ate, and there are peculiar difficulties in reconstructing the history of pre-
literate societies. Archaeologists, physical anthropologists, and linguists
provide us with information. So do social anthropologists who study the
societies in their present condition and authors who record the traditions
that have been handed down within those societies. But even when we have
a rich collection of such sources, our knowledge of the history of societies
in the period when they were neither literate nor in contact with literate
people is patchy. The archaeological record includes only a fraction of
human remains and human products. Weare on shaky ground when, as we
must do, we draw historical inferences from comparative linguistics and
from social anthropology. Weknow, moreover, that people manipulate and
modify traditions to suit their interests.
In unraveling the prehistory of Southern Africa, the best we can do on
many crucial topics is to express approximations, probabilities, and in-
formed conjectures derived from the available evidence. The situation im-
proves when we reach the time when literate eyewitnessesbegan to produce
written descriptions; but not until the nineteenth century do we have the
first substantial descriptions of societies in the interior of South Africa.