ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have projected the image ahistorically onto a present conceived to have, for Bushmen hunters (foragers), an essentially synchronic, shallow past. The history of pastoralism in the western sandveld Kalahari has a similar chronology although it differs in a number of significant social and economic details. The entire range of Kalahari environments was incorporated into these Early Iron Age systems, form the riverine and hardveld ecosystems far out into the sandveld. An analysis of the history of property relations and of the place of labor in the political economy of the region is the essential first step in this project. The system had quite suddenly alienated San labor from the land more thoroughly than had been possible before and had, thereby, created a captive surplus labor pool with essentially only a single outlet. The foraging that "Bushmen" were forced to practice was subsistence foraging, no longer the fully formed pastoro-foraging it had been at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
