Zyl, Archaeofauna.

  • 54. Mosothwane, Dietary Stable Carbon, 123.

  • 55. Denbow, 1982 fieldnotes.

  • 56. Thomas Tlou, History of Ngamiland: 1750–1906 (Johannesburg: Macmillan, 1985); Denbow and Thebe, Culture and Customs; Denbow, Archaeology and Ethnography; John Kinahan, “The Acquisition of Ceramics by Hunter-Gatherers on the Middle Zambezi in the First and Second Millennium AD,” Journal of African Archaeology 11.2 (2013): 197–209.

  • 57. Koen Bostoen and B. Sands, “Clicks in South-Western Bantu Languages: Contact-Induced vs. Language-Internal Lexical Change,” in Proceedings of the 6th World Congress of African Linguistics, eds. M. Brenzinger and A. Fehn (Cologne: Köppe Verlag, 2012).

  • 58. Andrew Reid and Alinah Segobye, “Politics, Society and Trade on the Eastern Margins of the Kalahari,” in African Naissance: The Limpopo Valley 1000 Years Ago, eds. M. Leslie and T. Maggs (Cape Town: South African Archaeological Society, 2012), 64.

  • 59. Denbow, Glass Beads.

  • 60. Marilee Wood et al., “Glass Finds from Chibuene, a 6th to 17th Century Port in Southern Mozambique,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 67 (2012): 59–74; Denbow, Glass Beads; Dagget et al., “Glass Trade Beads at Thabadimasego, Botswana: Analytical Results and Some Implications,” (Johannesburg: Congress of the Pan-African Archaeological Society, forthcoming).

  • 61. Denbow, Excavations at Bosutswe.

  • 62. Karin Scott, Faunal Report on Kaitcha [sic]. Unpublished report in the author’s possession, 2013.

  • 63. Denbow, Glass Beads.

  • 64. Andrew Reid and Alinah Segobye, “An Ivory Cache from Botswana,” Antiquity 74 (2000): 326–331.

  • 65. James Denbow, “Material Culture and the Dialectics of Identity in the Kalahari,” in Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa, ed. S. McIntosh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 110–123.

  • 66. James Denbow, “Preliminary Report on an Archaeological Reconnaissance of the BP Soda Ash Lease, Makgadikgadi Pans, Botswana,” report on file at the National Museum of Botswana, 1985; Denbow, Glass Beads; Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow, “The Middens at Tora Nju and Their Adjacent Stone Enclosure,” Journal of African Archaeology, forthcoming.

  • 67. Taggart, Report on the Conditions; Hitchcock, Kalahari Cattleposts.

  • 68. Ann Stahl, “Political Economic Mosaics: Archaeology of the Last Two Millennia in Tropical Sub-Saharan Africa,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 145–172; Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, “Animal Disease Challenges Fifteen Years Later: The Hypothesis in Light of New Data,” Quaternary International (2015); and Barberena et al. “Archaeological Discontinuities in the Southern Hemisphere: A Working Agenda,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (2016).

  • 69. Denbow, Material Culture; James Denbow, “Stolen Places: Archaeology and the Politics of Identity in the Later Prehistory of the Kalahari,” in Africanizing Knowledge: African Studies across the Disciplines, eds. T. Falola and C. Jennings (Somerset, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 345–374.

  • 70. Lawrence Barham and Peter Mitchell, The First Africans: African Archaeology from the Earliest Toolmakers to the Most Recent Foragers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  • 71. Peter Mitchell, The Archaeology of Southern Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800, 2d ed. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016).

  • 72. Roger Blench, Archaeology, Language, and the African Past (Lanham, MD: Altamira, 2006). See also Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa.

  • 73. Sarah A. Tishkoff et al., “The Genetic Structure and History of Africas and African Americans,” Science 324.5930 (2009): 1035–1044.

  • 74. The McGregor Museum in Kimberly.

  • 75. The Mapungubwe Museum in Pretoria.

Interactions among Precolonial Foragers, Herders, and Farmers in Southern Africa (2024)
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