. Annals of the South African Museum = Annale van die Suid-Afrikaanse Museum. Natural history. 34 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM Three scenarios might explain this observation: (a) the Khoi herders departed with their livestock, leaving behind partly acculturated hunter-foragers with enough skills to make fibre-tempered pottery; (b) ditto, but the acculturated residents were left with small flocks of their own; or (c) the Khoi lost all their stock and abandoned Khoi vessel-making as a craft because there was no further need for it, no milk storage. Dispossessed of their herds, they be
. Annals of the South African Museum = Annale van die Suid-Afrikaanse Museum. Natural history. 34 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM Three scenarios might explain this observation: (a) the Khoi herders departed with their livestock, leaving behind partly acculturated hunter-foragers with enough skills to make fibre-tempered pottery; (b) ditto, but the acculturated residents were left with small flocks of their own; or (c) the Khoi lost all their stock and abandoned Khoi vessel-making as a craft because there was no further need for it, no milk storage. Dispossessed of their herds, they became 'Bushmen-Hottentots' as many eighteenth-century writers called the valley resi- dents. The archaeological consequences of scenarios (a) and (c) would be that no stone kraal was in use after about 300 years ago. The upshot of scenario (b) might be that some stone kraals continued in use by herders who only made dec- orated fibre-tempered pottery. Each scenario sounds too trite, and the reality was probably a messy combination of all three processes. If so, it will be extremely difficult to recognize in the archaeological 3 m Fig. 2. Haaskraal: excavations (thick line) were conducted (area I) under the shelter drip line (dashed line) through collapsed historical walling, and immediately behind the prehistoric kraal wall on the talus slope (area II). Ultimately, the best proof that indigenous livestock was still present in the upper valley when the trekboers arrived will come from neither pots nor kraals, but from the physical remains of the animals themselves. To this end, we have plotted the provenances of all recovered fragments of domestic fauna from nine excavated rock shelters in the upper valley. The overwhelming majority of these (often abundant) remains occur in the upper levels of each shelter fill, in firm association with European artefacts. Whereas the European-derived livestock remains tell a fascinating story of their own (Voigt et al. in prep.), it is
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectnaturalhistory, booky
