BUSHMEN, Kalahari hunter-gatherers and their descendants

206pp., illus., maps, paperback, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019 

ISBN: 9781108406871

Drawing on his four decades of field research in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, Alan Barnard provides a detailed account of the original hunter-gatherers of southern Africa known as Bushmen or San. His study covers ethnography, archaeology, folklore, religious studies and rock-art studies, as well as several other fields, including social development and politics, both historically and in the present day, helping us to reconstruct both human prehistory and a better understanding of ourselves.

"Probes the great questions - such as human ancestry, and the origins of art - that are posed and possibly answered by anthropology's multifaceted engagement with these hunter-gatherers. Reading Barnard's detailed evidence for the enormous ideas he addresses with such clarity here, I felt I was spending a series of grand evenings by the fire with a fine and encyclopaedically knowledgeable conversationalist. I will read this work of intellectual generosity more than once, and with gratitude." Dr Megan Bielele, founding member, Kalahari Peoples Fund, and Adjunct Professor in Anthropology, Michigan State University and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln

Alan Barnard is Emeritus Professor of the Anthropology of Southern Africa, University of Edinburgh, and has over 40 years' experience of field research with Bushmen or San in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. His publications include Language in Prehistory (2016), Genesis of Symbolic Thought (2012) and Social Anthropology and Human Origins (2011).