The Maloti-Drakensberg of Lesotho and South Africa is Africa’s highest and most expansive mountain system south of Kilimanjaro (Tanzania). Its name is hyphenated because the mountain ranges it incorporates span political and modern...
moreThe Maloti-Drakensberg of Lesotho and South Africa is Africa’s highest and most expansive mountain system south of Kilimanjaro (Tanzania). Its name is hyphenated because the mountain ranges it incorporates span political and modern language and cultural regions and, accordingly, the mountains are seen from different perspectives. Maloti in the Sesotho language means ‘mountains’; the Africaner trekboere saw them as dragon’s (‘drakens’) mountains, today often coupled with the isiZulu term uKhahlamba, or ‘barrier of spears’. The region labelled Drakensberg’ on the KwaZulu-Natal (South African) side of the range simply refers to the escarpment (Mazel, this volume), whereas the highest peaks are inside the Kingdom of Lesotho. Although the mountains themselves were formed during uplift of the central plateau some 20 million years ago, it was the late Quaternary that saw the peopling of the area, with recurrent occupations from at least 83,000 years ago in the Lesotho Highlands (Pazan et al., 2022, this volume). This Special
Issue highlights selected topics pertaining to the varied Late Quaternary
peoples and environments of the mountains across time and space.