UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

Southern Africa: hunters and food-gatherers
Whole examples, and even nests of several bottles which have obviously
been buried at some strategic place, are known, but have usually been
recovered by amateurs and consequently are not fully recorded. Animal
bladders were also used to carry water but ceramic vessels are never
described for the purpose. Pottery will be discussed in some detail in the
section on Khoi herdsmen.
All in all, San technology seems to have included a wide range of hunting
and gathering techniques, using implements made from materials such as
stone, bone, wood, fibre, reed, leather, shell, ivory, sinew and leaf 52 and
often including composite tools in which raw materials were combined.
Stone seems to have formed only the tip or cutting or scraping edge of
more complex tools, and stone artefacts were clearly as often as not
mounted in mastic on a wooden or bone handle. 53 For these artefacts, finegrained
homogeneous rocks such as chalcedony, agate, silcrete or indurated
shale were preferred, whilst the more brittle quartz was also used and
quartzite pebbles and boulders were turned into upper and lower grindstones
for grinding pigments or foodstuffs. It is interesting that few of the
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travellers specifically mention or describe
the manufacture of stone artefacts, perhaps indicating the gradual
replacement of at least some stone artefacts by bone, wooden or metal
versions. The implications of this picture of wide raw material usage are
obvious for those who wish to classify and distinguish between groups
on the basis of stone assemblage comparisons alone.
Archaeological research is increasingly directed as the conditions which
governed the settlement of San groups. The result is that it is becoming
possible to describe the patterns of need of hunter-gatherers in ecological
terms which were not familiar to early travellers. Nevertheless, historical
records and information from rock paintings can obviously add to the
evidence now emerging from large-scale excavation and detailed analyses of
animal bones and plant remains.
Compared with the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari and farther afield,
it is likely that San groups would have been small and highly mobile units.
In this connection it is not surprising to note that the early expeditions sent
out by Van Riebeeck came across very large numbers of unoccupied
windbreaks, and that Paterson recorded the same phenomenon a hundred
years later near the mouth of the Orange river. 54 These shelters were brush
screens intended to protect the occupants from the elements, and were
obviously abandoned after use, probably for only a few days. Nor is it
surprising that by and large San groups rarely numbered more than
twenty individuals, and in most cases were either small work-parties of
under ten men or women, or larger groups at a camp site with both
52. J. E. Parkington and C. Poggenpoel.
53. H. J. Deacon, 1966, pp. 87-90; H. J. Deacon, 1969.
54. H. B. Thom; W . Paterson, p. 117.
651