Karl-Johan Lindholm

Throughout his career, Paul Sinclair has encouraged students to pursue a concerned archaeology that goes beyond establishing cultural chronologies to formulating critical inquiries fundamental to our world and for our future. This book honours his achievements by exploring urbanism, resilience and livelihoods, contacts and trade, and heritage and landscape. In the tradition of Paul Sinclair’s eclectic multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary approach to archaeology and historical ecology, this book expands the scope of archaeology by combining the examination of the material record with climatology, paleoecology, ethnography, sociology and archival sources to address both past and present interactions between people and environment. In doing so, the contributions to this volume highlight the value of knowledge about the past in contemporary society.

The conventional view on the Kalahari in southern Africa expresses that the area is unsuitable for livestock herding. For this reason, it is argued that livestock herders avoided the Kalahari in the past and were only able to establish themselves in the later half of the twentieth century, when deep-reaching boreholes were introduced in the area. An effect of this concept was that the archaeological record of pastoralists in the Kalahari either was perceived as non-existent or received little attention from scientific enquiry.
  Based on an archaeological survey in the Kalahari of the northeastern part of Namibia, the purpose of this study is to construct an alternative approach to the archaeology of livestock herding. The aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the areas unrecorded land-use history.
  I depart from the notion that the main ecological constraint for dryland pastoralism is the availability of dry season water and fodder resources. For this reason, the fundamental basis for a pastoral land-use system is places that contain dry season resources. By reviewing recent ecological research, historical and anthropological accounts and previous archaeological research, I establish a link between livestock herders’ procurement of dry season key resources and the practice of digging wells. The link can be motivated from the pastoral ambition of accumulating livestock and high water requirements in the restrained dry season. On this basis, I suggest that artificial wells are useful indicators of pastoral land use in the Kalahari.
  The most crucial task for the study is to address the archaeological visibility of pastoral well sites. By a research approach integrating the theoretical understanding of pastoralism and a methodology including ecology, archaeology, history and the knowledge of the people who keep livestock in the region today, the archaeological survey revealed 40 well sites, including nearly 200 well structures that have all been used for watering livestock.
  However, it would be unfortunate if a study of pastoral wells would solely address the ecological foundation and the archaeological visibility of pastoralism. I suggest that the wells signify the labour of peoples with common or separate histories, with or without own herds, but probably talked about in relation to herds. I will also argue that the wells can be used for tracking and reconstructing a pastoral land-use system that predated the colonial era. Furthermore, the wells can be used to identify changes of the land-use that took place during the twentieth century, which involved that livestock herding was more or less abandoned in large parts of northwestern Kalahari.
  The study surmises that the critical historical perspective is valuable for development projects and conservationist interventions active in the region, especially in the light of the recent trends in the dryland ecology, which shows a larger appreciation for the indigenous understanding of the management of dryland ecosystems. With modifications, the developed approach can be applicable for land-use historical research elsewhere in southern Africa.

Keywords
Namibia; Kalahari; Omaheke; archaeology; wells; land-use history; pastoralism

This paper will discuss a pedagogical approach to integrating the humanities and the natural sciences. Our approach calls for extended collaboration between the two fields and a capacity to integrate the experimental and deductive lines of reasoning within the natural sciences with the holistic and critical perspectives of the humanities. This paper will describe and discuss how this notion is applied to the construction of a pedagogical framework or a learning environment constituted from landscape theory, GIS, and pedagogical principles derived from EBL and PL. The paper highlights how a landscape approach in combination with the interactive and dynamic properties of GIS can be used as an active learning environment crossing the interfaces of the disciplines.

Published in: In Ekblom, A. Isendahl, C. & K-J. Lindholm. The Resilience of Heritage: Cultivating a Future of the Past, Essays in Honour of Professor Paul J.J. Sinclair. (Studies in Global Archaeology 23). Uppsala: Uppsala University. Pp 243–258.

Historical ecology has resulted in an increased engagement by archaeologists in present-day discussions concerned with environmental change, local livelihoods, and sustainable rural development. This chapter discusses the pastoral land-use history of the Eastern Communal Area in north-eastern Namibia, southern Africa, and argues that the lack of a detailed historical analysis of the current land organization has resulted in a rather static image of people and land-use in this area. This in turn has fed into current rural development efforts, which seem to reinforce a colonial heritage. Hence, the main objective of the case study is to situate current discussions concerning rural development and conservation efforts in eastern Namibia in a historically rooted landscape. The chapter exemplifies how archaeology in combination with a landscape approach can contribute to a better understanding of the processes that have shaped the present setting of rural development efforts.

The author notes that livestock herding in the Kalahari Desert would require water during the dry season. By mapping and dating artificially dug or enlarged waterholes, he shows when and where such herding would have been possible. Dating is by radiocarbon, artefact scatters and cartography. Comparison with climatic, documentary and oral evidence shows that the use of the artificial wells correlates with what is known so far about the movement of peoples over the last two millennia. This inspires confidence in the connection between the wells and herding and in the survey methods.

This paper discusses a series of wells mapped in an archaeological survey in western Kalahari, Namibia. The study examines the wells as archaeological evidence for livestock herding and considers their implications for related studies in southern Africa.

Cet article présente une discussion sur une série de puits cartographiés lors d’une reconnaissance archéologique dans le Kalahari de l’ouest, en Namibie. L’étude considère les puits comme preuve archéologique sur l’élevage de troupeaux de bétail et examine leurs implications pour des études apparentées en Afrique australe.

While environmental discussions of the African dry lands are matters of great concern the most attention has been directed on physical, biological and systemic issues. Recently however, research in a number of fields has increasingly started to acknowledge that environment is about people and history as much as it is about species and ecosystems. This recognition does also suggest a significant shift in the use of science in environmental research (Scoones, 1995; Costanza, 2003). Among other things, the shift suggests or even necessitates a larger room for archaeological land use history as a tool for environmental assessments; mainly owing to the subjects’ diachronic time frame, inherent interdisciplinarity and capacity of crossing the gap between natural and social science; bringing the experimental and deductive abilities of the natural science together with the criticism and non-reductionism of the social science. The purpose of this essay is to present some thoughts behind my ongoing PhD study in eastern Namibia for the GULD symposium participants (Lindholm, 2002).

The author notes that livestock herding in the Kalahari Desert would require water during the dry season. By mapping and dating artificially dug or enlarged waterholes, he shows when and where such herding would have been possible. Dating is by radiocarbon, artefact scatters ...