ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the main theoretical trends that are presently significant to southern African Iron Age archaeology and thereby are paving the way for novel interpretative and theoretical frameworks in the near future. A significant epistemological shift would be the effort to erase the existing mental frontier that still separates the eastern agriculturalist/Iron Age/Bantu-speaking parts of southern Africa from the Western pastoralist/Later Stone Age/Khoekhoe-speaking region. Historically, Nick Shepherd has noted that the discussed 'hard' version of science and a certain 'hard' version of culture have run thread-like through the various contexts of archaeology in South Africa. Among the problematic legacies of the Western cultural archive and modernity's philosophical humanism is that nature became prior to culture. Four dimensions will structure the treatise of main strands of critique and proposed alternatives: science, modernity, space and time, culture and fusion, scale and identity, and social dynamics and agency.
