1 Hereafter, the Southeast, referring to the area of what is now South Africa south of the Drakensberg Escarpment between the Black Mfolozi River at the northeast and the Mzimkulu River at the southwest. The area overlaps with much of KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape but avoids the overrepresentation of the Zulu kingdom and Zulu ethnic identity in history predating the nineteenth century and obscures the twentieth-century political boundaries between provinces.

2 Lodder, J., Hill, T. R., and Finch, J. M., ‘A 5000-yr record of Afromontane vegetation dynamics from the Drakensberg Escarpment, South Africa’, Quaternary International, 470 (2018), 126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Arnold, E., Greenfield, H. J., and Creaser, R., ‘Domestic cattle mobility in early farming villages in southern Africa: harvest profiles and strontium (87Sr/86Sr) isotope analyses from Early Iron Age sites in the lower Thukela River Valley of South Africa’, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 5 (2013), 129–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greenfield, H. J. and van Schalkwyk, L. O., ‘Early Iron Age regional settlement and demographic patterns along the eastern seaboard of South Africa: a view from the lower Thukela River valley’, in Badenhorst, S., Mitchell, P., and Driver, J. C. (eds.), Animals and People: Archaeozoological Papers in Honour of Ina Plug (Oxford, 2008), 131–51Google Scholar.

4 Hall, M., Settlement Patterns in the Iron Age of Zululand (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar.

5 For a detailed examination of social changes in early Nguni history, see R. F. Jimenez, ‘Rites of reproduction: gender, generation and political economic transformation among Nguni-speakers of Southern Africa, 8th–19th century CE’, (unpublished PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 2017).

6 For examples of similar histories elsewhere in Africa's distant past, see especially Schoenbrun, D. L., A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (Portsmouth, NH, 1998)Google Scholar; Vansina, J., How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 (Charlottesville, VA, 2004)Google Scholar; Stephens, R., A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900 (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 The phrase ‘god with a wet nose’ refers to a Tswana proverb praising cattle for their significance in reproducing households and motivating warfare. I use it here to signal the extent to which Southern African historiography prioritizes cattle in narratives about culture and political economy. See Schapera, I., Married Life in an African Tribe (Evanston, IL, 1966)Google Scholar; and Comaroff, J. L. and Comaroff, J., ‘Goodly beasts, beastly goods: cattle and commodities in a South African context’, American Ethnologist, 17:2 (1990), 195–216Google Scholar.

8 Hunter, M., Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (London, 1936), 69Google Scholar, quoted in Schapera, I. and Goodwin, A. J. H., ‘Work and wealth’, in Schapera, I. (ed.), Bantu Speaking Tribes of South Africa (London, 1946), 137–8Google Scholar.

9 Schapera, Married Life, 38–9; M. D. W. Jeffreys, Lobolo Is Child-Price (n.p., 1951).

10 Whyte, E. P., ‘Kinship and marriage’, in Hammond-Tooke, W. D. (ed.), Bantu Speaking Peoples of South Africa (London, 1974), 177–210, 187–8Google Scholar.

11 A full list of reconstructed word roots can be found in Appendix 1. See root 1.

12 Krige, E. J., The Social System of the Zulus (London, 1936)Google Scholar; and interview with Dyer Macebo in Stuart, J., Webb, C. de B., and Wright, J. B. (eds.), The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples, Volume II (Pietermaritzburg, 1976), 42–4Google Scholar.

13 Huffman, T. N., Handbook to the Iron Age: The Archaeology of Pre-Colonial Farming Societies in Southern Africa (Scottsville, South Africa, 2007)Google Scholar; Huffman, , ‘The central cattle pattern and interpreting the past’, Southern African Humanities, 13:1 (2001), 19–35Google Scholar. An early version of the model first appeared in Huffman, , ‘Archaeology and ethnohistory of the African Iron Age’, Annual Review of Archaeology, 11 (1982), 133–50Google Scholar. Most recently, Huffman has defended his model in ‘Debating the central cattle pattern: a reply to Badenhorst’, The South African Archaeological Bulletin, 65:192 (2010), 164–74Google Scholar.

