Namibian Archaeology

Rock art in Namibia is of special interest for
research on a global scale because it is particularly
rich hunter-gatherer art and it features paintings
and engravings (or petroglyphs) in roughly
equally shared landscapes that have experienced
comparatively little anthropogenic changes since
creation of the art. Above all, Namibia is the
country where hunter-gatherers lived their traditional
way of life in arid landscapes far into the
twentieth century and therefore becoming the
main reference for forager studies worldwide.
However, differently from the Republic of
South Africa, none of the extant hunter-gatherer
groups in Namibia has recent links to or a cultural
memory of the prehistoric art that is generally
older than 1000 years.

For almost four decades, the University of Cologne has been intensively involved with rock art research in southwestern Africa. Thousands of engravings and paintings have been documented, particularly from
Namibia. Excavations were carried out which yielded a chronological framework for Namibia's rock art. In Central Namibia, most of the prehistoric rock paintings are between 2,000 and 4,000 years old.
The practice of painting stopped during the first millennium AD when domestic sheep were introduced.

On 1 April 2008, parts of an historic shipwreck were unearthed during diamond-mining operations near Oranjemund, Namibia. Initial investigations undertaken during that same month indicated that it was, most probably, the remnants of an outward-bound Portuguese ship that foundered during the second quarter of the sixteenth century. The Oranjemund shipwreck is the oldest wreck ever found in sub-Saharan Africa and received worldwide attention in the media. After an initial survey was undertaken and a representative sample of artifacts and ecofacts recovered, the site was reburied. Following this, the Namibian Government stepped in and took control of the project. A Second Phase investigation was undertaken under supervision of the author during September and October 2008, resulting in full-scale excavation of the site. This article describes aspects of archaeological fieldwork.

Namibia has one of the most outstanding, diverse and extensive rock art records in Southern Africa. The country's Rock art database currently holds detailed records of both paintings and engravings found in various settings. However , some of these sites have been recorded and published, while others remained unrecorded and unpublished. This paper attempts to highlight the history of rock art research in Namibia over the last 50 years to date, the period where increased research activities has been observed in the region; by examining where rock art research has been focused and the aspects of management and conservation of the rock art sites in Namibia. Furthermore, we will briefly discuss some of the challenges of studying rock art in Namibia, current research trends and future research perspectives.

During the 1960s most of Africa’s countries had gained independence except for Namibia. Attainment of freedom for them was a momentous occasion particularly for those who had suffered firstly under the Germans and then under the South Africans who had extended apartheid to the Namibians. Namibia attained independence long after most African countries had, it is a subject of debate as to whether the results was control from the South African Country or there were other specific factors which are to be blamed. As the essay unfolds factors that precluded Namibia from attaining independence after World War II shall be discussed.

Bows in hunter-gatherer societies are not mono-functional items. Besides hunting and fighting, they may also have been used for musical purposes. Rock art in southern Africa provides a record of this use, giving way to investigating past music cultures. This paper brings together the published depictions of musical bows from across southern Africa with some new discoveries. Although depictions of bows being played as musical instruments have been recorded for decades, these scenes still lack archaeological or musicological investigation. When analysing these depictions, it turns out that there is a comparatively wide variety of technical aspects of sound production, of ways of playing and of contexts of the musical performance, indicating rich cultural diversity among the early peoples of the subcontinent. Moreover, the paintings show details in these aspects that are not corroborated by ethnographic studies. Nevertheless, they open up a tableau of the potential context variability in the musical practice of preHistory and also indicate that rock art studies should be open to finding contexts of meaning beyond the dichotomy of the purely ritual and the profane.

Usually referred to as 'ochre' or 'pigment' in archaeological contexts, ferruginous rocks were commonly exploited during the Later Stone Age in southern Africa. While ochre could lead to crucial inferences about socio-cultural behaviours of past populations, the provenance and the procurement strategies of this material in LSA contexts, as well as its association to rock art remain largely understudied. In the present study, seventeen ochre sources from five geological zones in north-central Namibia and 41 archaeological ochre pieces discovered in the stratigraphic sequence of the Later Stone Age site of Leopard Cave, Erongo Mountains-Namibia, were analysed by ICP-OES and ICP-MS/MS. Geochemical data coupled to data pre-treatment considerations and multivariate statistical analyses demonstrate that archaeological ochres were both collected locally and regionally from more distant sources. Beyond shedding new light on ochre provenance for rock art in north-central Namibia during the Later Stone Age, our data provide new insight into the mobility of past populations and the interactions existing between distinct rock art areas in north-central Namibia.

