Iron Age

"This article summarizes 15 years of research in and finds from the Oss-Vorstengraf and Oss-Zevenbergen areas. The results of fieldwork carried out in the area between 1997 and 2007 are presented briefly, including discussion of three monumental Hallstatt C mounds. Recently the finds from the Vorstengraf and the cremated remains of the Vorst were reanalysed, and the results of this work are summarized. Taken together, the research reveals that the three monumental Hallstatt burials are the result of a funerary ritual in which the dead and the accompanying imported objects were deliberately transformed in a highly local manner – with grave goods being dismantled, folded and broken – and consciously interred in an ancestral barrow landscape. The current article is not a final publication, but is intended rather as a prelude to the upcoming publication of a major synthesis on this barrow landscape and other similar burials."

"In northern South Africa, foragers lived in isolation during the early and middle Holocene (van Doornum 2005). Iron Age farming people moved into the region and settled in close proximity to foragers’ ca. AD 900. Farmers first settled on the landscape to hunt elephants to trade their ivory for cloth and glass beads imported from the Indian Ocean coast (Mitchell 2002). Around AD 1000, a new community of farmers moved into the area and set up the major farming centre of K2 and later, around AD 1220, Mapungubwe, southern Africa’s first urban centre and capital of its earliest state (Huffman 2007). As the Iron Age cultural sequence of the region changed, so did that of the foragers and at the end of the Mapungubwe phase ca. 1300, foragers disappeared completely from the archaeological record (van Doornum 2008).

This paper presents findings from recent work from northern South Africa."