Introduction

This chapter discusses the period between approximately 100 BCE and CE 1700, encompassing those parts of the Kalahari region lying between the

Okavango-Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. In the north, the Okavango Delta, one of the largest inland deltas in the world, provides a counterpoint to the otherwise flat and thirsty sands of the Kalahari sandveld into which it drains. From the Makgadikgadi salt pans to the Limpopo River, greater physiographic relief prevails on the more fertile soils of the hardveld, which today support over 80% of the region’s population.

While the climate of the Kalahari has remained relatively stable over the past two millenniums, the archaeological record indicates that a number of important cultural and economic transformations have occurred, first as domesticated livestock were introduced to supplement forager subsistence strategies and, later, as more sedentary agropastoral communities settled the more productive regions of eastern Botswana and along the margins of the Okavango Delta (Figure 1). By CE 1000 changes in the internal dynamics of subsistence production, enhanced by the establishment of local trade networks that carried game products, metal goods, and other valued objects, led to more regional political formations and the appearance of the first chiefdoms (see Political Complexity, Rise of). Connections with longer-distance trade networks in luxury goods that reached, through intermediaries in the Limpopo valley, eastward to the Indian Ocean accompanied these internal changes, eventually underwriting the more complex political and social formations of the historic period.