The Archaeology of Southern Africa

Peter Mitchell is Lecturer in African Prehistory at the University of Oxford, and Tutor and a Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford.

'… a synthesis of southern African archaeology was long overdue … Mitchell's book is timely and it will make a significant contribution to the growing corpus of published material on southern African archaeology. It represents the state of knowledge at the turn of the millennium, and is an invaluable tool for scholars, teachers and students with an interest in the long and rich archaeological history of southern Africa. I recommend that it finds its way on to bookshelves, and I will certainly be pleased to have it on mine.' Before Farming: The Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers

• 1. Introduction; 2. Frameworks; 3. Origins; 4. Modern humans, modern behaviour?; 5. Living through the late Pleistocene; 6. From the Pleistocene into the Holocene: social and ecological models of cultural change; 7. Hunting, gathering and intensifying: Holocene foragers in Southern Africa; 8. History from the rocks, ethnography from the desert; 9. Taking stock: the introduction and impact of pastoralism; 10. Early farming communities; 11. The Zimbabwe tradition; 12. Later farming communities of southernmost Africa; 13. The archaeology of colonialism; 14. Southern African archaeology today.