Wits University Press has given us permission to publish an extract from the landmark new book Forgotten World - The Stone Walled Settlements of the Mpumalanga Escarpment by Peter Delius, Tim Maggs and Alex Schoeman. This research begins to answer some of the key questions behind 'one of the most extraordinary archaeological and historical phenomena in southern Africa'.
Conflicting Readings of the Rocks
If you drive through Mpumalanga – perhaps on your way to Nelspruit or the Kruger National Park – and look carefully out at the land, you could see something remarkable. Once you leave the vast expanses of the highveld you descend into the rolling hills and open valleys of the escarpment. The changing seasonal hues of the mountain slopes are dotted with clusters of evergreen trees and darkly forested kloofs. If you keep a close eye on the landscape flashing by you will see fragments – large and small – of building in stone, near the sides of the road and further away on the hills above you and the valleys below. Once your curiosity is pricked you may find that wherever you look you will see sections of stone walling breaking the grass cover, and kilometre after kilometre of stone ridging traversing the hillsides. If you were to fly over the area in a small plane you would be amazed by the endless stone circles, set in bewildering mazes and linked by long stone passages, that cover the landscape below. In some places the coverage is quite sparse and intermittent but...
