Ritual Space in Pre-Colonial Farming Societies in Southern Africa

Thomas N. Huffman

21 citations0/0 files storedEthnoarchaeology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Archaeology and Rock Art Studies Archaeology and ancient environmental studies Archaeological and Geological Studies

Abstract

Ritual behavior in the archaeological past is not self-evident. Understanding pre-historic ritual therefore requires access to the worldview of people at the time. This is at least partially possible for pre-colonial farming societies in Southern Africa through the settlement model known as the Central Cattle Pattern. With this model we can recognize and interpret a wide variety of artifacts, features and spaces. The most important dimensions in the ritual code include a contrast between the ‘wild bush’ and the social order of human settlements; another contrast between front — public and back — sacred localities within a settlement; and a third contrast between heavenly forces above and the ancestral world below. The roles of ancestors provided the need for ritual spaces.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

References

1977Outline of a Theory of Practice 1984The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration 1980Outline of a Theory of Practice.1970The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual 2003The Archaeology of Southern Africa 1990The Built Environment And Spatial Form 1982Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context.2008Handbook to the Iron Age: the archaeology of pre-colonial farming societies in Southern Africa

Cited by

2023Profiling the people behind clay figurines: Technological trace and fingerprint analysis applied to ancient Egypt (Lahun village, MBA II, c. 1800–1700 BC)2016Unravelling the glass trade bead sequence from Magoro Hill, South Africa: separating pre-seventeenth-century Asian imports from later European counterparts 2017Foragers and trade in the middle Limpopo Valley, c. 1200 BC to AD 1300 2023Foragers during a period of social upheaval at Little Muck Shelter, southern Africa 2023Iron Age sites in northern Botswana’s Okavango Delta 1: the southern Delta sites Mat82 and Matlapaneng plus Qogana on the region’s eastern margin

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.