Indigenous pastoralists at Walvis Bay (formerly Walwich Bay) on the Namib Desert coast were drawn into global commerce at the end of the eighteenth century (Fig. 21.1). Rich documentary and material evidence allows insights into the indigenous response, giving voice to a fine-grained and nuanced perception of the local people, contrary to the standard view of them as hapless victims of processes outside their control. Through a narrative approach, I attempt to present the data in an accessible way.

ABSTRACT A unique assemblage of ritual objects is described from Falls Rock Shelter in the Dâures massif of Namibia, a major concentration of rock art sites linked to hunter-gatherer shamanic traditions. Occupation of the sites commenced about five thousand years ago and, although there is no direct dating for the rock art itself, it is thought to have been executed during the same period. The assemblage reported here, and dated to approximately 2750 cal. BC, is associated with the earliest evidence of Holocene occupation. Similarities between objects in the assemblage, their archaeological context and ritual paraphernalia depicted in the rock art provide new insights into the nature of shamanic performance in the Namib Desert.

Bones of domestic sheep dated to the early first millennium AD are described from the Dâures massif in the Namib Desert. The remains confirm earlier investigations which inferred the acquisition of livestock from indirect evidence in the rock art, suggesting a fundamental shift in ritual practice at this time. Dating of the sheep remains is in broad agreement with the dating of other finds in the same area and in southern Africa as a whole. The presence of suspected sheep bone artefacts, possibly used for ritual purposes, draws attention to the importance of livestock as more than a component of diet in the changing economy of hunter-gatherer society. Résumé Des os de mouton domestique datés du début du premier millénaire AD, découverts dans le Massif des Dâures (Désert du Namib), sont ici décrits. Ces vestiges confir-ment les premières observations effectuées sur l'art pariétal qui indiquaient de façon indirecte l'acquisition du bétail et suggéraient une transformation fondamentale des pratiques rituelles à cette époque. La datation de ces vestiges de mouton s'inscrit dans le cadre chronologique des découvertes locales et d'Afrique australe dans son ensemble. D'éventuels artefacts sur os de mouton, poten-tiellement attribués à des fins rituelles, sont aussi discutés. Ce fait attire notre attention sur l'importance du bétail au-delà de son utilisation comme ressource alimentaire, au sein du système économique en mutation de la société des chasseurs-cueilleurs. (To cite this pre-press online article, please include the standard reference information, the digital object identifier and online publication date)

One of the motivations for this collection of papers was articulated by one of us in an earlier publication that
was an exploration of Paleolithic images of animals (Davidson 2017a, 22):
It seems likely that there is an argument to be developed here about the emergence of the ‘Western’ styles of scene
representation (which is by no means confi ned to Western rock art traditions). Just as the emergence of naturalism
through the application of perspective is said to have created new ways of representing and seeing the world
during the European Renaissance, so changes in the ways images of animals were represented with other animals
probably testify to changes in the ways people saw the world.
The initial intent was to explore the question of scenes in the Paleolithic broadly, but then the question was
expanded to include rock and cave art from later periods. It has been traditional to state that there are few
representations of scenes in the Upper Paleolithic Cave art of Western Europe. Davidson (Ch. 1) reviews some
of the ways the absence of scenes in Paleolithic art has been represented in textbooks over the last sixty years
or more. In general, it has persistently proved to be true that scenes do not appear to be common in the art on
the cave walls. On the other hand, Davidson (Ch. 1), Culley (Ch. 12) and Villaverde (Ch. 15) demonstrate that
the view is distorted by the concentration on cave art to the neglect of portable art that is contemporary with
it. Van Gelder and Nowell (Ch. 13) show also that the distortion derives from emphasizing representations of
animals at the expense of other markings on the cave walls. When attention is turned to images engraved on
bones or on plaquettes of stone or to more nuanced understandings of what constitutes a scene, scenes are
not so rare. This suggested that the presence or absence of scenes might help reveal how the image making
was used by the societies of the artists. Importantly, recent work by Fritz, Tossello, and Lenssen-Erz (2013)
has addressed the problem of the lack of conventional scenes in cave art, identifying some instances where
animals seem to have been represented with the ground on which they would be seen.
The project, then, had its beginnings with one particular defi nition of how a scene might be recognized
and has morphed, through the successive defi nitions by different authors in the book, into a broader discussion
of scenes in rock art. The hope is that our broadening can contribute to correcting ideas about
scenes that took hold early and have persisted despite general knowledge of exceptions that proved those
ideas wrong. Kelly and David (Ch. 4) outline one history of the concept of scenes in rock art, and Lenssen-Erz
and colleagues (Ch. 6) also address that history.

