Medieval City in Southern Africa

Hey guys, it's me, Hidden History, and welcome to a new series, African Archaeology, where I'll be talking about African Archaeology. Wow, big surprise. In this series, I'll discuss major archaeological finds on the African continent. I don't expect uploads on this series to be very frequent, not because Africa lacks content for videos to be made on, but because Africa does not have a driving archaeological scene at the current moment. Despite many of Africa's ancient civilizations remaining unexcavated, which is truly a tragedy. Anyway, enough with the sad talk and on with the subject. Somewhat recently, archaeologists from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa used lidar technology to locate the remains of a city likely inhabited by Tiswana speaking Bantu peoples near Suiker Bosrand Hill, about an hour south of Johannesburg, an important South African city. The city would have likely been about 10 kilometers long and about two kilometers wide, and had the remains of 800 homesteads located in it, which could have housed the multiple thousands of inhabitants during its lifespan from the 1500s to the 1800s. In the center of the city, there are the remains of two large stone enclosures surrounding an area of about 10,000 meters. The archaeologists who did the dig suspected this was a cattle prowl, as cattle was generally of high importance in Southern African societies. The city was likely very complex in design and social hierarchy, with multiple different passageways leading to different sectors of the city that could have been areas that people of different classes lived in. And there definitely is some evidence of a complex social hierarchy, which can be seen by the use of heaps of discarded goods, like ashes from cow dung, animal bones, and broken pottery around homes. This may sound strange to us, but heaps like this were actually common as an indicator of wealth and status in many civilizations and cultures around the world, and are in some form still practiced today in certain places. The idea behind it is that you're showing off what stuff that you used, and therefore what stuff you own. If I own more cows, then I have more cow dung, and therefore I have more cow dung ash, which means that I must be of high status. Stone towers have also been found around homesteads as well, of varying heights and width, but generally ranging from about 1.5 to 2.5 meters in height, and up to 4.9 meters in width. Interestingly, homesteaded more stone towers often had larger heaps nearby them. So while we're not entirely sure of the purpose of these towers yet, due to this fact, it's possible that they were correlated to some sort of indication of status. It's generally believed that the city fell in the 1800s during the Mfecani, which was a crisis largely caused by the rise of the hyper-militaristic Zulu people farther south, and the subsequent rise of multiple other militaristic South African Nguni peoples. The Mfecani was a period of chaos in which Nguni people campaigned north from their homelands, killing and conquering peoples in numbers estimated to be as high as about 2 million. Among the conquered were numerous different Tshwana cities in South Africa, likely including this one found by archaeologists. We have yet to truly reconstruct the history of this city, and seeing as to how archaeology is a slow process, it may be a long time until we do. But regardless, this find is a very important one in reconstructing the history of Southern Africa, its people, culture, practices, and societies.