14 Huffman, Handbook, 457.

15 For the application of the CCP to the Early Iron Age, see Huffman, T. N., ‘Presidential address: the antiquity of lobola’, The South African Archaeological Bulletin, 53:168 (1998), 57–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Critiques of the model can be found in Stahl, A., ‘Concepts of time and approaches to analogical reasoning in historical perspective’, American Antiquity, 58:2 (1993), 235–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall, M., ‘The myth of the Zulu homestead: archeology and ethnography’, Africa, 54:1 (1984), 65–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall, , ‘Pots and politics: ceramic interpretations in southern Africa’, World Archaeology, 15:3 (1984), 262–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lane, P., ‘The use and abuse of ethnography in the study of the Southern African Iron Age’, Azania, 29–30 (1994), 51–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hamilton, C. and Leibhammer, N. (eds.), Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods, Volume I (Pietermaritzburg, 2016)Google Scholar; Hamilton, , ‘Archives, ancestors, and the contingencies of time’, in Lüdtke, A. and Nanz, T. (eds.), Laute, Bilder, Texte: Register des Archivs (Göttingen, 2015), 41–59Google Scholar; Badenhorst, S., ‘The central cattle pattern during the Iron Age of southern Africa: a critique of its spatial features’, The South African Archaeological Bulletin, 64:190 (2009), 148–55Google Scholar; Badenhorst, , ‘Phytoliths and livestock dung at Early Iron Age sites in southern Africa’, The South African Archaeological Bulletin, 64 (2009), 45–50Google Scholar; and Mitchell, P., The Archaeology of Southern Africa (Cambridge, 2002), 348Google Scholar.

16 The Southern Bantu speech community very likely entered Southern Africa in part through population movement, and, as this article will show, Nguni-speakers spread through the Southeast primarily through movement. That Southern Bantu descends from East Bantu is not in question. Rather, the critique of migration models is intended to oppose the wholesale transplantation of worldviews in favor of endemic processes of long-term change. Discussion of migration and the relationship between Southern Bantu and East Bantu can be found in Vansina, J., ‘New linguistic evidence and the “Bantu Expansion”’, The Journal of African History, 36 (1995), 173–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ehret, C., An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, ca. 1000 BC to AD 400 (Charlottesville, VA, 1998)Google Scholar; Robertson, J. and Bradley, R., ‘A new paradigm: the African Early Iron Age without Bantu migrations’, History in Africa, 27 (2000), 287–323CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ehret, , ‘Bantu expansions: re-envisioning a central problem of early African history’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 34 (2001), 5–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Valuable recent work seeking to reframe mobility as a framework for archaeological study includes Antonites, A. and Ashley, C., ‘The mobilities turn and archaeology: new perspectives on socio-political complexity in the thirteenth century northern South Africa’, Azania 51:4 (2016), 469–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Vansina, ‘Slow Revolution’, 16.

18 See especially Klehm, C., ‘Local dynamics and the emergence of social inequality in Iron Age Botswana’, Current Anthropology, 58 (2017), 604–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and S. Chirikure, ‘New perspectives on the political economy of Great Zimbabwe’, Journal of Archaeological Research, (2019). Advance online publication, doi:10.1007/s10814-019-09133-w.

19 For example, see Schoenbrun, Green Place; Schoenbrun, D. L., ‘Cattle herds and banana gardens: the historical geography of the western Great Lakes region, ca AD 800–1500’, African Archaeological Review, 11:1 (1993), 39–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Stephens, African Motherhood; Saidi, C., Women's Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa (Rochester, NY, 2010)Google Scholar; Vansina, Societies.

