searching for ‘real’ hottentots: the khoekhoe in the ... · classified and listed amongst the...

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Southern African Humanities Vol. 20 Pages 221–233 Pietermaritzburg December, 2008

http://www.sahumanities.org.za

Searching for ‘real’ Hottentots: the Khoekhoe in the history ofSouth African physical anthropology

Alan G. Morris

Department of Human Biology, University of Cape Town, Observatory,7925 South Africa; [email protected]

ABSTRACT

Physical anthropology was obsessed with types and racial purity for an exceptionally long time, only breakingthrough the clouds of typology in the 1960s and 1970s. For at least a hundred years, research on the Khoekhoepeoples of southern Africa was directed by the idea of Hamitic origins for these pastoralists, and the dynamicsand variation of the native populations were ignored so that individuals that fit the preconceived appearanceof the mythical Hamite could be identified. The three-race model (Bushman, Hottentot and Bantu) heldsway until Singer’s 1958 publication of The Boskop ‘race’ problem in which he criticized the type concept.Only after that seminal paper did population models begin to be considered in the study of aboriginalpopulations in South Africa. Here, I examine the important philosophical shift from ‘types’ to ‘populations’in our understanding of the physical anthropology of the Khoekhoe. For many new researchers in the field,the earlier literature must seem exceptionally alien with all of its talk of types, bloodlines and physicalfeatures treated as if they were genetic alleles. How much information from the earlier studies can besalvaged?

KEY WORDS: Khoekhoe phenotypes, Khoekhoe genotypes, history of physical anthropology, racialtypology.

HAMITES AND THE AGE OF TYPOLOGY

The Khoekhoe, or the ‘Hottentots’ as they were then known, were of great interest tothe visiting Europeans at the Cape right from first contact. The distinct cultural andphysical differences between the Cape Khoekhoe and the Europeans triggereddiscussions as to why the differences should exist, but in a context that was essentiallypre-scientific. Although many of the early observers were well educated, their viewswere a mix of uncritical speculation and settler myth. ‘Civilized’ people were abovenature, while the ‘primitives’ in the colony were members of the animal kingdom to beclassified and listed amongst the weird and wonderful fauna of distant lands (Morris1996). Peter Kolb (1731), amongst others for example, speculated that the flat nasalbones of the Khoekhoe were the result of the mothers crushing their babies’ nasal bridgesjust after birth for aesthetic reasons; he also professed an interest in the peculiar sexualanatomy of Khoekhoe women, especially their elongated labia. Kolb briefly discussedthe idea that weights were attached to the labia of women in order increase the length ofthe appendage, again assuming that peculiar ‘primitive’ behaviours were linked in someway to the difference in physical features between the Khoekhoe and the Europeans.

Not all of the early colonial observers were as uncritical as Kolb and as the eighteenthcentury drew to a close there were more systematic observers. Dr William Somerville,the British supervisor of lands and forests during the first British occupation of theCape, wrote a brief account of The structure of Hottentot women and illustrated thatsame structure in anatomical detail (Bradlow & Bradlow 1979; Singer 1978). After theCape returned to Dutch rule in 1803, one of its first educated visitors was Dr HinrichLichtenstein who arrived along with the new governor. Lichtenstein was part of thegrowing European fraternity of professional scientists who collected human skeletal

222 SOUTHERN AFRICAN HUMANITIES, VOL. 20, 2008

material for European museums. His South African harvest included the cranium of aKhoekhoe woman taken from her body during a judicial examination in the Karoo inAugust 1805 (Lichtenstein 1928–29). Although hardly scientific in today’s sense, theexamination of this woman was the first true forensic examination that we have onrecord in South Africa. More scientifically oriented visitors arrived in southern Africaduring the second half of the nineteenth century and they also provided descriptions ofKhoekhoe people.

