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ICYMI
The gold standard in 19th century Asante: Currency, Wealth, and Credit in a precolonial African economy
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The stone-towns of the Highveld are thus the cumulative legacy of social complexity in southern Africa, preserving fragments of its dynamic social, economic, & political history as it evolved from the end of the Middle Ages to the dawn of the colonial era.
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Both internal processes and regional upheaval influenced the settlement patterns of Sotho-Tswana capitals, as well as the abandonment and establishment of new towns.
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While stone architecture may be relatively permanent, its production and maintenance were firmly located within peoples’ changing relationships with the surrounding landscape and resources
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The stone settlements of the Highveld were the product of multiple internal and regional processes such as the centralization of political power, the accumulation of cattle wealth, competition between chiefdoms, population growth, and ecological stress
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These internal shifts are also mentioned in 19th-century accounts of the capitals, eg the town of Litakun which moved three times in 20 years, and its population fluctuated significantly from 10-15,000 in 1801, to 5,000 inhabitants in 1812
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Despite the seemingly permanent nature of the settlements, residents of some of the towns migrated semi-regularly within the vicinity of the town and beyond. Their populations fluctuated after the installation of new rulers as capitals were reorganized
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At the site of Kweneng for example, only one of the sampled houses shows evidence of a violent end and hasty abandonment. The other eight sampled lobes in the two compounds showed no evidence of burnt and hastily abandoned houses.
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This indicates that the abandonment of some of these capitals was unrelated to the mfecane, but was likely tied to more localized factors.
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Additionally, recent archaeological work on several sites across the plateau undermines this singular interpretation and has shown that the mobility of agro-pastoralist communities in this region was fairly commonplace well before the 19th century.
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Yet despite the devastation, several polities survived this upheaval and were encountered by the same authors, indicating that its effects were varied
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While many of the accounts had certainly been exaggerated by the biases of these external observers, the conflicts of the period were evidently disruptive.
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Travelers in the early 19th century who encountered these towns often attributed their abandonment to the regional warfare of the so-called mfecane wars —a prolonged period of regional warfare in southern Africa.
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“Many an hour have I walked, pensively, among the scenes of desolation —casting my thoughts back to the period when these now ruined habitations teemed with life and revelry. Nothing now remained but dilapidated walls, heaps of stones.”
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Other important sites include; Nstuanatsatsi, whose ruins are mentioned in the account of Arbusset and Dauma 1846 in the origin of the Sotho. The site features Type-N settlement patterns, which are the oldest building style.
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Not far from Kweneng are the ruined settlements of Boschoek & Sun Shadow. The sites are part of a cluster of stone-walled ruins, the material remains found at both sites indicate that the settlements were abandoned relatively quickly
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While Kaditshwene measures 4.5 km long and 1 km wide, and Molokwane is about 2.7 km long and about 750 m wide, the portion of Kweneng surveyed by LiDAR is 10 km long and 2 km wide.
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According to the archaeologist Karim Sadr, Kweneng is considerably larger than the other known ancient Sotho-Tswana capitals in South Africa, such as Molokwane and Kaditshwene.
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There are a number of narrow passageways lined with stone that were likely used as roads and cattle drives. The settlement was constructed in multiple phases and is dated to between the 15th and 18th centuries
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the ruins of Kweneng is made up of three sectors of clustered districts, each comprising several clusters of compounds, circular stone-walled enclosures demarcated spaces for various functions, and a few compounds with stone towers of unknown function.
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Finds of valuable material left in situ indicate that the site was hurriedly abandoned around the early 19th century, possibly due to the conflict between Hlubi and the Tlokoa just 60km away.
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Excavations at the site of Makgwareng (known by its Sotho name of lekgwara —stony hill/the place of stones) revealed multiple episodes of building across various zones beginning in 1520-1660.
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The ruins at Makgwareng belong to type V of the four settlement types; N, V, Z, and R.
its most distinctive feature are the corbelled stone dwellings and is thus the most archeologically visible of the four settlement types
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Makgwareng represented one of a number of settlement layouts observable on the southern Highveld, many of which featured large perimeter walls as well as corbelling, paved courtyards, and multiple ‘lobes’ in a single dwelling.
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The typical household unit here featured a bilobial layout that linked three circular enclosures separating various domestic functions, and the material culture found within these units provided evidence for craft specialization and exchange
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in the southern and central regions, settlement proceeded at a more modest scale from the 15th century. While early architectural trends featured walling made of reeds, stone became the main building material from the 17th century
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Besides wards of the royals, the kgosing in the center comprised wards of the kgosi's retainers. The inhabitants of the other two divisions consisted of persons not specially bound to the kgosi and included royals as well as commoners and immigrants
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Some pre-colonial Tswana capitals were divided into three geographical zones the kgosing in the centre, and an upper and a lower division on either side.
Each division consisted of a number of wards (dikgoro), comprising a number of lineages (masika).
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These were surrounded by a maze of wards and homesteads (kgoro) of the commoners, along with their kraals, all of which were bisected by stone walled lanes leading to different sections of the site which served various functions.
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Among the most distinctive features of the ruined capitals of the northern Highveld was the kgotla, next to this was the homestead of the chief and the central kraal complex.
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These features of Tswana society, which are first mentioned in the early 19th century accounts by various visitors to the region, were better described in early 20th century accounts of Tswana communities in the region.
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The capitals contained wards administered by appointed headmen, these wards were comprised of several dwellings, a cattle pen, and a court (kgotla); the primary, formal forum where judicial, political, and administrative affairs were debated.
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Marothodi featured evidence of significant metalworking of copper and iron, some of which was likely exported to Molokwane, which yielded finds of worked metal but no evidence of metalworking.
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The layouts of these settlements demonstrated different attitudes toward the control of space and resources. Molokwane’s and Marothodi’s layouts emphasized the central location of the kraal, while the same was segregated in Kaditshwene
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A similarly sized capital was Pitsane of the Baralong, located further north in Botswana, it was said to have about 20,0000 inhabitants according to Robert Moffat.
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The largest of these is Molokwane, covering an estimated 5km2. John Campbell, who visited Kaditshwene (Kurreechane) in 1820, reported a population of 16,000 to 20,000, apparently more than that of Cape Town at the time.
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On the northern Highveld, agglomerated towns like Molokwane, Marothodi, and Kaditshwene represented the late 18th-century capitals of Kwena, Tlokwa, and Hurutshe states.
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These massive, sprawling towns incorporated a wide variety of architectural spaces, including semiprivate courtyards and living areas, cattle kraals and passages running through the center of local activity, public courts, and areas used for crafts
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It was during this period that agglomerated stone-built townscapes like Molokwane, Kaditshwene, and Bokoni* proliferated across the northern highveld.
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Initially, their building traditions featured wood-and-pole and dry-walled stone construction, but by the early 18th century dry-stone became the most prevalent architectural material in the region.
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Archeological research has shown that at the end of the 15th century, the Highveld region saw dense concentrations of agropastoralist settlements, with economies based on cereal cultivation (mainly sorghum and millet) and livestock transhumance.
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...The raising of the stone fences must have been a work of immense labour, for the materials had all to be brought on the shoulders of men, and the quarries where these materials were probably obtained were at a considerable distance.”
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Moffat mentions “the ruins of innumerable towns, some of which were of amazing extent; stone fences, averaging from four to seven feet high, raised apparently without mortar, hammer or line.
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