Abstract
Southern Africa’s Later Stone Age (LSA) encompasses of vibrant changes with unique technological progression. In the middle Limpopo Valley (MVL), between about AD 900 and 1300, foragers witnessed and underwent considerable change. They were confronted with agro-pastoralism for the first time, and participated in state formation that in turn led to alteration in their technological and cultural behaviours to accommodate the changing political and social landscape. Ethnography tells us that foragers used their settlements differently, and primarily as aggregation camps, when bands come together to partake in social, ritual, and technological acts and spatial organisation is marked, and dispersal camps, when the groups split into smaller social units and activities are minimised. Space, therefore, can be viewed as a social construct, formed by the combination of various features, and which changes over time. This concept is captured in Manuel Castells (1999, 2000) theory of ‘spaces of flow’.
At present, Balerno Main Shelter in the middle Limpopo Valley has been interpreted as an aggregation camp based on finds made inside the shelter. However, an assemblage was also retrieved from outside, in the open-air component of the site, but it has not been analysed. Based on spatial organisation patterns noted in ethnographic records, different areas of the site may have been used for different purposes and contain different cultural assemblages. To test this, this research project examined the open-air material culture and compared it to the shelter’s assemblage. Specific attention was paid to formal tools, beads, ceramics, and shell remains, and the chronology of both spaces was compared. The findings demonstrated variable spatial usage with different sets of activities taking place outside versus inside the shelter. The lack of chronological comparison, however, limits strong correlations between comparable periods within and outside the shelter. The study, nonetheless, shows the importance of examining a cross-section of spaces across a site in order to fully document the occurrence of different activity patterns.