This paper analyses the chances of survival among shipwreck survivors who endured the initial wrecking of the Bom Jesus shipwreck in 1533 within Southern Africa. The paper takes a comparative historic analysis cantered on the pre-colonial historic relationship between the European sea farers and the indigenous people of South Western Africa in terms
of  trade,  social  interactions  etc,  and  shipwrecked  survivors narratives  in  Southern  Africa helped to reconstruct the factors at play in ensuring survival or death of the sailors in such situations.

Although the rock art of southern Africa is overwhelmingly concerned with ritual, there are few depictions of the initiation rites so important to hunter-gatherer identity. This study presents the first definitive evidence of women's initiation based on evidence from rock art and archaeological features at the site of /Ui-//aes in Namibia. The evidence reveals multiple links between initiation, women's work in gathering wild grass seed, and the importance of the female kudu as a metaphor of positive social values. These links show that the beliefs underlying ritual practice also form part of everyday subsistence activity, extending the same precepts from mundane artefacts such as grindstones, to the habits of desert antelope.

Rock art research done in Namibia since the 1960's by Ernst R. Scherz and Harald Pager on behalf of the University of Cologne and financed by "Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft" soon evoked questions about the age and nature of prehistoric paintings and engravings. Archaeological excavation of rock art sites, it was hoped, would help to establish a cultural sequence which was then still poorly understood. Thus, since 1968, Wolfgang E. Wendt has conducted 45 excavations throughout the country, among these the famous cave of Apollo 11.
The present author has analysed 13 of Wendt's excavations in the surroundings of the Brandberg. Additional data from 31 other excavations carried out north of the Tropic of Capricorn before 1985 have been compiled for comparison. The stratigraphic results and the related landscapes allow us to connect prehistoric lifeways during the last 10,000 years with their changing environments and to establish a chronological sequence for Northern Namibia, in which also rock art can be included by good arguments.

"Etemba 14 was excavated in two seasons (1968 and 1984) and yielded a stratigraphic sequence with Later Stone Age (LSA) and Middle Stone Age (MSA) material. Human remains discovered among material of the first excavation had been assigned to the MSA complex. The diachronic analysis of material from the second excavation showed that 1) the transition correlates with the sedimentological change from Unit IV to V, contrary to previous interpretations; 2) the interface most probably reflects a considerable time span; 3) the human cranial fragments belong to the LSA complex; 4) an undisturbed MSA layer was identified at the base of the second excavation.
A technological analysis of the MSA assemblage showed that discoidal reduction was the prevailing concept, independent of the raw material used. Cores made out of quartz show additionally a simple, unipolar reduction. Pointed flakes (pseudo-Levallois points) are frequent; blades are irregular and very scarce. The reconstruction of the chaîne opératoire allows some suggestions about the activities that took place on site.Early MSA assemblages from the south-western part of Namibia show similar technological features. Whether the discoid technology used at Etemba 14 is a chronological marker or a local expression of functional or economic needs requires further research."

This article relates an eye witness account of the extreme changes undergone from season to season in the Namib Desert and how this provides an explanation for the presence of archaeological remains in what at first appears to be an inhospitable environment.

New evidence of ritual seclusion and sensory deprivation, from the eastern margins of the Namib Desert suggests that specialized shamans may have operated alone, and possibly as itinerants, performing ritual services at widely scattered sites. This behaviour has its origins in hunter-gatherer responses to the introduction of pastoralism, and to the emergence of specialist rainmakers and healers during the second millennium ad. The research reported here identifies and explains important anomalies in the rock art and archaeology of hunter-gatherer religious practice in southern Africa.

