Forgotten World

Alex Schoeman, Tim Maggs, Peter Delius

Description

Indexed in Clarivate Analytics Book Citation Index (Web of Science Core Collection)

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• África
• Archaeology
• General officer
• History of Africa
• General
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781868148110
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 26 Mo

Extrait

FORGOTTEN WORLD
THE STONE-WALLED SETTLEMENTS OF THE MPUMALANGA ESCARPMENT
FORGOTTEN WORLD
THE STONE-WALLED SETTLEMENTS OF THE MPUMALANGA ESCARPMENT
Peter Delius, Tim Maggs and Alex Schoeman

WITS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
First published in South Africa in 2014
ISBN 978-1-86814-774-8 (print)
ISBN 978-1-86814-775-5 (digital)
Text Peter Delius, Tim Maggs, Alex Schoeman 2014
Images Individual copyright holders 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced in the captions. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images reproduced. Please contact Wits University Press at the address above in case of any omissions or errors.
Project managed by Monica Seeber
Design and typesetting by Quba Design and Motion
Printed and bound by Interpak Books

WITS UNIVERSITY PRESS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
Conflicting readings of the rocks
The exotic narrative
The indigenous interpretation
Twenty-first century perspectives
CHAPTER ONE:
NEW IDEAS ABOUT OLD DATA: HOW WE ARE LEARNING ABOUT BOKONI
Buildings in stone
Engravings
Material culture
Ceramics
Iron and steel
Historical sources
CHAPTER TWO:
THE ARRIVAL OF FARMING, THE GROWTH OF TRADE AND LINKS TO THE INDIAN OCEAN WORLD
Expanding regional trade networks and the start of Indian Ocean trade
From wood to stone, and the emergence of new political systems
Political dynamics
CHAPTER THREE:
MAKING OF A WALLED WORLD: CONTEXT AND EMERGENCE OF BOKONI
Settling the grasslands
Stone walls in the landscape
The homesteads
CHAPTER FOUR:
A NEW WAY TO MANAGE FIELDS, CATTLE AND PEOPLE
Terrace agriculture
Households, homesteads and fields
Hoes and bored stones - a puzzle resolved
The giant bored stone
Islands of agricultural intensification
Channelling people and cattle
Animal management
CHAPTER FIVE:
NEIGHBOURS AND RAIDERS
Fear, famine and capture in Bokoni
Capture and cannibalism
Marangrang
1830s onwards
CHAPTER SIX:
THE OLD IN THE NEW: LEGACIES IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Fortresses
Mission stations
The Land Belongs to Us : Dinkwanyanwe, Mafolofolo and Boomplaats
CONCLUSION
A select bibliography
Additional readings for the curious
Books, articles and theses
Index
Photograph: Graeme Williams

Photographs: Riaan de Villiers
PREFACE
The expanding and exciting research on the Bakoni society of Mpumalanga offers a window on a lost African civilisation in southern Africa. 1
Scholarly research into the archaeology and history of Bokoni and neighbouring regions has wider implications for the study of southern Africa s precolonial past it clearly demonstrates the productive potential of interdisciplinary partnerships, such as that between historian Peter Delius and archaeologist Alex Schoeman, in research into the late pre-colonial era. 2

