The Archaeology of Southern Africa

This book provides an archaeological synthesis of Southern Africa.

Peter Mitchell (Author)

9780521633895, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 14 November 2002

532 pages, 204 b/w illus. 29 maps 19 tables
24.4 x 17 x 2.7 cm, 1.04 kg

'… well written, very generously referenced and sensibly balanced … Mitchell … should be congratulated in making a very great deal of food for thought available in an interesting and digestible form.' Antiquity

Some of the earliest human populations lived in Southern Africa, and evidence from sites there has inspired key debates on human origins and on the emergence of modern humans. The sub-continent has one of the world's richest heritages of rock art, and specialists have developed innovative theories about its meaning and significance that have influenced the understanding of rock art everywhere. Passionate arguments about the hunter-gatherer way of life have centred on Southern African cases, and the relationship between archaeological and anthropological data is also central to understanding the past of Southern Africa's pastoralist and farmer communities. The pre-colonial states of the region provide some of the best documented cases of the influence of external trade on the development of African polities. This book is a comprehensive modern synthesis of the sub-continent's archaeology. It offers a thorough-going overview of three million years of Southern African history.

1. Introduction
2. Frameworks
3. Origins
4. Modern humans, modern behaviour?
5. Living through the late Pleistocene
6. From the Pleistocene into the Holocene: social and ecological models of cultural change
7. Hunting, gathering and intensifying: Holocene foragers in Southern Africa
8. History from the rocks, ethnography from the desert
9. Taking stock: the introduction and impact of pastoralism
10. Early farming communities
11. The Zimbabwe tradition
12. Later farming communities of southernmost Africa
13. The archaeology of colonialism
14. Southern African archaeology today.

Subject Areas: Archaeology by period / region [HDD], Regional studies [GTB]