This paper is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Master‟s Degree in the Department of Public and Development Management March 2015 / This research presents an assessment of the socio-economic impact of land restitution on people‟s livelihoods with specific reference to the Ehlanzeni District. South Africa`s constitution since the advent of democracy, accompanied by the adoption of its post-apartheid legislative framework, provides for restitution of the land as a way of correcting historical imbalances. More specifically, section 25(7) of the South African constitution provides the opportunity for people who were dispossessed of their land after the 19th June 1913 to have their land rights restored by means of restitution. South Africa‟s land restitution process is predicated on restorative forms of historical redress, which is counter to retributive forms of historical redress. The lodging of land claims requires historical evidence of dispossession, and in most rural cases claims are lodged collectively by communities rather than individual citizens. This may be problematic due to social differentiation that may have been caused by years of societal breakdown. Land dispossession was one of the most important determinants of the social and economic configurations in South Africa; therefore land restitution constitutes a central aspect of correcting historical injustice and a clear understanding of the restitution processes is necessary in order to understand the impact of restitution programmes. This study adopted qualitative research methods since the issues to be researched are people‟s experiences, which are dynamic and complex phenomena. An assessment of the claims was done; semi-structured interviews were conducted with the purpose of assessing the implications of the restitution, including interviewing the farming community to understand their experiences after restitution had taken place and their perception of the impact of restitution projects on their livelihoods. ii The interviews revealed a great deal of improvement in the ownership, greater access to infrastructure and to an extent, the ability of the beneficiaries to run farms. However, even when participants expressed their commitment and satisfaction, the socio-economic impact on their livelihoods are limited. The study recommends an in depth interrogation of the small-scale farming model and particular emphasis placed on monitoring of projects.

The present study identifies settlement patterns of the Manteño culture within the cloud forest of southern Manabí by surveying, recording and analyzing the stone architecture found within the drainage basin of the Las Tusas River, Ecuador. The statistical methods used were: Triangulated Irregular Networks or TIN (for topography interpretations), K-means (to determine natural groups for structures based on their dimensions, shape, and wall thickness), Ripley’s K (to determine spatial nature of these groups) and Kernel Density (to visualize their spatial organization). The cloud forest ecotone of southern Manabí was an anthropogenic landscape during the late Integration period. The alluvial valleys of the upper Rio Blanco drainage basin do not represent a hinterland or a periphery occupation but a series of Manteño nucleated settlements raised on terraces and interconnected by strings of linear settlements and dispersed settlements throughout the rugged terrain of this landscape. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Indigenous people have not disappeared, yet the myth of the vanished native persists as an ideological feature of settler politics and identities today. This dissertation examines the social mechanisms of this common settler narrative through an ethnographic study among settler colonists in Argentina who identify as primeros pobladores (“first inhabitants”) despite having built their economy on local indigenous land and labor. Based on field results, I argue that settlers sustain an identity as founders by turning indigenous locals into strangers from elsewhere—a mode of racialized role-reversal that I call “native estrangement.” My argument draws on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among settler, creole and indigenous Qom populations in the Argentine cotton belt—a subtropical lowland region of the Gran Chaco conquered from the Qom and other natives by the Argentine military in 1911 for European immigrant settlement. The dissertation focuses on three case studies of “native estrangement” developed in three parts: “Labor,” “Space” and “Race.” The two chapters of Part I – entitled Labor – argue that racialized regimes of plantation labor have been central to indigenous dispossession and resistance in Chaco historically, and that they continue to shape settler imaginaries of territorial primacy to this day. The first chapter revisits the early 20th century history of joint land and labor conquest, exemplified by the state-run Napalpí reservation: designed to keep conquered natives off settler-colonized land, the reservation also sought to both exploit and “civilize” them through de-Indianizing field labor in conditions that led to a native strike, culminating in a genocidal massacre. The second chapter turns to the present, showing that today’s settlers continue to discount indigenous primacy on the land through racialized religious distinctions between the “sacrificial labor” of settler cotton farming, and the mere “gathering” of cotton-picking labor, deemed an inherent distinction of evolutionary aptitudes between sedentary and hunter-gathering peoples. Part II – Space – argues that settlers turn natives into strangers spatially by imagining them as an influx from elsewhere. A chapter examines what I call the settlers’ “imagined geographies of native origin,” which includes both nationwide Argentine patterns of attributing foreign provenance to indigenous people near the borderlands, as well as smaller-scale settler tendencies to imagine natives as migrants from a locus beyond the space and time of settler “founding.” The following chapter examines the effect of this racialized estrangement on those estranged, through a comparison between two ethnically similar Qom slums outside the settler colony that are respectively racialized as more “savage” or more “civilized.” Through archival and oral history, the precursors of this difference are traced to the “savage” slum’s ancestral ties to the colony’s terrain itself, from which they were repeatedly removed or ousted in several stages over the past century. Part III – Race – complicates the settler-native binary by exploring how criollization contributes to indigenous dispossession, through a case study of racialized ghost-stories and segregated deathways in the traditional Qom territories of Napalpí. The chapter traces criollo rumors about white settler ghosts at the inauguration of a settler landmark near a segregated gringo-criollo cemetery, all of which is built on an original Qom “burial ground”. While the state-funded landmark was meant to sacrilize a settler myth of founding, these criollo rumors disrupt that official narrative with a phantasmagoric backstory of white devil worship that highlights the ongoing segregation between the groups. Although the creoles’ segregated class position is premised on their visible indigenous trace, their rumors of resistance nevertheless disavow a third indigenous Qom deathway. Racialized rifts between dominant “melting pot” and repressed “creole” renditions of national territorial belonging generate and sustain a native absence from both narratives. A process which, as I demonstrate, is not able to eradicate the ongoing assertions to sovereignty that indigenous claims to these territories represent.

