The Archaeology of Southern Africa

Some of the earliest human populations lived in Southern Africa, and evidence from sites there has inspired key debates on human origins and on the emergence of modern humans. The sub-continent has one of the world's richest heritages of rock art, and specialists have developed innovative theories about its meaning and significance that have influenced the understanding of rock art everywhere. Passionate arguments about the hunter-gatherer way of life have centred on Southern African cases, and the relationship between archaeological and anthropological data is also central to understanding the past of Southern Africa's pastoralist and farmer communities. The pre-colonial states of the region provide some of the best documented cases of the influence of external trade on the development of African polities. This book is a comprehensive modern synthesis of the sub-continent's archaeology. It offers a thorough-going overview of three million years of Southern African history.

1. Introduction; 2. Frameworks; 3. Origins; 4. Modern humans, modern behaviour?; 5. Living through the late Pleistocene; 6. From the Pleistocene into the Holocene: social and ecological models of cultural change; 7. Hunting, gathering and intensifying: Holocene foragers in Southern Africa; 8. History from the rocks, ethnography from the desert; 9. Taking stock: the introduction and impact of pastoralism; 10. Early farming communities; 11. The Zimbabwe tradition; 12. Later farming communities of southernmost Africa; 13. The archaeology of colonialism; 14. Southern African archaeology today.

Southern Africa is central to many key debates in contemporary archaeology, including hominid origins, origins of anatomically modern humans and modern forms of behaviour, and the development of ethnographically informed ways of understanding rock art. Peter Mitchell presents the first new archaeological synthesis of the region in fifty years.

Peter Mitchell is Lecturer in African Prehistory at the University of Oxford, and Tutor and a Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford.