KWENENG: HOW TO LOSE A PRECOLONIAL CITY

摘要

LiDAR imagery has revealed a precolonial Tswana capital, Kweneng, just south of Johannesburg. How could such an extensive town have gone unnoticed for two centuries? Tests reveal that vegetation obscured many of the ruins. Another reason is that Kweneng lies in a historical blind spot, and the memory of the place does not seem to have survived the Difeqane civil wars of the early 19th century. A third important reason is that an earlier generation of archaeologists who examined aerial photographs of this area in the 1960s failed to record the extraordinarily dense concentration of ruins at Kweneng.