The archaeology of the 18th and 19th century western BaTswana towns in the Rustenbutg·Zeerust region of North West Province, South Africa, is important and complex. This period, the late Moloko phase at the end of the Late Iron Age, was a time of significant upheaval. The colonial frontier was advancing, slowly hemming in the BaTswana population. In the mid· 17th century, the climate became cooler and drier, resulting in widespread drought through the beginning of the 18th century. These factors increased inter-group competition over land, access to trade goods and control of agricultural and exchange networks. The sociopolitical response to these political and environmental pressures was large- scale centralization, in which people moved from dispersed village homesteads into expansive stone-walled towns with populations in the thousands. Settlement aggregation had significant effects on the scale of production at these new centres. Whereas earlier, small populations were largely self-supporting in basic needs such as agriculture and pottery manufacture, large, centralized populations required controlled maintenance of food and other natural resources. This trend toward sustainable management likely spread to materials production, as well. This research examines a shift in pottery manufacturing techniques that occurred between the early and late Moloko periods, as evidenced by inclusions of grapWtic and lustrous, platy and fibrous tempers in ceramic samples from town sites that do not occur in ceramics from earlier sites. Comparatively, petrographic data of analyzed potsherds from Marothodi, an early 19th century BaTlokwa town, reveals only two of 42 ceramic samples containing lustrous inclusions and none made of graphitic clay. A number of concepts, drawn from materials science and ethnographic analogy, are put forth to help understand this variation. This shift must be examined in the broader context of aggregation. Craft specialization and standardization might be one solution for providing for the needs of a large population. There are underpinning technological, social, political, economic, environmental and ideological factors that must be considered in understanding and interpreting the production and use of an object. Also implicit in the chafne operatoire of pottery manufacture is human behaviour, technological choice, function, style and social identity. Changes in scale or type of ceramic manufacture must be evaluated in terms of the sociopolitical, cultural and technological context in which they took place. These shifts in pottery production occurred over a relatively short time, but the exact sequence of change over the late Moloko is unknown. While the oral-historical record offers a general indication of when the large stone-walled towns were occupied and abandoned, the beginning and duration of settlement cannot be resolved. This is because radiocarbon, the most common archaeometric method for dating the Late Iron Age, is ineffectual during the late Moloko due to anomalies in atmospheric production ofradiocarbon and acute De Vries effects in the time range AD 1650- 1950. Bayesian radiocarbon calibration can help to refine radiocarbon results, but still the resolution is not precise enough to inform usefully on the late Moloko archaeological record. An alternative dating method is optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), which determines the amount of time passed since a mineral grain was last exposed to heat or light. This research includes a pilot study in dating late Moloko sites by measuring OSL of quartz grains from furnace and midden features for which approximate age is already known though oral-historical records and ceramic seriation. The results of this experiment in OSL dating of the recent past are promising. OSL provides chronological control with the resolution necessary for establishing the settlement and ceramic sequence of late Moloko sites. This constitutes a first step in the future construction of a master archaeomagnetic calibration curve for absolute dating of sites in this region using chronometric data obtained through OSL. Archaeomagnetism is potentially the best method for relative, and eventually absolute, dating of sites in this temporal and geographic context.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/19136 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Rosenstein, Dana Drake |
| Publisher | University of Cape Town, Faculty of Science, Department of Archaeology |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MSc |
| Format | application/pdf |
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