Surface lithic scatters are relatively common in arid environments worldwide and attest to human occupation and use of desert environmental resources over long (104–106-year) time scales. A recent paper by Hardaker (2020) describes Early to Middle Stone Age lithic scatters in desert environments in Namibia, and deduces their spatial patterns and the relative age of individual lithic artifacts. Here, we challenge the results of Hardaker’s study based on (1) the methodology that was employed to map the scatters and analyse lithic age, and (2) the spatial interpretation applied to the lithic scatters and the derived ages of individual artifacts. This re-evaluation of Hardaker’s study provides a better conceptual basis for documenting and interpreting lithic scatters worldwide, which should apply established geoarchaeological methods and be set in the context of desert geomorphological processes and environments during the Quaternary.

This paper presents a preliminary report of an excavation in Oruwanje 95/1 rock shelter that provided some significant results concerning the rise of herding societies in Namibia. The stratigraphy mainly covers the last 3000 years and several LSA-phases could be distinguished. Of special interest are the finds of pottery and remains of domesticated sheep and goats. Despite dating problems, the findings together reveal the appearance of pottery and domesticated animals in the former Kaokoland at least by 2000 B.P. The sedimentological analysis points to slight climatic variations. This is not, however, confirmed by the archaeobotanical and archaeozoological data.

Climatic amelioration during the mid-Holocene Optimum is associated with hunter-gatherer occupation of remote sites in the Namib Desert. Subsequent changes in late Holocene site distribution suggest there were alternative responses to increasing aridity during this period. Abandonment or episodic occupation is evident in some areas, while others show an emphasis on mountain refugia and resource anomalies. Specialized coping strategies developed during this time allowed a broad re-occupation of the desert when conditions improved briefly during the Medieval Warm Epoch. Successive patterns of settlement and subsistence in the Namib Desert Holocene sequence exemplify the four moments of Holling's adaptive cycle.

Khoekhoe pastoralists living in Gobabeb, in the arid Kuiseb River Valley of central-western Namibia, keep goats (Capra hircus). Several decades ago, palaeontologist C.K. Brain collected modern skeletal remains of goats from these villages. The goats were butchered using pocketknives with metal blades. We investigated the frequency of butchery marks on a sub-sam- ple of this collection, representing 60% of the total assemblage. Most specimens in the collection are weathered. Moreover, most goat specimens from Gobabeb lack butchery evidence and even the use of magnification only marginally increased this number. We compared our results with the frequency of butchery marks documented from Early and Middle Iron Age samples from South Africa, a time when sheep dominated faunal assemblages and were slaughtered using metal knives. The frequency of specimens with butchery marks in the goat sample from Gobabeb is higher than that recorded for the Early and Middle Iron Age samples. The higher...

The remains of a complex stone-walled encampment at//Khauxa/nas in Namibia provide new insights into the social consequences of European contact with the pastoral Khoi. The Namibian evidence contradicts the general view that the eighteenth-century Khoi were little more than a colonial underclass. Details of layout and construction from //Khauxa/nas point to the rise of a hierarchical organization uniting autonomous households within a pastoral alliance. This development reflects the evolutionary potential of Khoi society at a crucial moment in its history, immediately prior to the rise of armed resistance against colonial rule. Les vestiges d'un campement complexe ceinturd d'un tour de pierre //Khauxa/nas en Namibie donnent des nouveaux aperfus des consdquences sociales du contact europden avec les Khoi pastoraux. L'dvidence namibienne ddment les rues gdndrales que les Khoi du 18dme sidcle n'dtaient plus qu'une sous-classe coloniale. Les ddtails du plan et de la construction du campement de//Khauxa/nas mettent en dvidence l'essor d'une organisation hidrarchique unifiant des mdnages autonomes darts l'alliance pastorale. Ce ddveloppement refldte le potentiel dvolutionniste social de la socidtd Khoi d'un instant crucial de son histoire, immddiatement avant le soul~vement de la rdsistance armde contre l'autoritd coloniale.

