Farmer-forager frontiers

San hunter-gatherers responded in various ways to the appearance of herders and agriculturists in southern Africa in the last 2000 years.

In the north eastern Karoo, San at times shared the landscape with herders. They resisted changing to a herding way of life. In other regions they adopted herding or were absorbed into farming communities.

Complex cultural, social and economic patterns developed as groups interacted with one another. Distinctive stone walled villages along the Riet River, thought to have been made by former hunter-gatherers in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, are an example of this process.