The notion of a career scientist employed by a university started to take hold inearnest from the 1830s throughout Europe. Whereas previously most science was eitherpublished privately or through the auspices of one of the Royal Societies, professionaljournals in specific subject areas were becoming common by the middle 1800s andrace and racial ethnology were developing as distinct subjects of research in the newfield of anthropology. Typical of these early career scientists was Francis Galton, thefirst cousin of Charles Darwin. Although he was wealthy enough not to require auniversity post, his interests were focused on science as a profession. He arrived inDamaraland in 1851 and was immediately impressed by the steatopygia he saw inKhoekhoe women, but was not in a position to make direct measurements of thisphenomenon. He solved the problem by using his sextant, a tape measure andtrigonometry (Galton 1889: 53–4).

I profess to be a scientific man, and was exceedingly anxious to obtain accurate measurements ofher shape. The object of my admiration stood under a tree, and was turning herself about to allpoints of the compass, [as] ladies who wish to be admired usually do. Of a sudden my eye fellupon my sextant; the bright thought struck me, and I took a series of observations upon her figurein every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefullyupon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake; this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring-tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtainedboth base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms.

Despite their scientific veneer, most of these early researchers were collectors ofcuriosities rather than explorers of nature. Their approach was little different from thatof their zoological and botanical colleagues who spent their time collecting typespecimens of new species. The British colonial government encouraged this approachat the launch of the South African Philosophical Society in 1877 by emphasizing theneed to study native groups before they disappeared (Tobias 1985), but the real tide ofacademic science did not reach these shores until the turn of the twentieth century withthe launch of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science and therise of the first South African universities.

In 1902, the South African Association for the Advancement of Science was started,with one of its major objectives to unify ‘Brit and Boer’ (Morris 2002). The organizerswanted it to be a unified body in which discussion about the scientific advancement ofthe colonies could be discussed. One of their decisions was that they would have anearly joint meeting with the British Association so that the South African Associationcould have a solid launch. In 1905 the British Association came to South Africa. Over400 overseas delegates came on a specially chartered vessel, mostly from Britain butincluding a scattering of scientists from Canada, the United States, Germany, Austria,France and Japan. From the British perspective, this was an opportunity to show thecolonies how research was done. Two of the people who came with them were AlfredHaddon of Cambridge and Felix von Luschan, who was at that stage curator at the

MORRIS: KHOEKHOE PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 223

Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. These two were the leading Europeananthropologists of their day.

Haddon gave a lecture on the state of anthropology in the colonies, in which hecriticized the museums for having unsystematic collections. He implored the researchersto study first those aspects which were being lost, especially in physiology andpsychology, and especially of the Khoesan peoples. Haddon’s plea echoed the perceivedneed to use anthropological data to train administrators and he stressed that goodadministrators of colonies needed to understand the native peoples that they governed(Morris 2002). Von Luschan, on the other hand, was genuinely interested in gettingjoint research going. In particular, he linked with Louis Peringuey, who was curator ofanthropology at the South African Museum in Cape Town. Von Luschan convincedPeringuey to begin a programme of making casts of native peoples including theKhoekhoe. The first cast was made in Cape Town by Von Luschan, but Peringuey feltthat his taxidermist Drury could do a better job and set him on a casting project thatlasted until the 1920s and yielded 60 or more body casts (Davison 1993; Summers1975).

Von Luschan used his papers to present his pre-formed ideas about the peopling ofsouthern Africa. In particular, he pushed the Hamitic theory for the origin of theKhoekhoe. He used physical, cultural and linguistic evidence to identify the fundamentalseparation of the Khoekhoe and the San (Von Luschan 1907). Like Haddon, he spokeof the need for research into the psychological characteristics of the people. Von Luschanstrongly supported the link between behaviour and race, and one of his strongest reasonsfor separating the San from the Khoekhoe was the ‘fact’ that the Khoekhoe wereshepherds with a Hamitic ancestry. He supported a model originally proposed by thelinguists that the Khoekhoe were Hamites who had moved down from northeast Africaand were changed culturally and physically by interbreeding with the San. Von Luschan’sHamitic hypothesis influenced many of the next generation of German and South Africanresearchers, but surprisingly had only a limited effect on Peringuey at the South AfricanMuseum.

