History runs through it: A biography of gorges in Bokoni, South Africa

Summary

Stonewalled enclosures and associated terraces embody the intersection of Bokoni gorge biographies and broader social history. The complex biographies of the gorges include being ritual spaces marked by rock art, iron smelting sites, refugia and strongholds. Many of the uses did not substantially alter the gorges, but in the troubled times of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in southern Africa pre-colonial farmers used stonewalling to reconfigure several gorges in Bokoni. The stonewalled enclosures and associated terraces, however, materialised ideas about ‘home’ that had developed at earlier sites configured around ideas about livestock and farming. While the older ideals and ways of living materialised in the stonewalled architecture were no longer feasible, being a person of Bokoni had become entangled with a specific pattern of configuring stonewalls, and people attempted to transfer these ideas onto gorges. They, however, were simultaneously informed by the existing meanings and identities of gorges, and this shaped the specific configuration of gorge enclosures and terraces.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Biographies of Enclosure in Global Context

Keywords

Spatial Coverage