Contesting space: contact between foragers and farmers in the Mapungubwe cultural landscape, South Africa Tim Forssman Introduction Figure 1. The Shashe-Limpopo confluence viewed from the Mapungubwe National Park. In northern South Africa, the sequence of occupation could be summarised as follows: foragers lived in isolation during the early and middle Holocene (Van Doornum 2005) and, around AD 900, Iron Age farming people moved into the region (Figure 1) and settled in close proximity to forager camps. The farmers hunted elephants to trade their ivory for cloth and glass beads imported from the Indian Ocean coast (Mitchell 2002). Around AD 1000, a new community of farmers appeared and set up the major farming centre known as K2 and later, around AD 1220, Mapungubwe, southern Africa's first urban centre and capital of its earliest state (Huffman 2007). As the Iron Age cultural sequence of the region changed, so did that of the foragers: at the end of the Mapungubwe phase, in c. AD 1300, foragers disappear completely from the archaeological record (Van Doornum 2008; see Figure 2 for site locations).