179 Southern African Humanities Vol. 20 Pages 179–203 Pietermaritzburg December, 2008 http://www.sahumanities.org.za Invisible herders? The archaeology of Khoekhoe pastoralists Karim Sadr School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits, 2050 South Africa; karim.sadr@wits.ac.za ABSTRACT Although based on strong historical, linguistic and ethnographic evidence, the conclusion that immigrant Khoekhoe pastoralists introduced the first livestock to southernmost Africa finds no convincing archaeological support. This may be for a number of reasons. Perhaps nomadic pastoralists leave no archaeological traces; or migrations are difficult to detect. Archaeology and the other disciplines may not be looking at the same thing. Or maybe the migrations date to the second millennium AD, long after the first livestock had reached southernmost Africa. It is not easy to tell: Later Stone Age animal bones, stones and pots do not broadcast the language and identity of the people who discarded them. KEY WORDS: archaeology, Later Stone Age, southern Africa, Khoekhoen, pastoralists, herders, migration, diffusion. For archaeologists, the word ‘Khoekhoe’ evokes seventeenth century herders at the Cape of Good Hope, rich in cattle and sheep, seasonally transhumant, organized in hierarchical lineages, and living in kraals of up to a few hundred mat huts amongst which livestock were kept safe at night (e.g. Boonzaier et al. 1996; Elphick 1985; Kolbe 1719). For linguists, Khoekhoe is one of several languages in a linguistic family called Khoe. Khoe languages form one of the two major subdivisions of click, or Khoisan, languages in southern Africa, the other being ‘non-Khoe’ (Vossen 1997; see also Heine & König this volume; Güldemann this volume). All agree that the speakers of non- Khoe were the autochthonous hunter-gatherers of the subcontinent. Speakers of Khoe languages may have been indigenous as well, but not everyone agrees. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the first Europeans at the Cape, Portuguese mariners, encountered locals with livestock (Raven Hart 1967; see also Fauvelle-Aymar this volume). Later, the English and Dutch seafarers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exchanged metals for cattle and sheep with the locals. The availability of livestock was one reason why, in the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch East Indies Company established a refreshment station where Cape Town now stands. The conventional view is that livestock, which clearly was not locally domesticated and had to have come from the north, was introduced to the Cape by Khoekhoen 1 about 2000 years ago (e.g. Ehret 1982, 1998; Elphick 1985; Smith 1992, 2005). Although their point of origin remains a subject of debate, a migration of Khoe-speaking nomadic pastoralists parsimoniously explains both the presence of 2000-year-old bones of livestock and the Khoekhoe language at the Cape. A side effect of this conventional view, however, is that it makes the first herders at the Cape look like the seventeenth century Khoekhoen. What archaeological evidence supports the conventional view? Strictly speaking, none. This is odd because linguists and ethnographers seem fairly certain that Khoe- 1 Throughout this paper, ‘Khoekhoen’ is used as a proper noun designating the people, while ‘Khoekhoe’ is used as an adjective. Khoekhoe is also used as a proper noun to designate the language of the Khoekhoen.