9 - Hunting, Gathering, Intensifying: The Mid-Holocene Record

Summary

Hunter-gatherers continued to occupy most of Africa throughout the Holocene, making it more similar in this respect to Australia and North America than to Eurasia. This generalisation, however crude, again highlights the importance of relating African huntergatherers to those on other continents. Our focus here falls on the mid-Holocene, from 8 kya to between 4 and 2 kya, an upper limit set by the regionally variable arrival or adoption of food-production. After sketching the history of livestock-keeping and cultivation in Africa, we review the continent region by region, emphasising areas south of the Sahara because food-production was adopted much earlier within the modern desert and to its north (Fig. 9.1). We examine evidence that African hunter-gatherers were engaging in processes of social and economic intensification at this time and ask how complex some of them may have been, how far they pursued experiments in domestication independently of connections with food-producers, and whether social and/or ecological factors constrained their ability to do this. Rock art is crucially important for understanding African hunter-gatherer societies during the period covered by this chapter and the next one. We therefore describe in some detail the diversity of African hunter-gatherer rock arts, showing how some can now be read in detail while discussing the challenges of integrating them with excavated data.

MID-HOLOCENE PALAEOENVIRONMENTS

The Holocene was far from being a period of environmental stasis, and we draw upon growing evidence for the importance of shortlived ecological changes at many points in our discussion.