The Origins and Spread of Dry Laid, Stone-Walled Architecture in Pre-colonial Southern Africa

Bibliographic Data

ID4889862
AuthorsKarim Sadr (0000-0002-9290-4431, University of the Witwatersrand, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume38
Issue2
Pages257-263
Publication date2012-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Southern African Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0305-7070 • E-ISSN: 1465-3893
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/03057070.2012.683697
OpenAlexW2046185754
LanguageEN
Citations received9

Pre-colonial stone-walled structures (SWS) are some of the most visible and accessible archaeological remains in southern Africa. Great Zimbabwe is the best known, but there are many tens or even a few hundreds of thousands of other SWS scattered throughout the subcontinent. What is their origin? Did this architectural style and concept arise from a single source or several independent ones? There are different views on these matters and they are described in the first section of this article. In the second part, I suggest that one of the roots of SWS in southern Africa lies in the Later Stone Age (LSA) cultures from the western half of the subcontinent. The article concludes with a brief report of an ongoing project to discover the sequence in the development of SWS in the high plains from the Witwatersrand to the Vaal River

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Indian subcontinent · Later Stone Age · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Computer Science · History · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology · Architecture

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