ABSTRACT
The conflict on the expanding Eastern Frontier of the colonial Cape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century represents a critical moment in South African history. It was here that Europeans and Bantu-speakers initially came into sustained contact as competitive occupants of the region. Archaeology can play an important role in ‘making alternative histories’ when the analysis of both indigenous and colonial material culture is used in the reinterpretation of South African history since the mid-seventeenth-century arrival of the Dutch and the subsequent late eighteenth-century transition to British domination. Archaeology reveals the social and economic consequences of the shift from a pre-industrial to a capitalist economy in South Africa. The changing nature of society on the Eastern Cape frontier from the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century is not a simple one. The archaeology of this period of contact is a story of loss that had at its centre the perpetually expanding and permeable colonial frontiers.
