The Later Prehistory of Southern Africa from the Early to the Late Iron Age

Abstract

Introduction The archaeology of the later prehistory of southern Africa (Map 1.13.1) is synonymous with the Iron Age (Soper 1971; Phillipson 1977). This chronostratigraphic label is used to denote communities that made iron, lived in permanent settlements and practiced crop agriculture (Hall 1987; Pwiti 1996; Mitchell 2001; Phillipson 2005; Huffman 2007). Not only was such a way of life new but it also contrasted remarkably with the preceding Later Stone Age period (see Chapter 1.9), in which men and women relied solely on hunting and gathering for their existence (Deacon & Deacon 1999; Mitchell 2001). How then did this new way of life come to eclipse the old one? The orthodox view contends that the ancestors of modern Bantu people drifted down the vast southern African terrain absorbing and or pushing to the margins the autochthonous hunter-gatherer populations (Hall & Morris 1983; Hall 1987; Phillipson 2005; Huffman 2007). These migrations, which took place in the early 1st millennium ce , opened a new chapter in the history of the subcontinent now known as the Iron Age (Soper 1971; Huffman 1989; Mitchell 2001). After the Early Iron Age flourished for almost a thousand years, material culture differences suggest that towards the end of the 1st millennium ce it was followed by the Late Iron Age, which continued until the dawn of colonialism (Garlake 1973; Huffman 2007). The later prehistory of southern Africa is therefore mostly concerned with studying the archaeology of the Early and Late Iron Age peoples and cultures.

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