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.

The discovery of the McMurdo Dry Valleys was an accidental result of the desire in polar exploration to find the South Magnetic Pole and the South Geographic Pole. James Clark Ross was astonished in 1841, after pushing his way through a thick collar of pack ice, to suddenly sail into an open body of water, McMurdo Sound, finding a large island (Ross Island) like Hawaii formed by a series of several large volcanoes, one of which was smoking and ready to erupt. He came here to find the South Magnetic Pole, which was too far inland to the west to reach easily on foot, as he had done years earlier in reaching the North Magnetic Pole. This opened the way for Robert Falcon Scott to come here in 1902–1904 with his Discovery expedition to make and attempt on the Pole. He set up camp on Ross Island and stayed for two years exploring various ways to reach the Pole. Albert Armitage, one his men, pushed a route directly west to see what was there and was astonished to find large valleys fully free of ice and snow, the McMurdo Dry Valleys.