Verlorenkloof Farm

I would like to discuss a topic very close to my heart. One which my dad has been interested in for some time and researched extensively. That is the stone circles found in Mpumalanga. Most of the mountains and hills of Mpumalanga have stone circles on them and extensive road networks joining them to one another. This has long been thought of as just homes of the local peoples and their cattle kraals. They were therefore dismissed as being of any real value or importance archaeologically. However, it has since been proven by means of extensive investigation and discovery of artefacts, rock art and satellite and aerial imagery, that these people, the Bokoni or Koni people were much more advanced.

Forgotten World, the epic study by Delius, Maggs and Schoeman

They were farmers, forgers of weapons and tools, miners and traders. The smelting of iron and copper and forging of weapons and tools from iron ore and mixing this with charcoal and fluxes to get steel takes a very specialized skillset, even some form of chemistry to get the mixture right for the steel to be strong enough to be of use. This later developed into a specialty performed by only specific people and the skill was then passed down within those families. The chief of the village prized the metal-workers as the skill allowed...

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...