{"it":{"id":"AFR-001","kind":"site","sub":"Africa outside Egypt","name":"Blaauboschkraal stone ruins","place":"South Africa","lat":-25.595,"lon":30.289,"nfacts":5,"tags":["Africa"],"sum":"Across the hills of Mpumalanga in South Africa run thousands of stone-walled homesteads, terraces and cattle paths. Blaauboschkraal is one cluster in that system, declared a national monument in 1975. On average its walls stand about 1.2 m tall.","why":"Blaauboschkraal shows a sophisticated African farming landscape that was long under-studied, leaving room for much older stories to fill the gap.","src":[274,555],"nsrc":3,"yt":"How large was the Bokoni population that built and farmed these terraces, and what would excavation need to show to estimate it?","rel":["AFR-002"],"hook":"Bokoni farmers ringed a hidden valley homestead with stone walls to keep cattle off the crop terraces"},"S":{"274":["Wikipedia: Blaauboschkraal stone ruins","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaauboschkraal_stone_ruins"],"555":["SAHRA heritage register: Blaauboschkraal Stone Ruins, site 9/2/282/0008","https://sahris.sahra.org.za/sites/922820008"]},"rec":{"id":"AFR-001","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"150 kilometres long north to south and around","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"50","u":"km","o":"In this region there is a clustering of stone walled settlements which span for 10,000 square kilometres, approximately 150 kilometres long north to south and around 50 km east to west.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blaauboschkraal_stone_ruins&oldid=1375364913","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375364913 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0562"},{"f":"the stone walls in the Mpumalanga region are","a":"height","v":"1.2","u":"meters","o":"While the exact height of the Blaauboschkraal stone ruins is unknown, on average the stone walls in the Mpumalanga region are 1.2 meters tall and the least damaged parts reaching 2 metres tall.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blaauboschkraal_stone_ruins&oldid=1375364913","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375364913 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0563"},{"f":"meters tall and the least damaged parts reaching","a":"height","v":"2","u":"metres","o":"While the exact height of the Blaauboschkraal stone ruins is unknown, on average the stone walls in the Mpumalanga region are 1.2 meters tall and the least damaged parts reaching 2 metres tall.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blaauboschkraal_stone_ruins&oldid=1375364913","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375364913 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0564"},{"f":"the region is estimated to have been around","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"660-1000","u":"mm","o":"During the period of the Bokoni average rainfall in the region is estimated to have been around 660-1000mm per annum.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blaauboschkraal_stone_ruins&oldid=1375364913","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375364913 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0565"},{"f":"the average size of Bokoni stone walls are","a":"height","v":"1.2","u":"metres","o":"These effects have been seen as the average size of Bokoni stone walls are 1.2 metres high, but some are 2 metres high indicating the effect of the weather.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blaauboschkraal_stone_ruins&oldid=1375364913","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1375364913 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0566"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"-25.5947","lon":"30.2888","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0000 deg (~0.00 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/582805243"},"src":[{"id":"S0268","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blaauboschkraal_stone_ruins&oldid=1375364913"},{"id":"S0438","t":"Wikipedia: Blaauboschkraal stone ruins","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaauboschkraal_stone_ruins"},{"id":"S2556","t":"SAHRA heritage register: Blaauboschkraal Stone Ruins, site 9/2/282/0008","u":"https://sahris.sahra.org.za/sites/922820008"},{"id":"VAFR-001-4","t":"Stockholm University (DiVA): full-text thesis 898073","u":"https://su.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:898073/FULLTEXT02.