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Publication Details
AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS
SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH
arts and humanities
Hunting and the Social Lives of Southern Africa’s First Farmers
Journal of Archaeological Research, Year 2023
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Description
Perspectives on human–animal relationships are changing in archaeology and related disciplines. Analytical models that distinguish foraging from food production remain popular, but scholars are beginning to recognize greater variability in the ways people understood and engaged with animals in the past. In southern Africa, researchers have observed that wild animals were economically and socially important to recent agropastoral societies. However, archaeological models emphasize cattle keeping and downplay the role of hunting among past farming groups. To address this discrepancy and investigate human–wild animal interactions over the last ~ 2000 years, we examined zooarchaeological data from 54 southern African Iron Age (first and second millennium AD) farming sites. Diversity and taxonomic information highlights how often and what types of animals people hunted. Comparisons with earlier and contemporaneous forager and herder sites in southern and eastern Africa show that hunting for social and economic purposes characterized the spread of farming and rise of complex societies in southern Africa. The long-term cultural integration of wild animals into food-producing societies is unusual from a Global South perspective and warrants reappraisal of forager/farmer dichotomies in non-Western contexts. © 2023, The Author(s).
Authors & Co-Authors
Jones, Mica B.
United Kingdom, Oxford
University of Oxford
Kapumha, Russell
United Kingdom, Oxford
University of Oxford
Chirikure, Shadreck
United Kingdom, Oxford
University of Oxford
Marshall, Fiona B.
United States, St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis
Statistics
Authors: 4
Affiliations: 2
Identifiers
Doi:
10.1007/s10814-023-09194-y
ISSN:
10590161
Research Areas
Food Security