At nearly the same time that Von Luschan began publishing his Hamitic hypothesis,Peringuey had begun his most intense period of gathering skeletons through his networkof amateur collectors and by sending Drury out to excavate in prehistoric cave sites andto exhume the graves of known individuals of ‘pure race’ (Legassick & Rassool 2000;Morris 1992b). This large collection of skeletons suggested an alternative model ofKhoekhoe origins. Peringuey was influenced by an English anthropologist named FrankShrubsall, who had published an article in 1898 using 24 Khoesan skulls that he hadaccessed in British collections. Shrubsall suggested a classification of ‘Bushmen,Hottentots and Strandlopers’ in which he did not see a Hamitic influence. His proposedmodel considered the origin of the Khoekhoe as being influenced by Bantu-speakingpeople, not Hamites. Shrubsall thought that ‘Hottentots’ show many ‘Negro’ featuresand at most he acknowledged only some minor influence from Hamitic peoples.

By collaborating with Peringuey, Shrubsall (1907, 1911, 1922) was able to augmenthis sample with archaeological specimens from South African institutions. The totalsample in his 1922 report included 217 individuals that he subdivided into ‘Hottentots’,‘Kalahari Bushmen’, ‘Colonial Bushmen’ and ‘Strandlopers’ excavated from caves andmiddens along the South African coast, all based on Peringuey’s assessment of context


(Peringuey 1911: 191). Unfortunately we have no real idea how Peringuey identifiedhis Khoekhoe skeletons. Perhaps the information came from farmers who in turn hadheard that the skeletons were from ‘old Hottentot graves’, but once Peringuey hadlabelled them as Khoekhoe, they were locked into the accession register as such.

Peringuey then contacted Eugene Pittard at Geneva to continue these studies, and hesent the entire collection of skeletons from the museum to Geneva where they stayedfor ten years between 1925 and 1935. The result is that the largest list of publications onthe physical anthropology of Khoesan people is in French out of Geneva. There wereover 40 papers published between 1925 and 1946, all based on the skeletal data fromthe skeletons sent to Geneva by Peringuey, and all utilized the four categories fromShrubsall and Peringuey (Morris 1992a).

Dubow (1995) has emphasized that physical anthropology took the lead in the studyof South African prehistory after 1905 and this ushered in an ‘age of typology’ with arange of investigators describing a tangled web of types based on archaeological andmodern skeletons of South Africans (Morris 2005a; Morris & Tobias 1997). The key tothe complexity was the concept of a fixed racial type for each distinct population.Typology was at the heart of physical anthropology and this resulted in a new and moredirected phase of research with a focus on racial studies (Dubow 1995) in which bothVon Luschan’s Hamitic model and Shrubsall’s Bantu model took centre stage.

The advent of typology on the South African scene was most evident after the discoveryof the Boskop skull in 1913. This mineralized partial cranium was assumed to be ofgreat antiquity and its large size, associated with what were seen as San features,suggested that it was different from previously described human crania and livingsouthern African peoples. Although the skull was discovered in Potchefstroom, it becamethe focus of a ‘territorial’ spat between Peringuey in Cape Town and F.W. FitzSimons atthe Port Elizabeth Museum. The two museum directors were trying to get as manyskeletons of native peoples into their collections as they could; the digging was literallydone with shovels and context was rarely recorded. Peringuey and FitzSimons bothoffered cash to purchase the Boskop skull. FitzSimons offered the most money, so theskull went to Port Elizabeth, but Peringuey met with FitzSimons and negotiated for thefirst description to be done by the assistant director of the South African Museum, theyoung geologist Sydney Haughton (Haughton 1917).

Boskop was an influential find largely because of the notoriety created by thecompetition between Peringuey and FitzSimons. It was interesting in anatomy, butundated and with very little known about its archaeological context. Its assumed antiquitymade it important to the museums. When FitzSimons discovered similar large, long-headed crania in the deeper levels from caves in the Tsitsikamma Mountains on thesouth Cape coast, he sent them for analysis to Raymond Dart, the new professor ofanatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand. The Boskop-like features of these fewindividuals suggested to Dart that a whole population of large-headed San must haveexisted in prehistoric times. Dart created the ‘Boskop type’ to represent this population(Dart 1923).

