Diet and fertility among Kalahari Bushmen

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 1

Exchange, interaction and settlement in northwestern Botswana: past and present perspective

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 3

Auxilary instruments of labor: The homogenization of diversity in the discourse of ethnicity

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 3 May 1993In the creation of an image of national unity successful political states employ their power of cultural hegemony to facilitate the continual renewal of forms of involuntary ascription, such as ethnicity, that can coexist with a national consciousness without apparent contradiction precisely because they are cultural, that is ascribed, and therefore appear both natural and national from the perspective of individuals. Continued tacit acceptance of imposed ethnic terms for current political discourse (e.g., in Eastern Europe, Islamic Asia, southern Africa, USA minorities) reaffirms the established status of these terms as the most readily available avenue for collective self-identification and action. "So long as social practice continues to be pursued as if ethnicity did hold the key to the structures of inequality, the protectionism of the dominant and the responses of the dominated alike serve to reproduce an ethnically ordered world" (Comaroff 1987:xxx). It is particularly important to stress this at a time' when a philosophy of primordial ethnicity is being widely reasserted as a form of neo-racism to justify new or continued suppression of dispossessed ethnic groups. In this paper, I will analyze processes of ethnicization, identity construction, and class formation in Botswana. In ethnicity and tribalism are conflated (e.g., Vail 1989). But tribes, as Vail's authors make abundently clear, are a product of colonial engagement; they are essentially administrative constructs. On the other hand, ethnicity as a central logic emerged out of conflicts engendered in competition for favored positions among these tribal constructs. The emergent ethnicities were formulated out of an amalgam of preexisting indigenous and inserted colonial partitive ideologies. A dominant class - in colonial Africa, this was often an ascendent 'tribal' aristocracy - defined and determined the terms of subordinate class competition which is the seedbed of ethnicizing processes

Remote area dwellers in Botswana: an assessment of their current status

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 6

Those who have each other: land tenure of Kalahari foragers

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 9

A town community for the Navajo tribe

Thesis (M. Arch)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1959.Accompanying drawings held by MIT Museum.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-97).Edwin N. Wilmsen.M.Arc

The Archaeofauna from Xaro on the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana

We report on the fauna from the sites of Xaro 1 and Xaro 2 located on the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana. Carbon isotopes from two human graves at Xaro Lodge located approximately 500 m south of Xaro 1 suggest an economy oriented toward wild plants, fish and game similar to that of the modern baNoka, or ‘River Bushmen’. The faunal remains from Xaro 1 and 2 corroborate this suggestion.Pottery from the Early Iron Age, radiocarbon dates from the Later Iron Age, and glass beads from the European trade indicate there were two occupations at both sites, one belonging to the 18th and 19th centuries and an earlier one containing ceramics consistent with a first millennium AD date. The fauna from both occupations is dominated by fish and Chelonia (likely tortoise or terrapin). The people also hunted a variety of game animals, most of which are associated with aquatic conditions. Sheep remains were recovered from the later occupation of Xaro 1.http://www.journals.co.za/ej/ejour_nfi_ditsong.htmlam2013cp201

Ancient genomes reveal complex patterns of population movement, interaction, and replacement in sub-Saharan Africa

Africa hosts the greatest human genetic diversity globally, but legacies of ancient population interactions and dispersals across the continent remain understudied. Here, we report genome-wide data from 20 ancient sub-Saharan African individuals, including the first reported ancient DNA from the DRC, Uganda, and Botswana. These data demonstrate the contraction of diverse, once contiguous hunter-gatherer populations, and suggest the resistance to interaction with incoming pastoralists of delayed-return foragers in aquatic environments. We refine models for the spread of food producers into eastern and southern Africa, demonstrating more complex trajectories of admixture than previously suggested. In Botswana, we show that Bantu ancestry post-dates admixture between pastoralists and foragers, suggesting an earlier spread of pastoralism than farming to southern Africa. Our findings demonstrate how processes of migration and admixture have markedly reshaped the genetic map of sub-Saharan Africa in the past few millennia and highlight the utility of combined archaeological and archaeogenetic approaches