The archaeology of indigenous herders in the Western Cape of South Africa

Archaeologists commonly cite the high mobility of pastoralists and destruction by modern development and agriculture to explain the low number of herder sites known to date. This paper presents an alternative explanation. Here it is argued that the type of research itself is at least partly responsible for the limited results. The focus on deeply stratified archaeological deposits in caves and coastal middens at the expense of open landscape surveys, the persistence of typological classification and the lack of research into the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Khoekhoen are presented as causal factors. A dominant theoretical model links all three. The cultural identity or ‘dichotomy model ’ requires deep deposits and large numbers of artefacts in order to classify assemblages as either produced by hunters or by herders. The dominant model also encourages a focus on the pre-colonial period, as hunter and herder identities are thought to have become less distinct after colonial settlement. In contrast, results of recent work suggest that the best methods for recognising herders in the archaeological record may involve open landscape survey and the study of low-density sites, the study of spatial and technological organisation and the use of a wider range of historical sources, including those from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. KEY WORDS: Khoekhoen herders, hunters, open site survey, low-density sites, post-contact archaeology. Historical records from the Western Cape abound with reference to Khoekhoen ‘kraals’, describing large open-air encampments of sheep and cattle herders (e.g. Moodie 1838