These two quotes from well-known historians give some context to our work on the terraced settlements of the Mpumalanga escarpment in north-eastern South Africa. The total project, of which this book provides a summary, has taken more than a decade and still has no end in sight, such is its rich potential. From the start, the research has been interdisciplinary - a lost history rediscovered has been combined with a revived archaeology neglected for several decades.
Each of us has been drawn to the subject from different directions.
Peter Delius
In the 1970s I researched the nineteenth-century history of the Pedi kingdom for my PhD at London University. In the process I worked in the Berlin Mission archive in what was then East Berlin and in the National Archives in Pretoria, and did long stints of oral history research in Sekhukhuneland, which had been the heartland of the Pedi kingdom. I realised from those experiences that there was more material available on the history of African societies in the region than had been recognised or utilised. In the decades that followed I published numerous books and articles on the history of what became Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces. But I knew that I had far from exhausted the sources I had located, and one of the joys of this book is that it has provided me with another opportunity to put some of this material on display.
In 2005, much to my surprise, I was called to a meeting by Thabang Makwetla, then premier of Mpumalanga, and asked to lead a research project on the history and heritage of the region. This initiative ultimately gave rise to two books. 3 While working on the project I was made more fully aware of the extent of the stone-walling and terracing on the escarpment by a survey of archaeological work on the area written by Amanda Esterhuysen and Jeannette Smith. Johan Heine, a pilot working in fire control and who routinely flew over the escarpment, showed me the remarkable pictures he had taken from the air of sites in Bokoni. He also gave me some inkling of the extent and tenacity of the exotic interpretation of these sites, which is challenged in the body of this book. I was at once simultaneously intrigued by the question of what history had played out amid these walls and irritated by the racist interpretations of them that gained a good deal of popular traction, and as a result I decided to undertake further research on Bokoni.
This objective led me into further conversation with Amanda and increasing cooperation with another archaeologist trained at the University of the Witwatersrand, Alex Schoeman. My enthusiasm for the project was given a further boost when I met Tim Maggs at a history and archaeology conference at Wits in 2006. Tim had for many years been a lone voice stressing the importance of these sites and publishing important articles about them. The three-way conversation and cooperation that developed between Tim, Alex and me led to a series of interdisciplinary research projects on Bokoni which, over time, drew in many other researchers from a range of countries and disciplines and which provided much of the material on which this book is based.
Another person fundamental to the genesis of this book was Riaan de Villiers. He did a magnificent job of editing and designing the books that flowed from the Mpumalanga project. He also became a passionate proponent of producing a book which would give Bokoni the recognition it deserved for a non-specialist audience and bring it to the attention of the people who were responsible for safeguarding our heritage. Many of the beautiful pictures that you will encounter in this book were taken by Riaan, and he commissioned and organised most of the rest. Especially fortunate for this book was that his enthusiasm infected Graeme Williams, a vastly experienced and talented photographer. Despite working for a song, Graeme clambered over boulders, waded through long grass and thorn bushes, and took to the air in precarious planes to secure the stunning images with which this book is blessed.
Tim Maggs
From a childhood association with and interest in the escarpment country of what was then the Eastern Transvaal, I later became fascinated with the archaeological potential of this beautiful region. During my student years in the 1960s I met fellow student Ludy von Bezing, the discoverer of the now famous Lydenburg heads, and worked on publishing these remarkable finds with Ray Inskeep. Even more intriguing were the still mysterious and under-researched terraced settlements scattered along the escarpment. My doctoral research, based on an aerial survey of pre-colonial stone-walled settlements in the Free State, failed to reveal (despite my efforts at air photo interpretation) anything resembling cultivated field systems in that province. Hoping to provide an example of an early African cultivated landscape, I tried to survey a patch of terracing on a site near Lydenburg, but my efforts came to nought. The next two decades kept me busy as the first professional archaeologist appointed to work in KwaZulu-Natal.
Many years later, in the early 1990s, while researching rock engravings made by pre-colonial African farming communities, I had the opportunity to visit Boomplaats near Lydenburg and was struck by how closely the images engraved on boulders reflected the pattern of the ruined stone-walled homesteads linked by cattle roads. By this time, archaeologists had done a fair amount of work on the homesteads but they had virtually neglected the unique system of agricultural terracing. All fired up, I spent a week at the Trigonometrical Survey (now the Chief Directorate: National Geo-Spatial Information) mapping the distribution of these settlements from air photographs. I also read up on the exciting new work coming from similar systems of specialised agriculture further north in Africa. This in turn led to a paper: From Marateng to Marakwet: Islands of agricultural intensification in Eastern and Southern Africa , which I read at the 1995 congress of the Pan-African Association for Archaeology and Related Studies in Harare. Although this was only published in summary form it did mark the first time that the terraced settlements were placed in a wider African context which recognised pockets of specialised and more intensive agricultural development scattered in several regions of the continent. It also aroused the interest of several colleagues, including Robert Soper, then completing his major work on the Nyanga terraced settlements of eastern