Five Hundred Years Rediscovered

Written by archaeologists and historians, to collectively reframe, revitalise and re-examine the last 500 years of African history by challenging thinking about the region’s expanding internal and colonial frontiers, and broadenening current perceptions about southern Africa’s colonial past.

In the age of the African Renaissance, southern Africa has needed to reinterpret the past in fresh and more appropriate ways. The last 500 years represent a strikingly unexplored and misrepresented period which remains disfigured by colonial/apartheid assumptions, most notably in the way that African societies are depicted as fixed, passive, isolated, un-enterprising and unenlightened. This period is one the most formative in relation to southern Africa’s past while remaining, in many ways, the least known. Key cultural contours of the sub-continent took shape, while in a jagged and uneven fashion some of the features of modern identities emerged. Enormous internal economic innovation and political experimentation was taking place at the same time as expanding European mercantile forces started to press upon southern African shores and its hinterlands. This suggests that interaction, flux and mixing were a strong feature of the period, rather than the homogeneity and fixity proposed in standard historical and archaeological writings. Five Hundred Years Rediscovered represents the first step, taken by a group of archaeologists and historians, to collectively reframe, revitalise and re-examine the last 500 years. By integrating research and developing trans-frontier research networks, the group hopes to challenge thinking about the region’s expanding internal and colonial frontiers, and to broaden current perceptions about southern Africa’s colonial past.

Preface1 IntroductionSection 1 Disciplinary Identities: Methodological Considerations2 Historical archaeologies of southern Africa: precedents and prospectsJ. Behrens and N. Swanepoel3 South Africa in Africa more than five hundred years ago: some questionsN. Parsons4 Towards an outline of the oral geography, historical identity and political economy of the Late Precolonial Tswana in the Rustenburg regionS. Hall, M. Anderson, J. Boeyens and F. Coetzee5 Metals beyond frontiers: exploring the production, distribution and use of metals in the Free State grasslands, South AfricaS. Chirikure, S. Hall and T. Maggs6 deTuin, a 19th-century mission station in the Northern CapeA.G. Morris7 Reinterpreting the origins of Dzata: archaeology and legendsE. HanischSection 2 Material Identities8 Revisiting Bokoni: populating the stone ruins of the Mpumalanga EscarpmentP. Delius and M.H. Schoeman9 The Mpumalanga Escarpment settlements: some answers, many questionsT. Maggs10 Post-European contact glass beads from the southern African interior: a tentative look at trade, consumption and identitiesM. Wood11 Ceramic alliances: pottery and the history of the Kekana Ndebele in the old TransvaalA.B. EsterhuysenSection 3 ‘Troubled Times’: Warfare, State Formation and Migration in the Interior12 Rediscovering the Ndwandwe kingdomJ. Wright13 Swazi oral tradition and Northern Nguni historical archaeologyP. Bonner14 Mfecane mutation in Central Africa: a comparison of the Makololo and the Ngoni in Zambia, 1830s-1898A. KanduzaList of contributorsIndex