Abstract:
VISUALISING SOUTHERN AFRICAN LATE IRON AGE
SETTLEMENTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE studies the visualisation of Southern
African Late Iron Age Settlements (LIAS) (c. 900–1800) across the late nineteenth,
twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries (1871–2020), as found in a survey of
the cultural production, circulation, reproduction, and theorisation of illustrations
accompanying archaeological, anthropological, and historical Southern African LIAS
research. A valuable contribution of LIAS research is its continuous demonstration
of a pre-colonial hub of cosmopolitanisms on a scale never imagined in colonial
histories of 'indigenous' communities – thought of as the ultimate 'other' of global
modernity.
This study focuses on the visualisation of four settlements, namely: Mapungubwe,
Khami, Great Zimbabwe, and Bokoni. It is proposed that as with the authority of
Eurocentric 'formative interpretations' of LIAS research currently under review,
visualisations accompanying LIAS also need to be critically relooked at within
appropriate visual cultural methodologies informed by postcolonial, decolonial
and critical race theory. The study follows a two-fold methodological framework
involving a textual analysis and an image-making process. On both accounts, the
study focuses on the cultural politics of representation, asking: who and what is
being made visible in the visualisation of settlements accompanying LIAS research;
what forms of materiality and spatiality are pictured and performed; what is the
affect such visualisations have on the people that experience them; and finally,
what do they mean in the context in which they are made