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Delius, Maggs and Schoeman 2016, extract from Forgotten World: The Stone-Walled Settlements of the Mpumalanga Escarpment (Wits University Press), The Heritage Portal","u":"https://www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/one-most-extraordinary-archaeological-and-historical-phenomena-southern-africa"},{"id":null,"t":"Delius and Schirmer 2014, Order, openness, and economic change in precolonial southern Africa: a perspective from the Bokoni terraces, Journal of African History 55(1): 37–54 (abstract and notes)","u":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853713000844"}],"sum":"Drive the road toward Nelspruit, in eastern South Africa, and the hills of the Mpumalanga escarpment look at first like ordinary grassland broken by rock. Then the eye adjusts. On the slopes and in the folds of the valleys there are rings of stacked stone, lines of stone running along the contours, and long walled lanes that wind between them. The historian Peter Delius and the archaeologists Tim Maggs and Alex Schoeman describe the view from the air as \"endless stone circles, set in bewildering mazes and linked by long stone passages.\" In one steep valley above the Blouboskraalspruit river, hidden in a kloof, a wooded ravine, rather than set out on open ground, a group of those circles rings a central homestead. That is Blaauboschkraal.\n\nTo a newcomer the ruin is easy to read once you know what you are looking at. In the middle stands the homestead, a set of dry-stone enclosures built without mortar. Around it run outer walls that archaeologists think kept cattle, sheep and goats away from the crops. Below, on the slopes, step the terraces where those crops grew. Walls across the region average about 1.2 metres high, about chest height on an adult, and the best-preserved stretches reach 2 metres. The site was declared a national monument on 18 April 1975. It lies about 10 kilometres from the town of Emgwenya.\n\nBlaauboschkraal is one small piece of something enormous. The stone-walled landscape stretches from Ohrigstad in the north to Carolina in the south and covers more than 10,000 square kilometres, the size of a small country. Its terraced fields run for some 150 kilometres along the escarpment. Historians now call the whole region Bokoni, \"the land of the Koni people,\" the oldest name for the area that has survived. Delius and his colleague Stefan Schirmer call it \"the largest known terraced site in Africa.\"\n\nA Bokoni settlement had three parts, and each tells you something about the people who built it. There were homesteads of stone circles. There were terraces on the slopes. And there were long walled lanes that led cattle between them, so herds could pass through farmland without trampling it. The Wits University archaeologist Dave Collett concluded that the complex central enclosures were cattle pens, while simpler circles scattered through a settlement held smaller stock. Some of the rocks in the terrace walls carry grooves worn by sharpening metal hoes, the small clue that marked these long stone ridges as fields. Mats Widgren and his colleagues, who studied the terraces closely in 2016, also recorded clearance cairns, heaps of stones lifted out of the soil, and lines of stones marking the boundary between one plot and the next. Their best comparisons lie far to the north: the stone lines of the Dogon country in Mali, the fields of Engaruka in Tanzania, the terraces of Nyanga in Zimbabwe.\n\nThink about what that means in human terms. Every one of those stones was lifted by hand. The terraces were not built to a single grand plan in a single season. Widgren's team found that they grew gradually, with clearing, cultivating and walling going on together over years and generations, each family adding to what its parents had left. Rainfall in the region is estimated at around 660 to 1,000 millimetres a year, enough to farm but not enough to waste. A landscape like this is a long conversation between people and a hillside.\n\nWho were they, and when? Delius and Schirmer put the flowering of Bokoni at about 1500 to the 1820s, and Widgren's 2016 study gives a range from about the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Oral histories place people linked with Bokoni in the region by the seventeenth century. One site was dated by radiocarbon in the 1970s to the early nineteenth century, a result the excavators treat with caution but which fits glass beads of that century found there. Trade with the coast near Maputo may have helped the society prosper, with Bokoni possibly supplying cattle and surplus food. What they grew is the hardest question of all. A pilot study of phytoliths, microscopic silica bodies left behind by plants, pointed to maize on the terraces, but its authors call it a pilot that needs testing by other methods. Large grindstones of the kind usually linked to maize are the only other physical hint.\n\nThe end came with violence. In the early nineteenth century, raiding and war tied to the upheavals known as the Mfecane brought a new order built on guns and strongholds, and the population, in Delius and Schirmer's word, \"plummeted.\" Archaeologists place the hidden kloof sites like Blaauboschkraal in this last phase, when people pulled back from open ground into refuges. By the 1830s the homesteads and terraces had been abandoned, and Pedi rule took over the former Bokoni lands. It is an old pattern in human history: a society organised around production meets one organised around force, and the walls that once kept cattle out of the maize become places to hide.