This chapter sets out some of the key frameworks within which southern African archaeology operates. It first establishes the boundaries of ‘southern Africa’ for the purposes of this book and then examines the region’s physical geography. The climate and topography described frame southern Africa’s present-day ecology, which is discussed using the biome divisions of Mucina and Rutherford (2006). The chapter then considers how environmental change affected southern Africa during the Quaternary (using the well-known Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) system), the data that archaeologists and others use to reconstruct past environments, and the principal climatic mechanisms at work in the region. It concludes by outlining and assessing the major chronometric and other dating methods employed to build the chronological framework of southern Africa’s past.