ABSTRACT
Cognitive archaeological research in South Africa has focused intensively on continuities and discontinuities in religious beliefs and practices within societies. There, however, is a growing body of evidence for continual hybridity in the formation of southern African communities. These communities and processes generally are localized and context specific, but there often are strands of similar beliefs woven across community boundaries. In this paper, I explore the possibility of long-term continuities in belief and symbolism in specific localities, in spite of the rise and fall of polities, and the waxing and waning influence of various centers of power in regions on the periphery. Drawing on Hammond-Tooke’s concept of selective borrowing, I explore elements of the transfer of ideas and resulting continuity in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area, where intense interaction between different communities, population movement between communities, as well as some form of residential continuity of individual persons contributed to the creation, and endurance of place specific beliefs and rituals.