By the 1920s and early 1930s South African physical anthropology had already divideditself into distinct schools in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Bloemfontein. Dart’senthusiasm for typological studies of crania infected his colleagues and students at theDepartment of Anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand, and Lawrence Wells


and Alexander Galloway became converts to the Boskop type. The extension of anextinct race into the present was completed when Dart identified Boskop ancestry in agroup of San from the northern borders of the Cape Province in the Kalahari GemsbokPark (Dart 1937). Dart assessed each individual according to his or her percentage‘Bushman’ or ‘Boskop’ ancestry. Features that fitted neither of these preconceptionswere said to be signs of intermixture from Bantu-speaking, Mediterranean (Hamitic),Armenoid or Mongoloid peoples. Dart’s racial explanation was a direct reflection ofhis cultural diffusionist beliefs (Dart 1939). He interpreted each physical feature as if itwere a cultural artefact passed genetically from ‘hand to hand’ by a flow of visitors.The Khoekhoe were drawn into this mix when Galloway began the detailed analysis ofthe human skeletons from Mapungubwe in 1935 and Bambandyanalo several yearslater. His report later published as his DSc thesis (Galloway 1959) emphasized Boskop-like features on the crania and this, along with Gardner’s link of the pottery to NorthAfrican styles, firmly identified the inhabitants as Khoekhoe rather than Bantu-speakingAfrican people (Gardner 1949, 1963). Perhaps the most bizarre of Dart’s typologicalpapers discussing Khoekhoe individuals was the one published in 1952 entitledA Hottentot from Hong Kong in which he compared African archaeological skeletonsto skeletons of south Chinese individuals excavated from the old mine compounds ofJohannesburg.

The passion for types was just as strong in the Department of Anatomy at the Universityof Cape Town (Morris 2005a). Although Matthew Drennan did not publish any specificpapers on the Khoekhoe, his colleague J.A. Keen worked through the now substantialskeleton collections at UCT and the South African Museum to identify a Khoekhoe‘Hamitic’ morphology (Keen 1947, 1952). Keen took his lead from the third school ofphysical anthropology in South Africa, that at the National Museum in Bloemfontein.T.F. Dreyer and his junior colleague A.J.D. Meiring from the museum in Bloemfonteinproposed that the living Khoekhoe were descendants of Hamitic migrants from thenorth, and they set about proving this by excavating a series of graves from along thebanks of the Orange River near the town of Kakamas (Dreyer & Meiring 1937).

Their model was based on the then newly published journal of Wikar (Mossop 1935),who had travelled the region of the middle Orange in 1775 and seen his ‘first realHottentots’ there. Dreyer and his team of labourers dug up in three weeks over 100graves that they categorized according to the style of the cairn. High, conical cairnswere said to be a sign of ‘undegenerated Hottentot culture’ imported from thenorth, and therefore the individuals buried in these graves were said to be pureKhoekhoe: “It must be borne in mind that individuals of pure race may continue tobury in the old, typical way even after hybrids have abandoned the ancestral methodsin favour of more slothful and slovenly ways of interment” (Dreyer & Meiring 1937:82). A typologically selected set of five crania became the ‘Kakamas type’, and thisformed the basis for their expectation of what the North African Hamitic ancestorshould look like. When some of their ideas were criticized by Broom and Wells, theyaccused these foreign-born researchers of not understanding the term ‘Hottentot’ inthe same manner as “used by South Africans born in the country” (Dreyer & Meiring1952: 19).