This essay examines a well-written and cautionary tale about the ways that archaeological observations were once hijacked and commercialized in the service of racism and colonialism, and the drive that has led some great researchers to jump to unwarranted conclusions.

Abstract Usually referred to as ‘ochre’ or ‘pigment’ in archaeological contexts, ferruginous rocks were commonly exploited during the Later Stone Age in southern Africa. While ochre could lead to crucial inferences about socio-cultural behaviours of past populations, the provenance and the procurement strategies of this material in LSA contexts, as well as its association to rock art remain largely understudied. In the present study, seventeen ochre sources from five geological zones in north-central Namibia and 41 archaeological ochre pieces discovered in the stratigraphic sequence of the Later Stone Age site of Leopard Cave, Erongo Mountains - Namibia, were analysed by ICP-OES and ICP-MS/MS. Geochemical data coupled to data pre-treatment considerations and multivariate statistical analyses demonstrate that archaeological ochres were both collected locally and regionally from more distant sources. Beyond shedding new light on ochre provenance for rock art in north-central Namibia during the Later Stone Age, our data provide new insight into the mobility of past populations and the interactions existing between distinct rock art areas in north-central Namibia.

Arianna Dagnino was born in Genova, Italy. After Moscow, London, and Boston, she worked in South Africa as a foreign correspondent. In Australia, she earned a PhD in sociology and comparative literature. She currently teaches at the University of British Columbia. Like many of her characters, she shares the nomadic experience.

The Afrikaner (Guernica Editions, 2019) is a powerful novel set in extraordinary locations in Africa, where we encounter some mysterious people. Zoe du Plessis and her Italian colleague, Dario Oldani, are palaeontologists searching for the remains of the earliest humans in Africa. When Dario is suddenly killed in Johannesburg, Zoe must carry on their dig in the middle of the hostile Kalahari Desert. The sensual and rich descriptions of the desert landscape take us there on every page. “The territory has spectacular red sand dunes, with solitary black-maned lions roaming the open pans. Occasionally, mighty baobabs rise amid the arid plains. Some of those giants are more than a thousand years old.” This is a visual work with cinematic qualities in many scenes.

The Afrikaner is a work of self-translation from the Italian version titled Fossili (1996). Dagnino explains that she had to substantially rewrite much of the novel while converting it into English. As an author who used self-translation as part of the creative process, she joins a group of international writers who move between languages. These include Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Canadian Nancy Huston, as well as African writers Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, André Brink and Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen).

The size distributions of ostrich eggshell beads from a
number of central Namibian assemblages fall into three
types characterized by the presence or absence of beads
larger than 7,5 mm in maximum diameter and by the
shape of the distribution. Type I is associated with preherding
LSA assemblages; Type II is associated with
LSA assemblages post-dating the arrival of herding; and
Type III is characteristic of herder assemblages since
800 BP. In addition, the relevance of beads as indicators
of site function and seasonality is also commented upon.

Although the rock art of southern Africa is overwhelmingly concerned with ritual, there are few depictions of the initiation rites so important to hunter-gatherer identity. This study presents the first definitive evidence of women's initiation based on evidence from rock art and archaeological features at the site of /Ui-//aes in Namibia. The evidence reveals multiple links between initiation, women's work in gathering wild grass seed, and the importance of the female kudu as a metaphor of positive social values. These links show that the beliefs underlying ritual practice also form part of everyday subsistence activity, extending the same precepts from mundane artefacts such as grindstones, to the habits of desert antelope.

Archaeological evidence from the Awasib-Gorrasis basin complex confirms the late Holocene occupation hiatus observed elsewhere in the southern Namib Desert. The second millennium AD re-occupation of the study area is related to the development of specialized hunting and gathering strategies which maximized the opportunities of a highly episodic environment.

The Meob Bay shipwreck project was initiated in January 1993, when some copper coins that had been washed ashore were identified by the author. All coins are VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, United Dutch East India Company or DEIC) doits, minted in the town of Middelburg in the Netherlands in 1746. Research revealed that they most probably originate from a VOC ship that foundered during the outward-bound voyage. All leads point to the Vlissingen, a vessel that was lost with all hands in 1747. This article describes the identification process, the results of archival research into the historical background of the Vlissingen, as well as some aspects of archaeological fieldwork undertaken on site to date.