Deep in the heart of southern Africa, the ruins of a colossal stone walled town bear silent testimony to an African way of life almost forgotten ... Undisturbed since it was abandoned nearly two centuries ago, Marothodi was the royal capital of a Tlokwa chiefdom, the metal-producing ancestors of a community still living in South Africa and Botswana. Using an interdisciplinary combination of archaeology, history, ethnography and oral tradition, the remarkable legacy of Marothodi and its people can now be explored. Filled with the results of recent research and over 170 maps, plans, photographs and illustrations, this book introduces the historical archaeology of one of the great Iron Age Tswana towns of South Africa, and tells a fascinating story of pre-colonial African achievement.

This book explores how objects, landscapes, and architecture were at the heart of how people imagined outlaws and disorder in colonial southern Africa. Drawing on evidence from several disciplines, it chronicles how cattle raiders were created, pursued, and controlled, and how modern scholarship strives to reconstruct pasts of disruption and deviance. Through a series of vignettes, Rachel King uses excavated material, rock art, archival texts, and object collections to explore different facets of how disorderly figures were shaped through impressions of places and material culture as much as actual transgression. Addressing themes from mobility to wilderness, historiography to violence, resistance to development, King details the world that raiders made over the last two centuries in southern Africa while also critiquing scholars’ tools for describing this world. Offering inter-disciplinary perspectives on the past in Africa’s southernmost mountains, this book grapples with concepts relevant to those interested in rule-breakers and rule-makers, both in Africa and the wider world.

Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 offers an inclusive vision of South Africa's past. Drawing largely from original sources, Paul Landau presents a history of the politics of the country's people, from the time of their early settlements in the elevated heartlands, through the colonial era, to the dawn of Apartheid. A practical tradition of mobilization, alliance, and amalgamation persisted, mutated, and occasionally vanished from view; it survived against the odds in several forms, in tribalisms, Christian assemblies, and other, seemingly hybrid movements; and it continues today. Landau treats southern Africa broadly, concentrating increasingly on the southern Highveld and ultimately focusing on a transnational movement called the 'Samuelites'. He shows how people's politics in South Africa were suppressed and transformed, but never entirely eliminated.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. It includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates and situates the subject's contemporary practice.

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.

As the most influential and powerful country on the entire continent of Africa, an understanding of South Africa’s past and its present trends is crucial in appreciating where South Africans are going to, and from where they have come. South Africa changed dramatically in 1994 when apartheid was dismantled, and it became a democratic state. Since 2000, when the previous edition appeared, further big changes occurred, with the rise of new political leaders and of a new black middle class. There were also serious problems in governance, in public health, and the economy, but with a remarkable popular resilience too. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of South Africa contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about South Africa.