Robert Broom did not subscribe to any of the schools and essentially worked alonethroughout his career. He applied the same typological methods he used in his studies


of mammal-like reptiles to his studies of humans. He searched for racial ‘essences’ onthe crania of his archaeological skeletons and tried to reconstruct past racial historyfrom these features. He added a new and fundamentally more ancient type than ‘Bush’or ‘Boskop’ by introducing his Australoid Koranas (Broom 1929, 1941). Broomhypothesized that the robust features he saw in the living Korana were the last remnantsof a very ancient genetic strain akin to the Australian aboriginals who had lived inAfrica as part of a world-wide primitive race in ancient times and whose features couldstill be found amongst the Khoekhoe. Broom could therefore characterize any individualas possessing percentage ancestry according to genetic lines of ‘Australoid’, ‘Negroid’,‘Bush’ or ‘Boskop’, giving him a typological model almost as complex as that of Dart.

In a summary paper on the origin of the Khoekhoe written in 1955, Phillip Tobiastried to create some order out of the profusion of physical types. He identified no lessthan eight genetic lines crossing and combining to produce the living Khoesan and theBantu-speaking peoples of southern Africa (Fig. 1). Although Tobias accepted the varioustypes listed by previous workers, it was clear that he struggled to make sense of theconfusion and this was nearly the last of his published papers that accepted the typologicalmodel without criticism.

GENOTYPES, PHENOTYPES AND LIVING ‘HOTTENTOTS’

South African medical researchers began to focus on blood types in the 1920s and bythe 1950s and 1960s significant data were available on the distribution of the ABOblood group system in South African peoples (Tobias 1966). The Khoekhoe were seento be distinctive in the ABO blood group system because they had very high rates of B,and relatively low rates of A, whereas the San groups had very high rates of A and lowrates of B (Singer et al. 1963; Zoutendyk et al. 1965). A high frequency of B is also

Fig. 1. Chart of human types forming South African peoples (after Tobias 1955).


found in North Africa, so these researchers briefly considered the possibility of theB allele arising from a non-African source, but in the end did not invoke the Hamitichypothesis to explain their data and instead accepted the idea that gene flow from Bantu-speaking people was the most likely cause of the high B frequency. An environmentalcause was also suggested by research that smallpox differentially killed people of bloodgroups A and AB (Vogel & Chakravartti 1966) and that the known smallpox epidemicsthat hit the Khoekhoe in the eighteenth century may have resulted in the high frequencyof B individuals amongst the survivors. What had happened between the early 1950sand the late 1960s that had caused such different interpretations of biological data?Tobias (1974: 4) expressed it thus:

The new approach stresses rather the environmental or selective pressures which have ledpopulations to diverge in genetic compositions. It is concerned with the adaptive benefits, theusefulness, the survival value, the selective advantage or disadvantage, of a particular gene or setof genes. Thus, it sees man in his environment, physical, biotic, social.

Although researchers remained interested in the differences between people, the focushad now shifted to the ‘process’ of change rather than the ‘description’ of variation.Most important was the concept of human adaptability (Morris 2005a). In contrast tothe old typological beliefs, the new physical anthropology recognized that populationschange over time and are highly adaptable in both physiology and anatomy. Two thingsare required for studies with this kind of focus: large, representative sample sizes andan understanding of genetics.

The real break with the typological system in South Africa is marked by the publicationof Ronald Singer’s paper on The Boskop ‘race’ problem in 1958. His paper rejected themythical ‘Boskop’ race and suggested instead that the various types created by Dart,Dreyer, Broom and others, were just part of the range of normal variation seen in Khoesanand Negro populations. Tobias was thinking along the same lines and his first realbreak with typology came with the publication of The meaning of race in 1961. Thecommon factor shared by Tobias and Singer was a background in genetics, a subjectnot well understood by the physical anthropologists of the 1930s and 1940s. Both Singerand Tobias had been exposed to the dynamics of living populations and had hadopportunities to gather data on large populations in the field. For Tobias this had occurredin 1952 when he joined the Rene Panhard Expedition to the Kalahari. For Singer it waswhen he helped to gather serological data on the Malagasy in Madagascar in 1954.

