With his book Foragers in the middle Limpopo Valley: trade, place-making, and social complexity South African archaeologist Tim Forssman takes us on a journey back in time across a region that is critical in southern Africa for understanding the complex mechanisms behind the evolution of past human societies. The middle Limpopo Valley extends into South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana, and is celebrated for its rich cultural heritage, natural beauty and plentiful wildlife, including herds of elephants that attracted Iron Age communities and European hunters alike. Located at the confluence of the Limpopo, the Shashe and the Motloutse Rivers, this region hosts several rockshelters that preserve the traces of the last foragers to have lived in the area. They are the main protagonists of this book. One must acknowledge that the archaeological record associated with these foragers is not spectacular. What makes the region remarkable, however, is the fact that not only is it one of the few places in the world where foragers interacted for several centuries with farmers, but it is also where foragers shared a territory with farming communities at a time when they were organising themselves into one of the first African, state-level societies at Mapungubwe.

The author proposes a preliminary synthesis of the nature of interactions between foragers and farmers in the middle Limpopo Valley, with, as the subtitle suggests, a particular emphasis on trade, place-making and social complexity. He examines the period preceding the appearance of the first farmers in the area beginning around 1200 BC, until the decline of Mapungubwe's influence at AD 1300. He builds his reasoning on his own experience as a field archaeologist and lithic analyst who has spent the last decade working in the region, as well as on existing information from the recent literature. The author considers data from nine rockshelters of different dimensions and possibly distinct uses by foragers: Balerno Main, Tshisiku, Balerno Shelters 2 and 3, Little Muck, Dzombo, Mafunyane, João and Euphorbia.

The outline of the book generally follows that of a research article. The first chapter sets the scene by introducing the main characters of the book and explaining its goals. It is concise and requires of the reader an existing degree of familiarity with the area, the chronological period and the specific terms related, for instance, to southern African geography and the different ceramic facies of the Iron Age sequence. Chapter 2 presents the region and the sites under consideration. The results of excavations and analyses of lithic assemblages from these sites are described in Chapters 3–5. The author considers four chronological phases of unequal length, which are divided according to the evolution of farming communities. The first phase (from 1220 BC until AD 100) precedes the first contact with farmers and serves as a backdrop against which the following behaviours can be compared. The second phase (from AD 100–900) is consistent with the early phase of interactions between foragers and farmers in the region. The third phase (AD 900–1000) relates to the arrival of farmers using a distinct type of ceramics (Zhizo) in the region and to social and political changes within farming communities, which eventually led to the development of state-level society during the fourth phase. This last phase covers the apogee of Mapungubwe from AD 1000 until its decline at AD 1300.

Forssman highlights the existing imbalance in archaeological research in the region, which has focused on the appearance of farming communities and the rise of state-level society, while overlooking the cultural developments of foragers living in the region at the same time. He strongly argues against the general interpretation that foragers did not experience internal social and cultural change in the last two millennia and that they were mostly passive in their interactions with farmers. The strength of the book is to propose a politically engaged and fresh look at these foragers and afford them the possibility of having as much agency as did farmers in the cultural, social and political changes taking place in the region. Disjointed research projects have taken place in the middle Limpopo Valley and the author is to be applauded for this first attempt at synthesising information on foragers in the area. While academic and political reasons might contribute to an explanation of why, historically, little attention has been devoted to foragers in this region, it is also the case that the traces they have left in the archaeological record are faint and not straightforward to interpret. The sites presented in this book contain shallow deposits, whose integrity is not always obvious, as indicated by a few instances of chronological reversals. The lack of detailed geoarchaeological information on site-formation processes (in general for the region and at the sites included in this book in particular) render many of the behavioural interpretations proposed by the author somewhat fragile. A large part of the argument rests on varying densities of lithics (raw material used and types of tools). This is questionable in itself when considering the nature of the archaeological record. It is particularly so when looking only at a few square metres from a handful of sites and when the variations themselves are often based on small sample sizes and are so tenuous that one wonders whether they would stand the test of statistical significance. I would regard some of the behavioural interpretations proposed by the author in Chapters 6–7 as hypotheses that need to be tested by continuous fieldwork and the application of more comprehensive geoarchaeological work. In sum, I consider this book a first milestone paving the way for future work in the middle Limpopo Valley.