areas that their predecessors had neglected'.Bythe sixteenth century, mixed
farmers occupied nearly all of the land east of the twenty-inch rainfall line
in Southern Africa, except for mountainous terrain, and all were pas-
toralists as well as crop producers.
This transformation was part of a process of cultural transmission and
gradual territorial expansion that derived ultimately from West Africa and
secondarily from the area around Lake Victoria, where people began to
adopt the iron-working, mixed farming way of life a few centuries before
the Christian era. It accounts for the wide spread of Bantu languages and
for much cultural similarity throughout sub-Saharan Africa, including, for
example, a strong sense of social hierarchy.-?
British archaeologist David Phillipson summarizes the process as re-
vealed in the archaeological record in Southern Africa: "The archae-
ological sites and artifacts ...
make a marked contrast with those that
had gone before, and contain the first evidence in these southerly latitudes
for food-production, for settled village life, for metallurgy and ...
for the
manufacture of pottery."23 He adds: "The fact that so many important
aspects of culture were introduced together over such a wide area and so