Heritage Cases

Livestock and crop farming have been fundamental to the economy of northeastern (NE) South Africa for the last 2000 years. Direct evidence for livestock in the region dates to the middle of the first millennium CE, which is significantly later than in western and southern South Africa (Lander & Russell, 2018). The fourth century CE site, Silver Leaves near Tzaneen in the Mopani district of NE South Africa produced the earliest evidence for crop farming in South Africa. In spite of the region yielding the earliest evidence for domesticated crops in South Africa, macro botanical remains, such as seeds, are very rare. This is also the only region in South Africa that has yielded significant direct evidence for intensive pre-colonial agriculture in the form of the Bokoni terraced urban farmscapes. After Bokoni seized to be an independent political entity, a small grouping of farmers continued to practice terrace farming well into the historic period which helped them to ameliorate the impact of colonialism and then Apartheid policies on farming in the Leboa homeland (A. Masolo personal communication 2019). The nature and development of their terrace farming strategies has not yet been studied, thereby leaving a significant gap in the history of farming in the region. This gap is not confined to the recent past, in spite of this long, rich farming heritage (Schoeman, 2020), the archaeological understanding of animal-plant-people relationships in pre-colonial NE South Africa is largely based on generalized models, rather than direct evidence. This lacuna is the result of past ideological and methodological approaches to archaeology in southern Africa. During much of the twentieth century so called ‘Iron Age’ archaeology in South Africa was entangled with cultural historical approaches, and later structuralist models. Consequently, the overall focus was on tracing identities, migrations and structural principles, rather than nuances in local economic and food systems as an adaptation to the landscape (Hall, 1983; Swanepoel et al., 2008). Even when discussing faunal assemblages, the implication of the nature of faunal assemblages was debated in terms of these migration models (e.g. Badenhorst, 2009; Huffman, 2010). Contemporary methods and techniques used in the rest of the world also are able to generate more detailed and nuanced data sets. These scientific techniques include Organic Residue Analysis (ORA) (pioneered in NE South Africa by Becher [2021]). This project will systematically use these contemporary methods in combination with Indigenous Knowledge to investigate the changing approach to farming, food processing, plant use and consumption in NE South Africa in the last 2000 years.