A new approach to the archaeology of livestock herding in the Kalahari, Southern Africa Karl-Johan Lindholm ∗ The author notes that livestock herding in the Kalahari Desert would require water during the dry season. By mapping and dating artificially dug or enlarged waterholes, he shows when and where such herding would have been possible. Dating is by radiocarbon, artefact scatters and cartography. Comparison with climatic, documentary and oral evidence shows that the use of the artificial wells correlates with what is known so far about the movement of peoples over the last two millennia. This inspires confidence in the connection between the wells and herding and in the survey methods. Keywords: Namibia, Botswana, Kalahari, water, wells, herding, desert Introduction Archaeologists in southern Africa disagree on how to identify livestock herders in the archaeological record: some stress that pastoralists produce sites with distinctive archaeological signatures, others that the identification of a pastoral package should be based on testable hypotheses about what pastoralism represents economically, socially and ecologically (Kinahan 1991). My approach tests a hypothesis, namely that herders would need access to water in the dry season, and I propose pastoral land use can be reconstructed by mapping artificial wells. The study area is situated in the Kalahari of eastern Namibia (Figure 1). The region contains areas with thick sand layers which, in combination with a dry climate, result in high evaporation rates and paucity of surface water. For this reason the area was considered from colonial times onwards as generally unsuitable for livestock herding before deep-reaching boreholes were introduced in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a consequence, the archaeological record of pastoralists was perceived either as non-existent, or received little enquiry. However, a recent re-introduction of pastoralism helped to explain the long survival of the Ju/’hoansi, a Khoesan speaking people, who were previously considered as providing ‘some of the best data we have on a full-time foraging ecology unaffected by the presence of cattle pastoralism’ (Lee 1979: 73). During the second half of the twentieth century, their economy and egalitarian social structures attracted considerable attention from hunter- gatherer researchers. ∗ Division of Rural Development and Agroecology, Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Box 7012, 750 07, Uppsala, Sweden (Email: karl-johan.lindholm@sol.slu.se) Received: 4 June 2007; Accepted: 13 September 2007; Revised: 18 August 2008 ANTIQUITY 83 (2009): 110–124 110