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The Greefswald Sequence: Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Brian Fagan
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Abstract

The Iron Age sites known as Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo on the farm Greefswald, 55 miles west of Messina in the northern Transvaal, South Africa, have aroused world-wide speculation ever since their discovery in the early 1930s. This international interest has been considerably stimulated by the publication of the second volume of the Mapungubwe report in late 1963. Much unnecessary confusion as to the significance of The Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo sites has been caused by the long delay in the publication of this second volume, and this has made a critical leview of the Iron Age sequence in this desolate corner of the Middle Limpopo valley a matter of some urgency. The Greefswald sequence is of vital importance to South African history, for the sites have been held to show that the earliest Iron Age population of South Africa was non-Negro. In addition, they have been used to provide a fairly accurate indication of the date at which Bantu-speaking peoples first crossed the middle reaches o the Limpopo.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , November 1964 , pp. 337 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1964

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