20 de Luna, K. M., Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa (New Haven, 2016), 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 The location of Proto-Nguni and Proto-Drakensberg were determined using the principle of least moves combined with archaeological evidence to support the presence of ceramic specialists producing pottery related and antecedent to pottery subsequently produced in areas populated by descendant Nguni subgroups.

22 See roots 2–4 in Appendix.

23 This includes the term *-kunzi, which refers to any altered male, such as wethers and capons.

24 Appendix, root 5.

25 Appendix, root 6.

26 Ehret, C., ‘The early livestock-raisers of Southern Africa’, Southern African Humanities, 20:1 (2008), 7–35Google Scholar; but see also Borland, C. H., ‘The linguistic reconstruction of prehistoric pastoralist vocabulary’, Goodwin Series, 5 (1986), 31–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, Archaeology, 232.

27 Gifford-Gonzales, D., ‘Animal disease challenges to the emergence of pastoralism in sub-Saharan Africa’, The African Archaeological Review, 17:3 (2000), 95–139CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, see also Chritz, K. L. et al. , ‘Environments and trypanosomiasis risks for early herders in the later Holocene of the Lake Victoria basin, Kenya’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112:12 (2015), 3674–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robinson, J. R. and Rowan, J., ‘Holocene paleoenvironmental change in southeastern Africa (Makwe Rockshelter, Zambia): implications for the spread of pastoralism’, Quaternary Science Reviews, 156 (2017) 57–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mitchell, P., ‘The constraining role of disease on the spread of domestic mammals in sub-Saharan Africa: a review’, Quaternary International, 471 (2018), 95–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Robbins, L. H., Campbell, A. C., Murphy, M. L., and Brook, G. A., ‘The advent of herding in Southern Africa: early AMS dates on domestic livestock from the Kalahari Desert’, Current Anthropology, 46:4 (2005), 671–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 The uncertainty speaks to the so-called Kalahari debate as to whether limited faunal evidence recovered from the Kalahari indicates Khoi and San desert populations moved livestock into Southern Africa. See Mitchell, P., ‘Discontinuities in hunter-gatherer prehistory in southern African drylands’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 46 (2017), 40–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lander, F. and Russell, T., ‘The archaeological evidence for the appearance of pastoralism and farming in southern Africa’, PloS one, 13:6 (2018), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0198941CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Orton, J., ‘The introduction of pastoralism to southernmost Africa: thoughts on new contributions to an ongoing debate’, Azania, 50:2 (2015), 250–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sadr, K., ‘Livestock first reached southern Africa in two separate events’, PLoS one, 10:8 (2015), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0134215CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Recently, re-examinations of faunal remains from important early sites in Southern Africa have challenged dating and models of movement for livestock, suggesting more research is needed to determine the early processes of expanding cattle, goats, and sheep into the region. See Horsburgh, K. A., Orton, J., and Klein, R., ‘Beware the springbok in sheep's clothing: how secure are the faunal identifications upon which we build our models’, The African Archaeological Review, 33:4 (2016), 353–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Ehret and Kinsman's classification of Shona suggests this process was well underway as much as 1500 years ago. See Ehret, C. and Kinsman, M., ‘Shona dialect classification and its implications for Iron Age history in Southern Africa’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 14:3 (1981), 401–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Appendix, roots 7–9.

32 Ibid. Root 10.

33 Ibid. Roots 11–12.

34 Ibid. Roots 13–14.

35 Ibid. Root 15.

36 Ibid. Root 16.

37 The terms Proto-Uplands and Proto-Woodlands replace names for the same speech communities used by the author in her dissertation. Proto-Uplands refers to the speech community previously labeled ‘Proto-Southern Nguni’ and Proto-Woodlands refers to the speech community ‘Proto-Northern Nguni’. New names for these speech communities better reflect the approximate locations of communities based on additional evidence generated after publication of the original thesis. See Jimenez, ‘Rites’, especially ch. 2.

