Beyond the Shadow of a Desert: Illuminating Southern Africa’s Foraging Spectra

Summary

There is arguably nowhere more susceptible to the tyranny of the ethnographic record than southern Africa. From Man the Hunter’s quintessential foragers to the revisionists’ marginalized proletariat, Kalahari hunter-gatherers cast shadows far longer than those created by the desert sun. There is no denying that this extraordinary record – central to both economic and social approaches to southern African prehistory – has greatly enriched our picture of the past. Unsurprisingly, however, the subcontinent continues to confront archaeologists with behavioral signatures outside the range of variation documented in the Kalahari. Two decades after Kelly’s landmark publication, and fifteen years into the paradigm shift towards an African origin for behavioral modernity, the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of southern Africa’s foraging spectra. In this paper we provide this, and advocate for a cross-cultural approach that integrates evolutionary theory with ethnography and ethnoarchaeology drawn from within and beyond the Kalahari. If this is critical for studies of prehistoric foragers across the globe, it is particularly pressing in southern Africa with such a diversified ecology and deep antiquity of humanity.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Foraging Spectra: Hunter-Gatherer Diversity in Prehistory

Keywords

Spatial Coverage