8 - Hunting, Gathering, Intensifying: Forager Histories in the Holocene before 2000bp

Summary

A richer, better-resolved dataset allows both ‘social’ and ‘ecological’ perspectives to be explored in greater detail than is possible for earlier periods. Themes discussed include regionalisation in material culture, the development of formal burial, shifts in exchange networks, changes in landscape use and subsistence, fluctuations in regional demography, and potential indicators of socio-economic intensification. This last point raises the question of how ‘complex’ southern Africa’s hunter-gatherer societies were and whether social and/or environmental constraints inhibited the emergence of food production using indigenous resources. Recent improvements in dating now offer the possibility of drawing southern Africa’s rich hunter-gatherer rock art into temporally anchored conversations with other components of the archaeological record. The chapter shows that Bushman ethnography strongly supports interpretations of that art in terms of beliefs and practices associated with shamanism, but that new theoretical work (notably studies employing the ‘new animism’) and further work on gender and initiation continue to expand how it can be understood.