ABSTRACT
Having looked at the nature of regional technological development over a 2-million-year period we now turn to a consideration of the archaeological evidence for economic change, specifically during the early-mid Holocene and focusing upon the emergence of the distinctive specialist and generalist foodproducing economies in the region. The lack of hard archaeological evidence demands that the orientation of our investigations has to be largely theoretical, using ethnographic and comparative approaches. Traditional perspectives on the archaeology of early food production have emphasised an evolutionary, teleological continuum or trajectory; in fact the African picture as a whole is far more complex, dynamic and cyclic. It is also important to stress that the development of new food-acquisition strategies, replacing longlived hunter-gatherer adaptations, was also accompanied by a profound shift in symbolic behaviour. As such, a consideration of indirect evidence for food production in the region needs to take into account the area’s rich wealth of rock art which provides dual evidence for economic and ideological change. In the first instance we need to situate the archaeological data in context; this demands a consideration of the modern food-producing economies.
