The ‘Interior World’ of the Nineteenth-Century Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains

Over the last four decades researchers have cast the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains as a marginal refuge for ‘Bushmen’ amidst constricting nineteenth-century frontiers. Rock art scholarship has expanded on this characterisation of mountains as refugia, focusing on heterogeneous raiding bands forging new cultural identities. Here, we propose another view of the Maloti-Drakensberg: a dynamic political theatre in which polities that engaged in illicit or ‘heterodox’ activities like cattle raiding and hunter-gatherer lifeways set the terms of colonial encounters. We employ the concept of the ‘interior world’ to refigure the region as one fostering subsistence and political behaviours that did not conform to the expectations of colonial authority. Paradoxically, such heterodoxies over time constituted widespread social logics within the Maloti-Drakensberg, and thus became commonplace and meaningful. We synthesise historical and archaeological evidence (new and existing) to illustrate the significance of the nineteenth-century Maloti-Drakensberg, offering a revised southeast-African colonial landscape and directions for future research

Transformation as Development: Southern Africa Perspectives on Capacity Building and Heritage

As an agenda for development, ‘transformation’ invokes the long-standing and (in South Africa) constitutionally supported struggle for redistributive socioeconomic rights. This chapter brings experiences from two different sorts of heritage management programs to bear on discussions of transformation as development: the Metolong Cultural Resource Management Project associated with Lesotho’s Metolong Dam, and the Matatiele Archaeology and Rock Art program as a National Research Foundation-funded academic project, both of which included capacity building components. Tracing their paths—and the expectations for heritage that they entailed—reveals where invoking heritage as a platform for capacity building too often works against the cause of empowerment. In this chapter, we disarticulate received narratives of transformation, community engagement, and development, identifying tensions and concerns that emerge in practical examples. We highlight issues surrounding credentialing trainees, knowledge production and the creation of expert/technician divides, and recommend policies for the southern African heritage sector to address these

Theory of preparation and relaxation of a p-orbital atomic Mott insulator

We develop a theoretical framework to understand the preparation and relaxation of a metastable Mott insulator state within the first excited band of a 1D optical lattice. The state is loaded by "lifting" atoms from the ground to the first excited band by means of a stimulated Raman transition. We determine the effect of pulse duration on the accuracy of the state preparation for the case of a Gaussian pulse shape. Relaxation of the prepared state occurs in two major stages: double-occupied sites occurring due to quantum fluctuations initially lead to interband transitions followed by a spreading of particles in the trap and thermalization. We find the characteristic relaxation times at the earliest stage and at asymptotically long times approaching equilibrium. Our theory is applicable to recent experiments performed with 1D optical lattices [T. M\"uller, S. F\"olling, A. Widera, and I. Bloch, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{99}, 200405 (2007)].Comment: 27 pages, 23 figures: Edited figures, added reference

Nonlinear atom-optical delta-kicked harmonic oscillator using a Bose-Einstein condensate

We experimentally investigate the atom-optical delta-kicked harmonic oscillator for the case of nonlinearity due to collisional interactions present in a Bose-Einstein condensate. A Bose condensate of rubidium atoms tightly confined in a static harmonic magnetic trap is exposed to a one-dimensional optical standing-wave potential that is pulsed on periodically. We focus on the quantum anti-resonance case for which the classical periodic behavior is simple and well understood. We show that after a small number of kicks the dynamics is dominated by dephasing of matter wave interference due to the finite width of the condensate's initial momentum distribution. In addition, we demonstrate that the nonlinear mean-field interaction in a typical harmonically confined Bose condensate is not sufficient to give rise to chaotic behavior.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure