This chapter looks at the establishment of farming communities in the east of southern Africa within the broader context of agropastoralist expansion south of the Equator and the spread of Bantu languages. Much of the literature on this topic depends heavily on analysis of ceramic design and arguments linking variation in this to variation in broad ethnolinguistic affiliations. The cultural-historical framework based on this is discussed, but alternative methods of ceramic classification are also explored, while the antiquity and utility of the Central Cattle Pattern settlement structure and its cognitive associations are critically assessed. In their dependence on a direct historical approach that is projected far back into the past both questions provide an agriculturalist counterpoint to the use of Bushman ethnography for understanding archaeological hunter-gatherer societies. Beyond these more theoretical concerns, Chapter 10 also emphasises the role of metallurgy, the social relations and subsistence base of early farming societies, the start of their engagement with Indian Ocean trade networks, and their interactions with pre-existing forager communities.

Just as the archaeology of the Zimbabwe Culture’s later phases (the Torwa and Mutapa states) can be understood as an exercise in historical archaeology structured by dialogue between the evidence of material culture and that of oral and written histories, so too can the recent past of farming communities and their neighbours south of the Limpopo. Here (and extending into modern Botswana), the archaeological record of the past several hundred years is that of the ancestors of today’s Sotho/Tswana, Nguni, Tsonga, and Venda peoples. This chapter therefore looks at the expansion of farming populations on to the temperate grasslands of South Africa’s interior; the multiple interactions between farmers, pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers (something also increasingly informed by genetics); early contacts with European traders on southern Africa’s Indian Ocean coast; the creative potential of cattle, metals, and other indigenous resources to generate power and wealth; the emergence of more complex societies and denser patterns of settlement; and the construction of new built landscapes that are only now beginning to be understood in detail (notably in Mpumalanga and Gauteng).