Unity and diversity in southern African hunter-gatherers: the ethnographic, rock art and excavated archaeological evidence

2026-07-22

Project SAHUD uses a regional case study to advance the global understanding of small-scale image-making societies. The rich and mutually illuminating relationships between ethnographic, rock art and excavated archaeological data in southern Africa are unavailable to rock art researchers in most other contexts, such as the European Upper Palaeolithic, where analogies often employ southern African ethnographies. However, despite the potential offered by this wealth of data, previous southern African archaeological research has focused on an overly small sample of local ethnographies to interpret inter-group differences in technological and subsistence adaptations to a range of environments and wild plants and animals. Simultaneously, ethnographic and rock art evidence has been used to emphasise practices and beliefs that transcend multiple hunter-gatherer groups across time and space. A novel, holistic integration is needed that is sensitive to all the available evidence and varied theoretical frameworks. The project’s key question is: does the evidence for diversity across ethnographic and mid- to late Holocene archaeological hunter-gatherers in southern Africa eclipse the widespread parallels and continuities in beliefs and practices? This question will be addressed in three interrelated ‘work packages’ that draw on published literature and archives in the United Kingdom and South Africa. The project uniquely analyses diversity across three traditionally independent research fields. The outcomes — including a novel database of ethnographic southern African hunter-gatherer diversity for archaeological investigations, and testing its potential for guiding studies of rock art diversity and for enriching discussion of archaeological diversity among southern African hunter-gatherers — will collectively constitute a new integrated synthesis of southern African hunter-gatherers between ~8,000 and 2,000 years ago.

United Kingdom (UK)

2025-10-01