Some of humanity's earliest ancestors lived in southern Africa and evidence from sites there has inspired key debates on human origins and the emergence of complex cognition. Building on its rich rock art heritage, archaeologists have developed theoretical work that continues to influence rock...

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Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	Mitchell, Peter 1962- (Author)
Format:	Electronic eBook
Language:	English
Published:	Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2024
Edition:	Second edition
Series:	Cambridge world archaeology
Subjects:	Excavations (Archaeology) / Africa, Southern Social archaeology / Africa, Southern Africa, Southern / Antiquities
Online Access:	DE-12 DE-473 Volltext
Summary:	Some of humanity's earliest ancestors lived in southern Africa and evidence from sites there has inspired key debates on human origins and the emergence of complex cognition. Building on its rich rock art heritage, archaeologists have developed theoretical work that continues to influence rock art studies worldwide, with the relationship between archaeological and anthropological data central to understanding past hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and farmer communities alike. New work on pre-colonial states contests models that previously explained their emergence via external trade, while the transformations wrought by European colonialism are being rewritten to emphasise Indigenous agency, feeding into efforts to decolonise the discipline itself. Inhabited by humans longer than almost anywhere else and with an unusually varied, complex past, southern Africa thus has much to contribute to archaeology worldwide. In this revised and updated edition, Peter Mitchell provides a comprehensive and extensively illustrated synthesis of its archaeology over more than three million years
Item Description:	Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 15 May 2024) Frameworks -- Histories -- Origins -- A cognitive revolution -- Hunter-gatherers of the late Pleistocene -- Archaeologies of the Pleistocene/Holocene transition -- Hunting, gathering, intensifying : forager histories in the Holocene before 2000 BP -- Taking stock : herders and hunter-gatherers -- Farmers and foragers : the first millennium -- Forming states : the Zimbabwe Culture and its neighbours -- Recent farmers and hunter-gatherers in southernmost Africa -- Colonisation, conquest, resistance -- Perspectives and prospects
Physical Description:	1 Online-Ressource (xiv, 569 Seiten)
ISBN:	9781009324724
DOI:	10.1017/9781009324724