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Elsewhere and before: For critique of ethnological comparativism in the study of prehistorical societies
Abstract
For more than a century, the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa, in particular the huntergatherers called Bushmen, have served as a reference mark in studies on prehistorical mankind in Europe. Beyond the legitimate preventive measures to be taken when doing this, certain aspects of the societies and of human evolution in Southern Africa over the past 2000 years can be useful for comparisons under condition that close attention is paid to the diversity and complexity of social, technical or identity-making processes, which might still be at work.
The parietal painted sign keeps on the memory of gesture that produces it. It is one of the distinctive features of this particular artefact. However, it is not possible to reconstruct this gesture if we do not give the context of the sign, if we do not present the numerous physical and cultural parameters which are in charge of their production. About schematic paintings of Neolithic age, we must take the union of criterions into account such as the parietal and site topography, the cultural constraints that appoint the location of figures and the ritual practices originally the graphical expression. The painter perceives, adapts and behaves according to this spatial and social environment. We refer here to several strategies: the attention for the parietal microtopography in accordance with the signs to draw, the respect of some criterions that specify the choice of the site like the hygrophily of places and the rubefaction of rock walls, the need to paint at the limits of the accessibility of site and wall, the use of drawing-tools for increase the capacities of the body. The efficiency of the gesture consists in realizing a sign bearing a meaning because in harmony with the features of its support.
The parietal painted sign keeps on the memory of gesture that produces it. It is one of the distinctive features of this particular artefact. However, it is not possible to reconstruct this gesture if we do not give the context of the sign, if we do not present the numerous physical and cultural parameters which are in charge of their production. About schematic paintings of Neolithic age, we must take the union of criterions into account such as the parietal and site topography, the cultural constraints that appoint the location of figures and the ritual practices originally of the graphical expression, etc. The painter perceives, adapts and behaves according to this spatial and social environment. We refer here to several strategies: the attention for the parietal microtopography in accordance with the signs to draw, the respect of some criterions that specify the choice of the site like the hygrophilie of places and the rubefaction of rock walls, the need to paint at the limits of the accessibility of site and wall, the use of drawing tools for increase the capacities of the body. The efficiency of the gesture consists in realizing a sign bearing a meaning because in harmony with the features of its support.
A small collection of stone, bone, and shell artefacts was recovered from excavations at Oudepost I, a Dutch outpost in the western Cape, occupied in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Most of the artefacts are similar to those found in Later Stone Age sites in the general region, dating within the last 2000 years, but some reflect the use of local raw materials to fashion colonial tools. The association of colonial and indigenous artefacts confirms historical documentation of interactions at the post, and the material signature of Khoikhoi people here raises questions about the cultural attribution of prehistoric artefact assemblages elsewhere.
Recent interdisciplinary research near Lake Ngami has revealed Later Stone Age occupation dated to between c. 3830 ± 100 BP and 2400 ± 80 BP. Detailed study of the sediments, dated by radiocarbon and thermoluminescence (TL) methods, as well as the identification of 19 species of diatoms provides new evidence about the water conditions and the past nature of Lake Ngami during the Holocene. These findings suggest that the main Later Stone Age occupation occurred during a period when an arm of Lake Ngami extended into the valley north of the site. The Holocene palaeoenvironmental record for Lake Ngami compares favourably with other regional data, especially cave speleothem and tufa evidence obtained from the summer rainfall zone of southern Africa.
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Burial complexes from mid- to late Holocene Later Stone Age occupations at Klasies River Mouth Cave 5 and Welgeluk Shelter are described and analysed. The data indicate that the expected relationship between increasing age, status and grave good 'wealth' does not always hold and some inversion of this expectation is visible in that the very young and juveniles received more ritual elaboration of burials than older people. In addition, the greater degree of ritual elaboration in the Klasies burials is interpreted as an explicit social display during a period of stress brought about through higher population densities and the consequent strain this placed upon inter-group relationships. The less elaborate Welgeluk burials reflect lower population densities within the more marginal eastern Cape environment. The social institution of hxaro provides the ethnographic basis for these interpretations.
The Europeans who landed on the shores of the South African Cape from the late 15th century onwards encountered local herders whom they later referred to as the Hottentots (now known as the Khoekhoe). There are written references to the settlements and livestock of these pastoralists, but archaeologists have not had much success in discovering any such sites. This absence of archaeological evidence for recent Khoekhoe kraals has been interpreted by some scholars as an indication for a general archaeological invisibility of nomadic pastoralist sites. This article reports on the archaeology of an extensive, low density surface spread of artefacts, KFS 5 (Western Cape), which possibly represents a Khoekhoe kraal dating to the time of the first contact with Europeans. Data are compared to other archaeological evidence of cattle pens in southern Africa and the issues of the visibility of prehistoric and historic kraals are re-addressed.
Excavations at several sites along the coast around Saldanha Bay and in the mountains overlooking the Swartland have revealed the remains of two quite distinct archaeological groups during the last two thousand years. In one group of sites, formally retouched stone tools, small ostrich eggshell beads along with a low density of ceramics are associated with a predominantly wild fauna, particularly small bovids. By contrast, in the second group, an informal stone industry, large ostrich eggshell beads and high ceramic densities correlate with domestic stock. The interpretation is that the two groups of sites respectively represent hunters and herders who existed side by side in the south-western Cape up to the colonial period.
Footprints and handprints clearly indicate that adolescents took part in the cave rituals of Upper Paleolithic Europe. We argue that the cave paintings were created by transegalitarian hunter–gatherers. To better understand the significance of adolescent involvement in cave rituals, we undertook a study of maturation events involving rituals among ethnographic transegalitarian hunter–gatherers. Our results show that the costs associated with all of these events increase as social complexity increases and as the rank of individuals within communities increases. Furthermore, on the basis of the comparative ethnographic evidence and archaeological parameters pertaining to the different types of ritual events, we argue that the presence of adolescents in Upper Paleolithic caves suggests the initiation of elite children to secret societies.
Sehonghong Rock Shelter has been recognised for some time as a key site for understanding late Pleistocene human adaptations in southern Africa as its deposits cover the period preceding, the peak of and the period after the Last Glacial Maximum. Previous interpretations have, however, been constrained by a lack of tight stratigraphic associations. This paper describes the artefact assemblages dating to between 20 000 and 11 000 BP recovered from new, stratigraphically conducted excavations at the site. It is argued that a considerable stress on bladelet production is already evident at 20 000 BP and that all the assemblages described thus form part of the same Robberg-like microlithic tradition. The use of the term 'MSA 9' to refer to the oldest of them (Carter et al. 1988) should therefore be abandoned. Bladelets may, however, have been hafted and/or used differently at 20 000 BP than in the terminal Pleistocene. A preliminary hypothesis is advanced as to how people may have used Sehonghong: the greater range of material culture evident after 12 500 BP suggests a possible shift at this time from a sporadically used hunting station to a home base status for the site.
As the exception on the continent, southern Africa has no Neolithic period. In the 1920s, when the term came to mean Stone Age with food production, Neolithic was dropped in South Africa for lack of evidence for farming or herding in Stone Age sites. But since the late 1960s many sheep bones have surfaced in just such sites. Now, the continued absence of a Neolithic may say more about the politics of South African archaeology than about its prehistory. This paper describes food production in the southern African late Stone Age and argues in favor of (re-)introducing the term Neolithic to the subcontinent.