Changing Lifeways in the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains, Southern Africa: Towards a History of Innovation and Belief in the Late Second Millennium AD

Despite their environmental and geo-political marginality, southern Africa’s Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains have been a significant locus of cultural creativity over the last two millennia. The past few decades have witnessed a steadily growing number of excavations on either side of the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg Escarpment, enabling a view of trans-montane connections between hunter-gathering and farming communities beginning around 1800 BP. Particularly in the highlands of modern-day Lesotho, finds of domestic fauna and worked metal in late first-millennium hunter-gatherer encampments attest to the incorporation of new technologies and social connections into lifeways that also emphasised foraging and fishing. Looking to the late second millennium AD, these mountains continued as a hub of interaction, with rock art offering insight into how cohorts of cattle-and-horse raiders forged new identities.