More than Mere Dots on a Map: Archaeological Sites among Venda-speaking Communities of the Soutpansberg

Summary

TThe presentation deals with fieldwork conducted between 1983 and 1985 to reconstruct the early history and political-economy of Venda-speaking communities in the Soutpansberg region of South Africa. In order to visit, locate, identify, map, excavate, and interpret ancestral stone-walled sites, the permission, guidance, background information, physical labor, and orally transmitted information of local Venda-speaking people were essential. In most instances permission and guidance to sites were obtained fairly easily, whereas in a few cases it was a protracted process of negotiation and false leads. Information gathered during the difficult times turned out to be valuable, as the indigenous significance of the sites under question became apparent. The results of the ethnographically-informed archaeological work appear to have had mixed responses among various Venda, revealing information about divisions within society that would not have been obvious otherwise. Whereas members of the politically dominant Singo clan benefitted from the exposure that the archaeological research generated concerning Venda-speaking people in general, numerous non-Singo clans appreciated the additional recognition that research into their ancestral settlements awakened among both Venda speakers and the wider southern African society.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeologies by Community Mandate: Practicing Collaborative and Community-Engaged Research

Keywords

Spatial Coverage