From the early second millennium AD more hierarchically organised societies marked by the rise of southern Africa’s first states developed in the north of southern Africa, culminating in Great Zimbabwe and its successors. This chapter outlines the processes involved, including the roles played by hunter-gatherer communities (for example at K2 and Mapungubwe) and the histories of farming societies on their periphery (notably those of Zimbabwe’s Nyanga Highlands). Much of this research is new and the past two decades have also seen challenges emerge to the importance previously accorded Indian Ocean trade in accounting for the emergence of social complexity, to the historical relationships between major centres (K2, Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami), and to understandings of the internal organisation, chronology, size, and functioning of those sites. Discussing these debates – particularly those relating to the settlement organisation of Great Zimbabwe and other stone-walled sites and the social implications of this – involves considering how far political action should be understood in terms of Indigenous, rather than Western, concepts.

This chapter begins by highlighting southern African archaeology’s importance at a global level, stressing the enormous time-depth over which hominins have been present in the region, the diversity of its archaeological record, and the contributions that this has made and continues to make to broader debates within archaeology and anthropology. Next, it indicates key changes made here relative to the first edition of this book in 2002 and then identifies the main sources of evidence available for reconstructing southern Africa’s past. These include archaeology, palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental science, ethnographic data, historical linguistics, genetics, and oral and written histories. The chapter then introduces the overall structure of the book, ending with a discussion and justification of some key matters of nomenclature regarding how southern Africa’s varied inhabitants have been/should be called. Guidance is also given on matters of orthography relative to sounds not used in English.

Livestock first entered southern Africa a little over 2,000 years ago and by the mid−1600s Khoe-speaking herders were widely distributed across the western third of the region. Debates over how pastoralist societies developed and how and by what routes livestock were introduced have been transformed over the past two decades by significant major fieldwork projects, a growing number of detailed genetic and linguistic studies, and new interpretative frameworks partly inspired by deeper acquaintance with pastoralist practice in East Africa. Important advances have also been made in understanding Khoe rock art, the chronology of pottery, and the relevance of disease in constraining the southward spread of livestock. This chapter reviews these developments, while also grappling with the thorny question of how, if at all, forager and herder societies can be differentiated archaeologically and what form relations took between those who kept domestic livestock and those who did not. Questions of identity (ascribed and asserted) and the degree of coherence to be expected between genetic, linguistic, ethnographic, historical, and archaeological sources come to the fore.

Understanding the past requires understanding how it has been created. This is not simply about improving methodologies, but also the theoretical approaches employed and the broader socio-political framework within which they are applied. This chapter therefore delineates major developments in southern African archaeology from its nineteenth-century origins to the present, situating them with respect to the region’s wider history and the broader social and political context in which they emerged. It also considers how archaeological research was constrained by, but simultaneously challenged, structures of racial oppression during the twentieth century, differences in the experience of southern Africa’s states (including research disparities within and between them), some of the key paradigms within which archaeological research is currently conducted, and the problems encountered in making archaeology accessible to all sections of society. Another theme concerns the theoretical and methodological challenges that archaeologists face when invoking the ethnographies of southern Africa’s recent or contemporary inhabitants to help understand the past revealed by their research.

Through close analyses of a wide range of Minoan animalian things, we have explored the specificity of their involvements in the experiences of people, and how those engagements contributed to the unique character of sociocultural life in the Aegean, on various levels. Here we draw out key points from across the foregoing analyses. Special attention has come to the objects’ inter-corporeal relationships with living humans and the connections that would have been realized through the objects’ particular qualities—connections with other animals, things, and spaces. Such relations were afforded through different dynamics, including bodily juxtaposition, cultivation of formal assonance, the sharing of specific features (e.g., a forward gaze), and embodiment with the same substances, as well as through similarities in size, composition (e.g., in friezes), and contextualization. Moreover, by working beyond an implicit focus on the design of the objects, to instead emphasize people’s actual experiences with them, we have opened the space for appreciating how both intended and unintended associations involving these complex things were in play together. We should view these not as alternative lenses on the objects, but as forces working concurrently, and upon one another, in the creative realizations that the animalian objects were.

Introduction to the book

Antioch is the first place where Christians congregated. This chapter will explore the establishment of Antioch’s Christian community, as well as its leadership and connections with other churches.

Hellenistic Antioch remains poorly known. Yet the later city’s visual repertoire, whether through emblemata, entire tessellated surfaces, or sculpture in the round is a recursive celebration of a shared Hellenistic past.

This chapter engages with Antioch’s church, highlighting pastoral figures and their role in leading the local community.

This paper examines the Greek Geometric pottery recovered during the Tunisian excavations by the Heritage National Institute at Utica. Skyphoi decorated with various motifs and dating to the Subprotogeometric IIIb/Middle Geomtric II and Late Geometric I periods represent the most common shape analysed by Neutron Activation Analysis. In the first place, the contexts where these pottery finds were used and deposited are placed under scrutiny. Following a typological examination, the study treats the use of these wares in their local context in association with handmade ceramics and pottery imported from other regions such as the eastern Mediterranean and Sardinia. The emphasis is thus put on the diversity of drinking and eating habits that indicate the multicultural nature of the first Phoenician community of Utica.

Only for the transition between the Pleistocene and the Holocene (c. 13,000−8,000 years ago) do we have a rich and chronologically relatively well-controlled record with which to explore the impacts on hunter-gatherer populations of the profound ecological changes associated with the shift from glacial to interglacial climates and through which to consider their own creativity at such a time. Previous archaeological work developed competing hypotheses to explain the shifts from microlithic to non-microlithic and back to microlithic (of a different kind) technologies during this period. These are considered here, along with potential evidence for patterns of social relations similar to those found in Bushman groups of the ethnographic present. At the same time, fuller publication of work from Elands Bay Cave allows further discussion of the value of John Parkington’s pivotal concept of ‘place’ and of the merits and disadvantages of employing ‘industries’ as building blocks for thinking about the hunter-gatherer past. New fieldwork in Lesotho reinforces this, along with the importance of deepening the relation between theory and the process of archaeological excavation itself.

The importation of an ensemble of Greek Geometric pottery found in the city of Huelva (south-west Spain) has been attributed to Phoenician trade. Conversely, thousands of Archaic ceramics of both Aegean and local origin must be linked to the establishment of Greeks and the allusions of ancient sources to the emporion of Tartessos. This article explores the domestic, ritual and other social contexts of that pottery’s use at that multicultural site.

This chapter considers the nature of state aid and intervention after earthquakes at Antioch between the Hellenistic period and Late Antiquity.