Empowering Places: Rock Shelters and Ritual Control in Farmer-Forager Interactions in the Northern Province

What Is a Hunter-Gatherer? Variation in the Archaeological Record of Eastern and Southern Africa

“…Another documented process is the similarity in religious beliefs between foragers and farmers in rock art and in the farmer appropriation of forager sacred sites (Hammond-Tooke, 1998;Walker, 1997). Finally, farmers may have disrupted the land-use patterns of foragers and displaced them (Hall and Smith, 2000;Loubser and Laurens, 1994;Wadley, 1996).…”

A macro-fracture investigation of the backed stone tools from Dzombo Shelter, eastern Botswana

“…Of further interest is the lack of metal in Units B and C, which, based on current thinking, replaced the need for stone hunting implements (e.g. Hall & Smith 2000). Previous arguments addressing similar stone tool shifts have tended to rely on a lack of evidence; backed tools decline because metal was adopted even though no or very little metal has been found in the archaeological record.…”

“…Shell and bone beads and bone tools are also possibly linked to trade with farmers as argued by Hall and Smith (2000) for Little Muck Shelter. Therefore, by comparing changes in these categories between the units it is possible to track shifts in artefact acquisition and production (Table 6).…”

How Important was the Presence of Elephants as a Determinant of the Zhizo Settlement of the Greater Mapungubwe Landscape?

“…The landscape was also particularly amenable to hunting and a wide diversity of species was present, far easier to hunt than elephant. Lastly, foraging people, as well as previous pioneer agriculturalist groups who lived and may still have been living in the area (Hall & Smith 2000), could have assisted a new group settling on the landscape by offering services, sharing local knowledge (e.g., J. Alexander 1984) and trading with hides, jewellery and subsistence products (Hall & Smith 2000) or by acting as ritual specialists (Forssman 2014). Thus, the landscape had a number of features and resources making it attractive for agriculturalist settlement and one of these was the large elephant population.…”

“…The region was occupied by foragers from about 12,000 BP (van Doornum 2008), and only by agriculturalists from the beginning of the first millennium AD (Huffman 2000). At first the agriculturist occupation was probably represented by a low population density (Hall & Smith 2000), but by AD 900, Zhizo ceramicproducing agriculturalists had firmly established themselves in the region (Huffman 2000). Huffman (2000) suggests that their local settlement was undertaken in order to exploit the large elephant herds that lived in the basin, specifically around the vlei (wetland) areas and along tributaries (e.g., , for the purpose of obtaining their ivory and using it as a trade good.…”