Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Map
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes to the Reader
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures and Tables
- 1 Introduction
- 2 First Footsteps
- 3 Time’s Arrow
- 4 Mountain Refuge
- 5 Elephants and Rain
- 6 Desert Garden
- 7 The Family Herd
- 8 The Black Swan
- 9 Men in Hats
- 10 The Death of Memory
- Epilogue
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Map
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes to the Reader
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures and Tables
- 1 Introduction
- 2 First Footsteps
- 3 Time’s Arrow
- 4 Mountain Refuge
- 5 Elephants and Rain
- 6 Desert Garden
- 7 The Family Herd
- 8 The Black Swan
- 9 Men in Hats
- 10 The Death of Memory
- Epilogue
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Among hunter-gatherers, a fundamental change in subsistence technology such as the adoption of domestic livestock, will affect custom, ideology and ritual practice, the constantly shifting mediators of social change. Food production and the rise of a more complex subsistence economy does not only involve livestock and, possibly, cereal crops acquired from elsewhere; in the Namib Desert the move towards food production was accompanied by fundamental shifts in human relationships with resources that were already being used, both animal and plant species. A process of intensification occurred, in which novel technologies such as pottery were involved in systematic exploitation and storage of wild plant foods, ensuring a degree of food security. The changes in subsistence behaviour explored in this chapter occurred in parallel with the social changes described in Chapter 5, and form the basis of the unique form of pastoral production that arose in the Namib Desert.
Hunter-gatherer populations in southern Africa attained an apex of specialization and adaptive complexity in the late Holocene. A wide range of plant species were intensively exploited and while there are some indications of small scale processing and storage, none were cultivated; neither were any animal species in this region suitable for domestication. Southern African archaeology has conventionally represented the late Holocene as a point of stasis, or ‘ethnographic present’, such that the arrival and spread of pastoralist and farming economies in the first millennium AD served only to drive hunter-gatherer peoples to the margins. This approach is based on an essentialist view, once widely held among archaeologists, that egalitarian hunter-gatherer social values could not accommodate the contradictory principles of ownership and husbandry. Even rock art as evidence of shamanic mediation of the ideological and existential, appeared to represent a static, unchanging canon of egalitarian social values.
The escalating complexity of ritual practice described in the previous chapter suggests a different social evolutionary trajectory in the Namib Desert, with evidence for the adoption of social values drawn from intensive and prolonged interaction with food-producing communities on the edges of the Namib Desert. This interaction initiated a number of developments that appear to be unique to the late Holocene archaeology of the Namib Desert, although there could be hitherto unrecognized parallels elsewhere in southern Africa.
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- NamibThe Archaeology of an African Desert, pp. 215 - 258Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022