to have been present. An outlier of rock art with similar metaphors occurs in central Tanzania where click languages are also spoken.

Herders and Farmers

Within the last 2,000 years, herding economies have developed in the more arid, western part of the subcontinent and mixed agriculture, in the wetter, eastern half. Historically, herding communities were Khoekhoe speakers, and the largest extant community is the 100,000-strong Nama in Namaqualand and southern Namibia. The identification of sheep remains associated with bag-shaped pottery at Die Kelders in southern Namibia (Schweitzer 1974) showed that it was possible to investigate the history of Khoekhoe settlement through archaeology. A stock post was identified at Boomplaas where age profiles of the animals indicate that stock raising was intensive (H. J. Deacon 1995). A main kraal, or settlement, was identified at Kasteelberg (Smith 1992) in which the remains included not only sheep but cattle that ethnography suggests were ritually slaughtered. Khoekhoen and San interaction was recorded historically, but with the fluid nature of economic and social groupings, it has proved difficult to document them archaeologically.

The Zimbabwe-type settlements attracted early interest not the least because of their association with gold artifacts. However, the first serious archaeological investigation of the ruins of great zimbabwe was undertaken by gertrude caton-thompson (1931), and she was able to show that the settlement was medieval in age based on its porcelain imports. This find was followed by extensive excavations at the Iron Age sites (eleventh to twelfth centuries a.d.) of K2 and Mapungubwe (Fouché 1937) in the Limpopo Valley of the Northern Transvaal in South Africa. Although pioneers like Schofield (1948) continued to study the pottery finds from early farming settlements, such studies only achieved formal recognition after World War. This recognition came through the proposal of the term Iron Age (Summers 1951) as distinguished from the Stone Age. With this recognition came the appreciation that the unwritten history of many extant communities in southern Africa was accessible only through archaeology (Mason 1989). Early farming communities contained metalworkers and miners as well as stock farmers; cultivators of millet, sorghum, and other crops; and the manufacturers of regionally and temporally distinctive styles of pottery. Iron technology was a prerequisite for their expansion as it enabled them to bring new fields under cultivation.

The Iron Age of southern Africa is part of the wider phenomenon of the expansion of siNtu, or Bantu, language speakers (Vansina 1995) in equatorial, eastern, and southern Africa. Since D.W. Phillipson’s (1977) synthesis, the main debates have been when and by what pathways or “streams” different movements of peoples into southern Africa may have taken place, which underscores the popularity of migration models (Huffman 1989). With large parts of subequatorial Africa underresearched and given that range expansion rather than purposeful migration was involved, the models remain relatively general in their resolution of past events.

The best attested expansion was down the eastern coast, and radiocarbon dating has shown that the distinctive pottery at the site of Silver Leaves in Mapumalanga, dated to a.d. 350, is similar to that which appeared on the Tanzanian coast at Kwale a scant 150 years earlier. Other expansions traced through pottery styles and radiocarbon chronologies appear to have been along a route through Malawi into Zimbabwe and through a western corridor from Angola and Botswana into South Africa. The southernmost limit of the coalescence of these expansions was near modern East London in the Natal province of South Africa, a limit imposed by edaphic and climatic factors.

Radiocarbon dating and the seriation of pottery styles have shown there were a number of expansions and contractions in the agricultural settlement of the subcontinent that are explicable in terms of climatic forcing and socioeconomic conditions. Largely as a consequence of prosperity brought about through trade with the east coast, progressively more-complex hierarchical societies emerged in the Limpopo Valley (Hall 1987). The best-known sites remain K2 and Mapungubwe, but it is only recently that their significance as precursors to Great Zimbabwe have been appreciated.