Khoikhoi and Bushman Pottery in the Cape Colony: Ethnohistory and Later Stone Age Ceramics of the South African Interior

Abstract

Early travelers in the southwest and south of the Cape Colony, and later explorers in the north, saw Khoikhoi pastoralists making and using large, reddish or black, coil-built cooking vessels with shoulder lugs and incised necks with everted rims. In these, they boiled meat and used some as drums. Smaller serving bowls were also seen. Travelers on the east and north frontiers of the Colony saw Bushman hunter–gatherers using flat-bottomed cooking bowls tempered with grass and decorated with punctate motifs. They boiled meat, soups, bones, skins, locusts, and seed mush in these, converted some to drums, and used others in gift exchanges. Few later sherd collectors made full use of these ethnohistoric sightings, but developed their own labeling systems. Most thought that the Bushmen of the interior learned pot-making through contact with coastal Khoikhoi. Why the two wares differed in every respect, however, could not be explained. Recent multidisciplinary studies in the northeast frontier area verify those differences, but also show that both wares were introduced together before 700 A.D., by herders. Thereafter the use of Khoi ware dwindled, then disappeared when the herding economy collapsed, leaving only grass-tempered bowls in general use. Thus “Bushman” pottery in the northeastern Cape appears to have its prehistoric roots in ancestral Khoi technology.