The Skeletons of Contact : A Study of Protohistoric Burials from the Lower Orange River Valley, South Africa

The region of the middle Orange River was a contact frontier between European colonists and Bantu-speaking cultivators as well as Bushman hunter-gatherers and Khoi herders.

In this book, Alan Morris presents the results obtained from an examination of four protohistoric populations in a situation of dynamic contact between black Iron Age intruders, original San and Khoi hunter-gatherer pastoral groups, and finally white prospecting and farming invaders.

The major conclusion of this study is that large-scale genetic intermixture may be regulated and directed by differences in self-perceived social status; the implication of these observations is that the myth of a precise and unchanging link between culture and biology (which has for so long been a major tenet of the political structure of South Africa) is untenable. "The Skeletons of Contact" should be useful to students and researchers in archaeology and anthropology. "Alan G. Morris is Associate Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Cape Town.".