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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The First Herders at the Cape of Good Hope
Author:Sadr, KarimISNI
Year:1998
Periodical:African Archaeological Review
Volume:15
Issue:2
Pages:101-132
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:pastoralists
Khoikhoi
Stone Age
Anthropology and Archaeology
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
External link:https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022158701778
Abstract:There seems to be general acceptance that the earliest livestock and pottery were brought to the southern tip of Africa, in present-day South Africa, by Khoi-speaking herders who originated in northern Botswana. This is thought to have taken place about 2000 years ago. The fly in the ointment is that the archaeological remains of that age show no sign of such migration. In contrast, all evidence seems to point to the Khoi arriving in the southwestern Cape about the end of the first millennium AD. The earliest pottery and livestock which probably did reach the Cape of Good Hope around 2000 years ago would seem to have done so by a process of diffusion. The real oddity to which this data give rise is the fact that the hunter-gatherer societies of the far western Cape made a successful adaptation to true pastoralism in the mid-first millennium AD, which current theory says should only have taken place in the presence of a hierarchical agropastoral society. The author hypothesizes that this may have been due to the fact that without the putatively essential strong ethos of sharing and egalitarianism these people were still able to go beyond the mixed hunter-herder adaptations of other Late Stone Age populations to achieve true pastoralism. The questions now to be posed are: when did they disappear from the scene and why did pastoralism not reappear in the area for roughly another thousand years? Bibliogr., notes, sum. in English and French.
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