Focusing on the relationship between demography and sedentary behavior, this thesis explores changes to mobility strategies on the Northern Northwest Coast of North America between 11,000 and 5,000 cal BP. Drawing on a regional database of radiocarbon dates, it uses summed probability distributions (SPDs) of calibrated dates as a proxy for population change, in combination with syntheses of previously published technological, paleo environmental and settlement pattern data to test three hypotheses derived from the literature about the development of logistic mobility among maritime hunter-gatherers on the Northern Coast. In all, each of the hypotheses proposes that early peoples on the coast were foragers that utilized high levels of residential mobility, who later adopted collector (logistic) strategies. Two of the hypotheses emphasize the role of population growth and/or packing and resource distribution in this transformation, while the third emphasizes population replacement. Other issues addressed within this thesis are whether or not the forager-collector continuum, as it is used for terrestrial hunter-gatherers, can be applied to those in aquatic settings. Also explored, is the question of whether the available data is sufficient for making and/or testing claims about early mobility patterns in the region. The results of the demographic models suggest that while population levels were volatile, volatility declined through time and that there is no significant trend in either growth or decline of overall population levels throughout the region. This thesis also confirmed that significant changes to mobility, as evidenced by the emergence of semi-sedentary to sedentary living, begin to appear by ~7,000 cal BP. However, there appears to be little, if any correlation between the advent of more sedentary and logistic behavior and any of the variables tested here. Thus this author suggests, in agreement with Ames (1985; 2004) and Binford (2001) that the distribution of resources and labor organization needs within aquatic environments are sufficient without any other drivers for the development and intensification of logistic mobility. The principle analytic contribution of this research comes from the demographic modeling that relied on the construction of summed probability distributions. Though these methods have become commonplace in other settings (namely Europe), this thesis presents the first application of these methods within the time period and region covered. Moreover, this research is one of the only of its kind to address demographic histories within coastal landscapes that utilizes both marine and terrestrial 14C samples. In order to explore possible biases within the database, comparisons of marine and terrestrial SPDs were made between sub-sections of the region (i.e. Haida Gwaii, Southeast Alaska and the Dundas Islands). Though patterning between each of these areas was consistent, these comparative methods revealed an unexpected finding; a massive population crash throughout the region that began between ~9,000-8,800 cal BP and lasted till around 8,400 cal BP. Importantly, this crash was witnessed within all of the individual sub-areas and within SPDs made from both the marine and terrestrial 14C samples, though the reasons behind this collapse and verification of its existence require future research. However, finding this collapse at all further highlighted the need for use of correctly calibrated 14C dates, as the gap in 14C dates effectively disappears when using uncalibrated dates, which has been a longstanding tradition within Northwest archaeology.

