This chapter outlines a narrative for precolonial farming societies of the second millennium A.D. in South Africa and highlights several themes. The first is that this is a period when trade relations with the wider world intensified, first with Swahili based in their East African coastal entrepôts and later with the Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The outcomes of these contacts vary, but a second theme draws attention to trade as an important factor in the growth of political complexity and the rise of social hierarchies. Some of these are referred to as state level in their complexity. In reviewing this complexity, however, the essay resists an inclination to reify steeply hierarchical systems over those that contextually combined factors of trade, wealth, and contact in different ways, that, although not monumental in scale, are no less important.

Third, the second millennium is a period when the identities that emerged historically can be identified, traced, and tracked fairly securely by a combination of archaeological, oral, and written sources. It is not a period of historical anonymity. This overlaps with the last theme, which relates to method, emphasizing in particular issues relating to analogy and the unavoidable and complex relationship between ethnographic models and their ampliative role. Ethnographic models extol cultural structure and capture historical context only in the broadest of ways. This characteristic is exacerbated when used in conjunction with structuralist assumptions.