38 Hall, Settlement Patterns; Maggs, T., Iron Age Communities of the Southern Highveld, Occasional Publications of the Natal Museum 2, (Pietermaritzburg, 1976)Google Scholar; Maggs, , ‘The Iron Age sequence south of the Vaal and Pongola rivers: some historical implications’, The Journal of African History, 21:1 (1980), 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Appendix, root 17.

39 Hall, Settlement Patterns, 156.

40 Though environmental research indicates the amount of labor necessary to build and maintain terraces depends on soil composition and other environmental factors, and construction differs considerably depending on the intended purpose of the terrace (water retention or drainage). See Ferro-Vázquez, C., Lang, C., Kaal, J., and Stump, D., ‘When is a terrace not a terrace?: the importance of understanding landscape evolution in studies of terraced agriculture’, Journal of Environmental Management, 202:3 (2017), 500–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Hall, Settlement Patterns, 156; Arnold, Greenfield, and Creaser, ‘Mobility’.

42 Whether the presence of tsetse in lower elevations prevented the buildup of cattle prior to forest clearance technology has been a point of contention for archaeologists, but it appears early second millennium communities were less concerned with molding their environment to accommodate cattle. As Thomas Huffman and Martin Hall have argued, though from different perspectives, the number of cattle present in communities did not necessarily correlate to the importance of animals. See Huffman, ‘Reply to Badenhorst’, 165; and Hall, M., ‘The role of cattle in Southern African agropastoral societies: more than bones alone can tell’, Goodwin Series, 5 (1986), 83–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Appendix, roots 18–20.

44 Dutton, T. P., ‘Iron smelting furnace dated 630 ± 40 years A.D. in the Ndumu Game Reserve’, Lammergeyer, 3:12 (1970), 37–40Google Scholar; Maggs, T., ‘Iron Age settlements and subsistence patterns in the Tugela River Basin, Natal’, in Avery, G., Avery, D. M., Wilson, M. L., and Humphreys, A. J. B. (eds.), Frontiers: Southern African Archaeology Today (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar; Whitelaw, G., ‘Precolonial iron production around Durban and in southern Natal’, Southern African Humanities, 3:10 (1991), 29–39Google Scholar. It should be noted that communities in the woodlands and uplands, or members thereof, traded iron products. The extent to which Nguni-speakers comprising the Proto-Uplands and Proto-Woodlands chains participated in iron production and trade has not been independently ascertained from linguistic evidence.

45 Huffman, Handbook, 444. The radiocarbon dates associated with Blackburn may require calibration of linguistic divergence dates. However, overlap with pottery does not mean language family and pottery tradition were coterminous. Proto-Drakensberg-speakers may have participated in production of Blackburn, or otherwise used Blackburn pottery without generating the facies as part of their identity.

46 Huffman, T. N., ‘The archaeology of the Nguni past’, Southern African Humanities, 16 (2004), 79–111Google Scholar.

47 For similar archaeological arguments elsewhere in Africa, see, for example, Gosselain, O., ‘Materializing identities: an African perspective’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 7:3 (2000), 187–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Appendix, root 21.

49 Appendix, root 22. The innovation of a new word root to replace an older word root with the same meaning may indicate a shift in thinking about the nature, consequences, or remediation of animal infertility, such that new vocabulary better described the material conditions. These details cannot be inferred from the root itself.

50 However, Shona-speakers do not practice male initiation. If Southern Bantu-speakers made changes to the materials, behaviors or beliefs associated with male circumcision inherited from earlier Bantu-speakers, the change either came about after the divergence of Proto-Shona from Southern Bantu, or Shona-speakers eventually eliminated the practice of male initiation. This is a subject for future inquiry requiring comprehensive survey of Southern Bantu.

51 Appendix, root 23.

52 Once innovated, it is uncharacteristic of meaning evoked in speech to include the original metaphor. What this root and others like it provide is an eventful chronology of conceptual history. The metaphor captures a single (if prolonged) moment in the changing conceptualization of social relations in which Proto-Nguni-speakers accepted the metaphor to be relevant.

