The Early Iron Age (ca 200 – 1000 AD) in Southern Africa was a time of expansion, reorganization, and innovation that laid the foundation for the complex system of inter-group interaction that early European explorers first encountered in the 15th century and that continues to influence community dynamics today. Across the subcontinent, indigenous hunting-and-gathering communities encountered groups of immigrant farmers and herders from Central and East Africa who brought with them new technologies and new forms of subsistence. Over the centuries, both indigenous and migrant communities experienced demographic shifts, changes in settlement patterns, transitions in economic practices, and cultural and social transformations. Much research for this time period focuses on the changes experienced by hunter-gatherer communities as they were affected by the presence of encroaching agro-pastoral populations. Another related body of research seeks to understand internal dynamics of agro-pastoral groups over time, particularly in the economic and cultural heartland of Shashe-Limpopo. However, a number of studies have documented hunter-gatherer influence on agro-pastoral community cultural practices. Furthermore, agro-pastoral socioeconomic strategies have been shown to vary regionally to an extent. Here, I ask what external influences acted on agro-pastoral communities, and what an understanding of those influences means for archaeologists’ interpretations of the Early Iron Age culture(s) as a whole. This project reframes community-level socioeconomic processes: rather than seeing agropastoralist sites as parts of a predominant and hegemonic sphere of influence, sites are nodes within a cross-continental, multi-scalar network in which multiple avenues of influence – social, geographical, and environmental – operate on all communities. In other words, if agro-pastoral communities are recontextualized as one influence among many in a network, how might regional variation in their material culture be explained? Researchers acknowledge the presence of a multi-scalar network of interaction and exchange incorporating several types of communities (including hunter-gatherers and coastal traders), but most assemblages tend to be analyzed from the point of a local and Iron Age-predominant perspective. Strong preference is given to the ‘keystone’ material types – ceramics in particular – while spatial organization of settlements are seen as ‘texts’ by which to interpret the structure of Iron Age society. On a methodological level, this research asks what inquiry that incorporates multiple lines of evidence, including non-traditional artifact types, can elucidate about the socioeconomic organization of a geographically and culturally peripheral site. In particular, through the use of a high-resolution site-level spatial dataset, this project seeks to lay the foundation for a more robust interpretation of use of space within sites in Early Iron Age Southern Africa. Excavation of Thabadimasego, survey of parts of its surrounding landscape, and interpretation of the resulting assemblage formed the basis of the dataset for this project. Thabadimasego is one of several Early Iron Age sites in the Mosu Escarpment area of northeastern Botswana which form a settlement complex that is only beginning to be understood. Overall, the research project addresses the role of smaller sites like Thabadimasego within the social and economic exchange network which is so often cited as crucial to the development of socioeconomic complexity in the Southern African Iron Age. Areas such as South Sowa, situated on the fringes of known Early Iron Age settlement distribution, are frequently framed as peripheral, if only implicitly, and in comparison with contemporary ‘cores’ of cultural and economic production. The data collected for this project comprise one of the few high-resolution spatial datasets for Early Iron Age sites in Southern Africa that give attention to the site's comprehensive set of material culture components. As such this dataset stands to contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussion on the relationship between site organization, socioeconomic organization, and group identity, as well as the interplay between regional economies and supra-regional cultural processes.
Read
