The Archaeology of Southern Africa

This revised and updated edition provides a comprehensive synthesis of Southern Africa's archaeology over more than 3 million years.

Peter Mitchell (Author)

9781009324755, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 June 2024

584 pages
25.2 x 17.7 x 2.8 cm, 1.2 kg

Some of humanity's earliest ancestors lived in southern Africa and evidence from sites there has inspired key debates on human origins and the emergence of complex cognition. Building on its rich rock art heritage, archaeologists have developed theoretical work that continues to influence rock art studies worldwide, with the relationship between archaeological and anthropological data central to understanding past hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and farmer communities alike. New work on pre-colonial states contests models that previously explained their emergence via external trade, while the transformations wrought by European colonialism are being rewritten to emphasise Indigenous agency, feeding into efforts to decolonise the discipline itself. Inhabited by humans longer than almost anywhere else and with an unusually varied, complex past, southern Africa thus has much to contribute to archaeology worldwide. In this revised and updated edition, Peter Mitchell provides a comprehensive and extensively illustrated synthesis of its archaeology over more than three million years.

List of illustrations
List of tables
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Frameworks
3. Contexts
4. Origins
5. A cognitive revolution
6. Hunter-gatherers of the late Pleistocene
7. Archaeologies of the Pleistocene/Holocene transition
8. Hunting, gathering, intensifying: forager histories in the Holocene before 2000 BP
9. Taking stock: herders and hunter-gatherers
10. Farmers and foragers: the first millennium
11. Forming states: the Zimbabwe culture and its neighbours
12. Recent farmers and hunter-gatherers in southernmost Africa
13. Colonisation, conquest, resistance
14. Perspectives and prospects
Glossary
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Archaeology by period / region [HDD]