\n\nThen came a second loss, slower and stranger. Scholars first arrived in the region for the rock engravings at Boomplaats near Lydenburg, described by Cornelis Pijper in 1918. In 1939 E. C. van Hoepen of the National Museum in Bloemfontein published the first full study of the stone-walled sites and concluded that black African farmers built them. Then research stalled, a silence Delius, Maggs and Schoeman link to apartheid after 1948. In the early 1960s Revil Mason of Wits University plotted the sites from aerial photographs and counted 1,792 of them. Later work credited the ruins to the Pedi kingdom. Only since the 2000s have historians and archaeologists working together separated Bokoni from the Pedi and given its builders back their own name.\n\nInto that long silence poured other stories. Cyril Hromník has held that the sites were Hindu temples tied to Indian gold traders. Johan Heine and Michael Tellinger claim that a stone cluster near Kaapsehoop is \"Adam's Calendar,\" dated by an amateur astronomer to about 75,000 years ago, and Tellinger, influenced by Zecharia Sitchin, has promoted the ruins as far older works. Richard Wade proposed that they were observatories built before Mapungubwe, before about AD 1200. None of these rests on excavated dating. Excavations have produced pottery and the remains of mud-and-clay houses that are plainly African, and the three historians conclude that the exotic readings rest on \"speculation rather than credible evidence.\"\n\nYet the gaps those stories rushed to fill are real, and they are worth stating precisely. Blaauboschkraal's exact age is unknown, and little detailed research has been done there. The settlements as a whole have not been scientifically dated. The crops rest on a single pilot test. Nobody knows how many people lived here at the peak. The true extent of the terraces is probably undercounted, because abandoned terraces act as firebreaks and quickly grow over with trees. Whether the valley floors were farmed too is still debated, since later ploughing has erased the evidence. And the cattle lanes raise a question of their own: were the herds stall-fed, their manure carried to the fields, in a system rare in southern Africa outside Nyanga? Delius has warned that the most pressing danger is weak protection, and has called for an audit and the prosecution of vandals.\n\nSo the mystery of Bokoni is not who built it. It is how much we still do not know about people who were standing in front of us all along, and how readily the world reached past them for an explanation from somewhere else. A reliable series of radiocarbon or luminescence dates from Blaauboschkraal itself would settle more arguments than any theory. Until then the walls keep their own counsel, ten thousand square kilometres of them, stone laid on stone by hands that left no writing. How much of the human past, on any continent, has been lost not because it was hidden, but because nobody thought to ask the people who made it?","qs":["How large was the Bokoni population that built and farmed these terraces, and what would excavation need to show to estimate it?","Did the move into hidden kloofs during the Mfecane change how Bokoni households farmed and herded?","Why have stone ruins in southern Africa so often been credited to outsiders rather than to the people who built them?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Bokoni_Stone_Ruins.jpg/1280px-Bokoni_Stone_Ruins.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bokoni_Stone_Ruins.jpg","title":"Bokoni Stone Ruins.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"MaruAttwood","cap":"Bokoni Stone Ruins, Mpumalanga, October 2020"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Bauwboschkraal_Stone_Ruins_30-April_2023.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bauwboschkraal_Stone_Ruins_30-April_2023.jpg","title":"Bauwboschkraal Stone Ruins 30-April 2023.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Sháron Viljoen","cap":"This is a photo taken at the Blaauboshckraal Stone Ruins showing the outside wall of the upper portoin of the ruins."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Pleuroceras_ammonite_with_no_background.png/1280px-Pleuroceras_ammonite_with_no_background.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pleuroceras_ammonite_with_no_background.png","title":"Pleuroceras ammonite with no background.png","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Llez (H. Zell).","cap":"Pleuroceras solare, Amaltheidae; Pyritic specimen; Diameter 3.2 cm; Upper Pliensbachian, Lower Jurassic; Little Switzerland, Bavaria, Germany. own collection, t"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/AFR-001.webp","w":1280,"h":1094,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Bokoni_Stone_Ruins.jpg/1280px-Bokoni_Stone_Ruins.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}