One of the developments in this broader approach was the creation of theWitwatersrand Kalahari Research Committee in 1956 under the chairmanship of Tobias.With typology excluded as the method of analysis, these field trips produced a wealthof studies including physiology, psychology, dental studies, serology and anthropometry(Morris & Tobias 1997; Tobias 1970, 1975). The holistic programme of the KalahariResearch Committee was used as a model in the design of the Human AdaptabilityBranch of the International Biological Programme in 1968. The idea was to look athumans in their environmental context, and the result was a wealth of studies of localpopulations including the Khoekhoe. Many of these were innovative studies workingwith growth and physiology (Krut & Singer 1963; Singer 1970; Singer & Kimura 1981a,1981b, 1986; Singer et al. 1980; Weiner et al. 1964), while others extended the knowledgeof serogenetics in the years before direct DNA mapping was possible (Barnicot et al.1959; Heltne & Singer 1971; Jenkins et al. 1970, 1978; Nurse et al. 1978).


Perhaps the most important paper indicating the shift in vision from the typologicalassessment of the Khoekhoe to a more population-based one is the 1963 work by Singerand Weiner. Originally presented at a symposium on the biology of modern populationsin Chicago in 1962, the paper is a brief summary of the biological differences andsimilarities between ‘Bushmen’, ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Bantu’. A special focus was on theorigin of the Khoekhoe, and the authors dealt in particular with the set of serogeneticdata that was still new at the time. In particular, the authors rejected a non-Africanorigin for the Khoekhoe and suggested that it was unnecessary to look beyond theAfrican context to understand the biological history of the region. Writing in 1978,Singer (1978: 119) accepted the differences between Khoekhoe and San as “what oneexpects in populations that derive from common ancestral stocks and that, after periodsof separation and isolation, come together at various times to remingle their genes”.

Tobias (1972) mined a similar vein in his address to the Royal Society of SouthAfrica which he began by admitting that his own work in the late 1950s had beenamongst the last of the research influenced by the now outmoded typological approachand that a new way of thinking had begun to emerge that he referred to as the biologicalapproach to populations. Like Singer and Weiner before him, he recognized the essentialAfrican origin of all Khoesan and Negro people, but suggested that the Khoesanmorphology was more extreme in value than other African populations and thatdifferences between Khoekhoe and San should be seen in the light of populationseparation over time.

A special symposium of the Royal Society of South Africa was held in June 1971 toexamine the vexed problem of the meaning of identities in southern Africa. Theyproposed that biology, language and economy were things that needed to be studiedindependently and that the same people could have different identities in each of thosethree categories (Jenkins & Tobias 1977). Such an approach, separating ‘Hottentot’language from Khoesan biology and pastoral economy, was the antithesis of the oldtypological models where the underlying assumption was that biology dictated all else.The separation of categories allowed for a much fuller understanding of dynamics ofpopulations and the nature of relationships between different groups of people.

NEW DIRECTIONS

Although the serogentics work in the 1960s and 1970s has brought us a large amount ofunderstanding of genes in populations, the real breakthrough was in the 1980s when itfirst became possible to compare DNA between individuals directly. Himla Soodyalland Trefor Jenkins have been at the forefront of this approach and there is no doubt thattheir work is beginning to explain the patterns of genetic differences in Khoesanpopulations and Khoekhoe groups in particular (Soodyall & Jenkins 1997).Mitochondrial DNA variations amongst the Khoesan have been shown to be the mostdeeply rooted of all living African variants studied and the broad outline of Khoesanorigins and their great antiquity in the region is now clear (Knight et al. 2003; Soodyall2002) but we still need clarity on the genetic differences between Khoekhoe and Sangroups and the timing of their differentiation. This will be one of the research thrusts ofthe future but it is beyond the scope of this paper.

Today, DNA studies have taken over the study of population origin, but we still havemuch to learn from studying the morphology of the people themselves. It is important


to remember that DNA studies and osteological studies are not equivalent, and oftengive us very different pictures of our prehistory because they are not within the samerealm of biological variation (Morris 2005b). But the osteological studies have onefeature that puts them into a completely different category from the DNA studies. Theyactually sample the past. The old bones that are the objects of the analysis do not representthe person from the past; they are part of that person, and therefore have a rich potentialfor information about the life and death of that individual. Hence the continuing need tostudy archaeological skeletons alongside the genetic studies of the living.

