9 - Taking Stock: Herders and Hunter-Gatherers

Summary

Livestock first entered southern Africa a little over 2,000 years ago and by the mid−1600s Khoe-speaking herders were widely distributed across the western third of the region. Debates over how pastoralist societies developed and how and by what routes livestock were introduced have been transformed over the past two decades by significant major fieldwork projects, a growing number of detailed genetic and linguistic studies, and new interpretative frameworks partly inspired by deeper acquaintance with pastoralist practice in East Africa. Important advances have also been made in understanding Khoe rock art, the chronology of pottery, and the relevance of disease in constraining the southward spread of livestock. This chapter reviews these developments, while also grappling with the thorny question of how, if at all, forager and herder societies can be differentiated archaeologically and what form relations took between those who kept domestic livestock and those who did not. Questions of identity (ascribed and asserted) and the degree of coherence to be expected between genetic, linguistic, ethnographic, historical, and archaeological sources come to the fore.