from II. - Africa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2014
Introduction
The archaeology of the later prehistory of southern Africa (Map 1.13.1) is synonymous with the Iron Age (Soper 1971; Phillipson 1977). This chronostratigraphic label is used to denote communities that made iron, lived in permanent settlements and practiced crop agriculture (Hall 1987; Pwiti 1996; Mitchell 2001; Phillipson 2005; Huffman 2007). Not only was such a way of life new but it also contrasted remarkably with the preceding Later Stone Age period (see Chapter 1.9), in which men and women relied solely on hunting and gathering for their existence (Deacon & Deacon 1999; Mitchell 2001). How then did this new way of life come to eclipse the old one? The orthodox view contends that the ancestors of modern Bantu people drifted down the vast southern African terrain absorbing and or pushing to the margins the autochthonous hunter-gatherer populations (Hall & Morris 1983; Hall 1987; Phillipson 2005; Huffman 2007). These migrations, which took place in the early 1st millennium ce, opened a new chapter in the history of the subcontinent now known as the Iron Age (Soper 1971; Huffman 1989; Mitchell 2001). After the Early Iron Age flourished for almost a thousand years, material culture differences suggest that towards the end of the 1st millennium ce it was followed by the Late Iron Age, which continued until the dawn of colonialism (Garlake 1973; Huffman 2007). The later prehistory of southern Africa is therefore mostly concerned with studying the archaeology of the Early and Late Iron Age peoples and cultures.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.