In northwest Alaska, archaeologists hypothesize that environmental variability was a major factor in both growing coastal population density, with large aggregated villages and large houses, between 1000 and 500 years ago (ya), and subsequent decreasing population density between 500 ya and the contact era. After 500 ya people are thought to have dispersed to smaller settlements with smaller house sizes in coastal areas, and perhaps, upriver. This settlement pattern was identified through research at four site locations over 30 years ago. The changing geographic distribution of sites, associated settlement size, and house size has not been examined in detail. A more careful examination of changing northwest Alaskan settlement patterns is needed before larger questions about socio-economic organization can be addressed. I use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to evaluate the evidence for a geographic redistribution of Arctic peoples during the Late Holocene. The author constructed a database of settlement location and site attribute information, specifically the number of houses within each settlement and the size (m2). Data were collected from a dataset of Western Arctic National Parklands (WEAR), the Alaska Heritage Resource Survey (AHRS) database of archaeological sites in Alaska, 409 unpublished site reports and field notes curated by the National Park Service (NPS) and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and the results of recent fieldwork in northwest Alaska. A total of 486 settlements were identified within the northwest Alaska with 128 settlements having temporal and site attribute data. The author incorporated settlement size data into a GIS database and then carried out global, Moran's I, local Moran's I, and local Getis-Ord spatial analyses to test whether settlement redistribution occurred and if key settlement locations shifted after 500 ya. The site attribute data (number of houses and average size of houses) are used to test the additional aspects of the proposed settlement pattern change after 500 ya. A total of 83 settlements with 465 houses are used to test if the average size of settlements and average house size changed after 500 ya. The results of the spatial analyses indicate no statistically significant patterns in the spatial distribution of settlements. Site attribute analysis shows no statistical difference in the average number of houses per village or the average size of houses before or after 500 ya. The results of this work build our understanding of regional settlement patterns during the late Holocene. By testing settlement pattern change, i.e. settlement distribution, settlement size, and house size, future research into settlement pattern change can begin to evaluate likely causes for the observed changes. My method, specifically the use of GIS as a method for testing settlement pattern change, can be applied to other regions and temporal scales.

Thesis (M. Dev.) --University of Limpopo, 2011 / This study was conducted in Limpopo province in Makhado municipality, Vhembe district. It concentrated on Levubu farms. There are seven Communal Property Associations (CPAs) which occupy about 258.7889 hectares of land; there are Ravele, Masakona, Tshakhuma, Shigalo, Tshivhazwaulu, Tshitwani, Ratombo but this study will concentrate only on Shigalo CPA. Two hundred and seventy respondents in Shigalo land restitution project in Makhado municipality were interviewed on sustainability of the restitution projects. It is argued that for a sustainability of restitution project, a number of requirements must be met. These include a clear and coherent vision, full participation and ownership by the beneficiaries of the project; political support at the highest level; appropriate mechanisms for implementation; sufficient funding; mutually- supportive linkages with other relevant areas of policy, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and the intended beneficiaries as well as taking care of the environment for the future generation. The case study was conducted to investigate the sustainability of restitution project in Shigalo restitution community. The results obtained in this study show that Shigalo beneficiaries have ownership and full participation in the land restitution farms. It also pointed out that Shigalo beneficiaries were capacitated to increase the level of farm production and farm management skills, and they were assisted by strategic partnership. With reference to environmental conditions, the results show that the sustainability of agricultural project is also controlled by good agricultural practices that are environmental friendly. There were environmental constrains that affected farming in Shigalo projects such as drought, veld fire and frost. Shigalo restitution farms get advice on environmental problems from the Department of Agriculture. Industrial, financial and technical support will play a vital role in sustaining restitution projects.

Thesis (M. Dev.) --University of Limpopo, 2011

Thesis (M.A. (Sociology)) --University of Limpopo, 2010 / The study is on land restitution and development departing from the assumption that the return of a people’s land should contribute to the enhancement of their wellbeing. The question is does the common land-use objective of beneficiaries of land restitution match their share historical right to the returned land? What should actions on the returned land be based – livelihood needs or restorative justice? A profile of the livelihoods of the Manavhelas showed how the land restitution process can be used to reduce poverty amongst previously dispossessed Black South Africans. Methodological triangulation was used to achieve the above. It was observed in this case that land restitution is yet to realise poverty reduction because of gaps in its conception and inadequacies in the implementation. Closing the gap and linking the land restitution programme to the livelihood needs of its beneficiaries will improve its capacity to deliver on its promise

Thesis (M. Dev.) --University of Limpopo, 2013

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