53 For example, marriages conducted using bridewealth exchanges may have been an ideal sufficiently widely held as to materialize in the lexicon, but the use of stones among the impoverished, and the existence of terms for elopement, suggest bridewealth was aspirational and not uniformly practiced or valued.

54 Root 24. Despite similarities in form, the term bears no relation to the ethnonym Khwe, referring to Southern African speech communities characterized by their use of click sounds. For further discussion of the word history of the root *-kó and its derivative *-khwe, see Vansina, J., Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990)Google Scholar; and Stephens, African Motherhood, especially ch. 3.

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59 Arnold, Greenfield, and Creaser, ‘Domestic cattle mobility’, 131.

60 Hall further argues the appearance of seral (intermediate regrowth) trees in nearby low-lying valleys suggests patterns of deforestation in lowlands. Partitioning of natural resources therefore followed a meticulous strategy and were not haphazard or accidental. See Hall, Settlement Patterns, 156.

61 Ibid. 162.

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69 Mitchell, Archaeology of Southern Africa, 350–6.

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71 For interpretations of feasting and the political use of cattle at Mapungubwe and other Iron Age sites, see Magoma, M., Badenhorst, S., and Pikirayi, I., ‘Feasting among Venda-speakers of South Africa: the Late Iron Age fauna from Mutokolwe’, Anthropozoologica, 53:1 (2018), 195–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Reid, A., ‘Cattle herds and the redistribution of cattle resources’, World Archaeology, 28:1 (1996), 43–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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73 Klehm, ‘Local dynamics’, 605–6.

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76 Excavations by Carolyn Thorp at the Great Enclosure of Great Zimbabwe yielded faunal remains in which cattle comprised 98 per cent of stock, with goats comprising the other 2 per cent and wild game virtually non-existent. Thorp argues the high rate of juvenile cattle remains at the Hill Midden represents a system in which cattle of thirty months of age or less were transferred to the social group living in the Great Enclosure, likely as a form of tribute. See Thorp, C., Kings, Commoners and Cattle at Zimbabwe Tradition Sites, Museum Memoir Series 1 (Harare, 1995)Google Scholar.

77 Chirikure, ‘Perspectives’. Chirikure further emphasizes the local, conditional nature of value assigned to other forms of material wealth, drawing attention to the ways in which political economy may intersect with global and regional forces but, in practice, translate to prestige and power at a much smaller scale.

78 Mitchell, P., ‘Prehistoric exchange and interaction in southeastern southern Africa: marine shells and ostrich eggshell’, The African Archaeological Review, 13:1 (1996), 35–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, Mitchell points out a growing differentiation between societies situated across the mountain range, something he correlates with the arrival of Southern Bantu-speakers.

79 Paul Landau argues Southern Africa should be regarded within its ‘broadest possible context’, allowing for recognition of the ways in which people, ideas, and materials flowed through the region as an ‘interactive space’ rather than discrete cultural or linguistic areas. See Landau, P., Popular Politics in the History of South Africa: 1400–1948 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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81 Ehret, ‘Livestock raisers’, 9–10; Bastin and Schadeberg, ‘BLR3’, RN 6531.

82 Bastin and Schadeberg, ‘BLR3’, RN170, DER 172.

83 Ibid. RN 434.

84 Ibid. RN 1227, DER 5195.

85 Ibid. RN 2841.

86 Ibid. RN 2793; Ehret, African Classical Age, 314; Jimenez, ‘Rites’, 367.

87 Bastin and Schadeberg, ‘BLR3’, RN 7240; Stephens, African Motherhood, RN 27; Schoenbrun, D. L., The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu Cultural Vocabulary: Etymologies and Distributions (Köln, 1997), RN 133Google Scholar.

88 Bastin and Schadeberg, ‘BLR3’, RN 5871; Jimenez, ‘Rites’, 387.