Visualising Southern African late iron age settlements in the digital age

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