Seminar: The Origins and Spread of Dry Laid, Stone-Walled Architecture in Pre-Colonial South Africa

Pre-colonial stone-walled structures (SWS) are some of the most visible and accessible archaeological remains in Southern Africa. Great Zimbabwe is the best known but there are many tens or even a few hundreds of thousand other SWS scattered throughout the subcontinent. What is their origin? Did this architectural style and concept arise from a single source or several independent ones? There are different views on the matter. I suggest that one of the roots of SWS in Southern Africa lies in the Later Stone Age (LSA) cultures from the western half of the subcontinent where a much older tradition of building in stone is documented. Because of a false disciplinary divide between Stone Age and Iron Age studies, they had not been integrated previously into the discussions of Iron Age archaeology.

This presentation concludes with a brief report on an on-going project to discover the sequence in the development of SWS in the high plains of the southern half of Gauteng Province, from Johannesburg to the Vaal River. This project follows in the footsteps of pioneering efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to plot distribution maps of pre-colonial SWS using aerial photographs to study the peopling of this landscape. Different architectural styles of stone-walled structures were attributed to different cultures that shared a mixed agricultural and pastoralist economic base and a cattle-centered world-view. New technologies such as Google Earth satellite imagery as well as Geographic Information System software justify revisiting these structures as they facilitate more complex analyses of larger databases. The spatial analysis of remotely sensed settlement data from a small part of this study area, namely the Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve, shows significant changes in settlement patterns from dispersed homesteads to nucleated towns in the two or three centuries before colonial times. These changes echo similar patterns reported in the neighbouring North West Province, where they have been interpreted as a sequence of evolution in social, political and economic complexity. In the Suikerbosrand Reserve, climate change, conflict and other factors may have helped bring about the observed changes in settlement patterns.

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