Settlement with limited traces was sophisticated and thriving metropolis, lasers reveal

New laser technology has revealed that Kweneng, about 50km (31 miles) south of South Africa’s commercial capital, was once a thriving metropolis with hundreds of households, a vast meeting place, scores of walled family compounds and a bustling market. It was ruled over by kings who regulated trade, waged wars against other similar city states and settled disputes.

The discoveries are important not just for South Africa – which some still claim was largely uninhabited before white settlers colonised the western coast and then pushed inland – but the African continent as a whole. In recent decades researchers have conclusively shown that western imperialists and historians who dismissed sub-Saharan Africa as a vast wasteland awaiting “civilisation” by Europeans were entirely wrong.

....

A recent wave of research has gone further, revealing new layers of complex commercial, agricultural and urban development.

“Now we understand that there was a network of settlements across very large territories and trading connections. These didn’t have a single major site and have left limited written or oral traces so have gone under the radar,” said Thomas Vernet-Habasque, a Johannesburg-based historian from the Sorbonne who is an expert on the history of pre-colonial Africa.

....

There is evidence of considerable sophistication too. “There were four or five levels of local government, probably with regiments organised by age that could be called up for civic work or war. They buried their important dead under the walls of the central cattle enclosures but there was a very strong egalitarian tradition and the king went out of his way to not stand out,” Sadr said.

Finding an exact date for the end of Kweneng’s days as a major metropolis is very difficult, as current archaeological techniques are not accurate to within decades. But the final days of the city may have been fearful and violent, a victim of the chaotic conflicts known Mfecane, or great scattering, triggered by the military expansion of the Zulu kingdom further south.

....