Abstract ID: 3.13292 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

Ostriches are peculiar birds and their strangeness has been recognized by southern African hunter-gatherers through multiple symbolic associations. Such qualities are likely to have been enhanced where people had access to beads made from their eggshell but did not have direct knowledge of the birds themselves. Southeastern southern Africa, encompassing the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains and surrounding lowlands, is one such area. We review the unusual attributes and associations of ostriches and their eggshell and summarize results of strontium isotope analyses to investigate past bead exchange networks in this region. Because bead size can be controlled and varies through time and space, we employ it as an additional indicator of the existence and spatial extent of past social networks. Having critically considered previous efforts to do so, we report on our work to build the largest sample of such data yet obtained in southern Africa and compare our preliminary results with other signals of interaction between precolonial hunter-gatherer and, where applicable, agropastoralist communities. Our results speak to mountain societies enmeshed with those of surrounding lowlands for at least 35,000 years.