Great Zimbabwe (a.d. 1250–1450) emerged as the capital of a state (Huffman 1981), an African kingdom similar those that flourished in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa in the last 2,000 years as world trade expanded. Portuguese competition for the Indian Ocean trade routes and internal conflicts fragmented the original Zimbabwe state into several lesser states, which survived into historical times. This fact allows for confidence in linking the Zimbabwe state to Shona language speakers. The histories of the Sotho and Nguni language speakers are less clear, but through tracing traditional decorative motifs in pottery, it can be shown that they were present in southern Africa from the early part of the last millennium (ca. 1000 a.d.). Linking prehistory to the very short period of recorded history remains a goal of researchers.

Perspective

From Victorian antiquarianism, prehistoric archaeological studies have developed in stages. The very visible surface trail of stone artifacts in the landscape encouraged an interest in the peopling of the subcontinent. Beginning in the 1930s, discoveries of the australopithecine remains preserved in solution caverns in dolomites provided a window of opportunity to explore the prehuman ancestry that raymond dart suggested for the Taung child. True human populations making Acheulean artifacts more than 1 million years old are widely represented although progress in the study of these populations has been slow because preservation of remains other than stone is rare and the occurrences are difficult to sample and date. The roots of modern humans now appear to be in the middle Pleistocene in Africa (Howell 1999), which makes the later Acheulean and the Fauresmith of developing interest. The finds of early modern human remains and associated evidence for the emergence of symbolic behavior in beginning late Pleistocene, middle–Stone Age sites like Klasies River have questioned the conventional wisdom that the first evidence of such behavior is in the Upper Paleolithic in Eurasia.

The occurrence of long-sequence cave and rock-shelter sites has made it possible for considerable advances in the study of the middle and later Stone Ages, and a wealth of historical and ethnographic data have aided in these studies. An accessible part of this Stone Age record is the rock art, which, with well in excess of 15,000 sites, is a considerable cultural resource for heritage management. Not only are there surviving San communities, but the descendants of Khoekhoe herders and Iron Age farmers make up the main population of the subcontinent. As archaeology in southern Africa enters the new millennium, it is poised to make a greater contribution to educating communities about their unwritten and largely forgotten past.

Acknowledgments

This entry is a contribution made within the University of Stellenbosch research project The Origins of Modern Humans, Homo Sapiens, in Africa. I thank Tim Murray for his encouragement to prepare the chapter.

H. J. Deacon

See also

Africa, South, Historical; Lithic Analysis; Rock Art

References

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