railroads, roads for automobiles, and, eventually, air transportation
ser-
vices, to enrich the soils with modern fertilizers, and to mitigate the effects
of the inadequate and intermittent rainfall by building dams, reservoirs,
and canals.
In the Beginning
In one respect, archaeologists have not served historians of Southern
Africa well. The historians' tendency to ignore all but the most recent
history has been compounded by the archaeologists' use of arcane termi-
nology. Some of their terms are positively misleading. In particular, follow-
ing precedents created in European archaeology, archaeologists of South-
ern Africa have used as their basic categories the terms Stone Age (which
they divide into Early SA, Middle SA, and Late SA)and Iron Age.2 Those
terms are illogical, ahistorical, and inaccurate: illogical because they con-
fuse chronological phenomena with cultural phenomena, ahistorical be-
cause their ages do not correspond with the historian's chronology, and
inaccurate because they imply that, for example, every member of an Iron
Agecommunity used iron tools and weapons. They have been discarded by
European and other archaeologists in favor of stages in the evolution of
cultural diversity, but they linger in much work on Southern Africa.