Late Holocene Foraging and Early Farming in Northwestern Zimbabwe: Excavations and Analysis of Rock Shelters and an Open‐Air Village Site

Summary

Archaeological sites in Hwange National Park, northwestern Zimbabwe, record how and when food production expanded into this part of southern Africa. An examined early farming village contains diagnostic comb-stamped and channeled thickware pottery and copper bangles dated to 1800 and 1200 cal BP. This earliest farming community supplemented crops with hunted local wild game, but left no evidence of direct contact with indigenous hunter‐gatherers who had repeatedly occupied rock shelters 30 km away since before 6000 cal BP. The biggest excavated shelter that was occupied by the foragers served as an aggregation site between 4000 and 3000 cal BP; however, after 2400 cal BP, forager use of the rock shelters dwindled to only seasonal occupations by individual families or a few individuals who preferred smaller, more private shelters, perhaps in reaction to expanding farming communities. Around 800 cal BP, sherds of burnished wares and a glass bead are intermixed with the traditional hunter‐gatherer lithic, osseous, and OES assemblage, affording the first archaeological evidence of significant interaction between the indigenous hunter-gatherers and the farmers.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Fire, Food, Farms, and Fortifications: Recent Advances in the Archaeology of Africa

Keywords

Spatial Coverage