The Origins and Spread of Dry Laid, Stone-Walled Architecture in Pre-colonial Southern Africa

Abstract

Pre-colonial stone-walled structures (SWS) are some of the most visible and accessible archaeological remains in southern Africa. Great Zimbabwe is the best known, but there are many tens or even a few hundreds of thousands of other SWS scattered throughout the subcontinent. What is their origin? Did this architectural style and concept arise from a single source or several independent ones? There are different views on these matters and they are described in the first section of this article. In the second part, I suggest that one of the roots of SWS in southern Africa lies in the Later Stone Age (LSA) cultures from the western half of the subcontinent. The article concludes with a brief report of an ongoing project to discover the sequence in the development of SWS in the high plains from the Witwatersrand to the Vaal River.