Whereas it is possible to draw relatively large samples of living peoples for geneticstudies, work on skeletons is limited by the availability of specimens. Starting in the1960s there was an attempt to generate samples of skeletons on the basis of ‘known inlife identity’ (Morris 1986, 1987). The archaeological or historical context was used toidentify individuals according to the communities from which they came and not bybiological category. Much of this was triggered by W.W. Howells who came throughSouth Africa in 1964 and 1965 gathering data for his worldwide compendium on humancranial variation (Howells 1973). Stern and Singer in 1967 debated the difficulty inidentifying individuals who could be said to be ‘Bushmen’ or ‘Hottentots’ and lamentedthat the sample of Khoekhoe who were ‘known in life’ was dreadfully small. AliceHausman (1982) tried to follow this up by looking at samples drawn from differentecological regions (actually reminiscent of Peringuey’s geographic categories from theturn of the century), but her work was still plagued by the problem of identity ofKhoekhoe skeletons (Morris 1986).

One problem of this work was that it still posed questions in a format that requiredclear ethnic identities. While the historians and archaeologists were proposing modelsof population movements and replacements that needed to be tested, the physicalanthropologists were asking questions that were more appropriate in a typological mode.My catalogue of Holocene skeletons (Morris 1992b) was an attempt to break awayfrom this ethnic and racial trap. It invited the testing of archaeological hypotheses bylisting over 2500 Holocene skeletons with temporal, geographic and burial context.The idea was to provide a database from which new hypotheses could be tested. Nowherein the entire catalogue are any skeletons listed with specific identities of Khoekhoe orSan or Negro or with any other ethno-racial tag. The idea was to let the hypothesis begenerated by the geographic distribution and the archaeology of the skeletons. One ofthe inspirations for the catalogue was an underrated Masters thesis by Frank Silberbauerin 1979 who examined skeletons that were drawn from different burial patterns in theEastern Cape. He used ethnographic information that identified burials in the open withlarge cairns as belonging to pastoralists, while burials in caves or found as isolatedunmarked graves in shell middens were of foragers. His analysis of dietary biochemistryof human bone produced isotopic signatures that showed his hypothesis to be correct.

The catalogue of Holocene skeletons is now being used by researchers specificallyto test hypotheses that are generated by the samples. Pfeiffer and Sealy and their studentshave looked at stature and body build along with dietary differences in biochemistryover time and place during the Holocene (Sealy 2006; Sealy & Pfeiffer 2000; Stock &Pfeiffer 2004). Unfortunately the most recent osteological studies have not involvedKhoekhoe populations. Deano Stynder (2006) has used morphometrics to see how themorphology patterned over time during the Later Stone Age, but he has not included


samples more recent than 2000 years ago. The reason why these studies have avoidedskeletons in the last 2000 years is because they have wanted to avoid the hunter-herderdebate and concentrate on a single economic mode. In addition there are very few datedskeletons from within the last 2000 years, but the number is increasing. Morris et al.(2004–05) have suggested that two individuals from Voëlvlei dated to about 700 yearsago show isotopic, statural and cultural patterns that indicate a Khoekhoe identity. Thereare now about 20 skeletons from this time period and it may be possible to begin lookingat them for trends over time and signs of population change.

How much of the old data can we salvage? Simply, if it is population-based, then itwill still be valid, but if the data have been collected from typologically selectedindividuals, then the data must go into the archive of the history of science. What wehave learned over the last century of study of the biology of the Khoekhoe is that humanbiological history is about dynamics. The people we study, whether the studies involveDNA from living individuals or bones from the long dead, need to be understood asmembers of self-defined and local communities and not representatives of observer-generated races. Identity is part of this complexity, with socio-cultural and biologicalidentities weaving a complex fabric that is not necessarily the same at different pointsof history.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the organizers of the Khoekhoe Workshop for bringing togetherthe disparate disciplines and giving us the opportunity to share our thoughts.

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