Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/28

4 though not usually so large. It is only by accident that they are found, for on the surface of the undulating soil there is no indication of their existence. They are turned to account by farmers at the present day, who use their contents as fertilisers for cultivated ground. In Europe, notably along the coast of Denmark, similar mounds have been exposed, and are there termed kitchen middens, a name that might also be used here. It would be convenient if the people who lived so largely upon shellfish had a distinctive name given to them, for the word strandloopers (beach-rangers), applied to them by some recent writers, causes much confusion. That word was used in the middle of the seventeenth century by the first Dutch settlers in South Africa to denote a very different class of people, an impoverished people of mixed Hottentot and Bushman blood, speaking the Hottentot language and whenever possible following Hottentot customs, who from dire necessity were reduced at times to eke out a miserable existence in the same manner as the far more ancient men of the shell mounds, and it has since been commonly used in history to signify them alone. The others—those alluded to in this paragraph—were beachrangers, it is true, but that was their normal mode of existence, and to distinguish them from the very different beachrangers of recent times I propose to term them the Ancient Shellmound Men.

The mounds referred to, however, may have had their origin at a time not exceedingly remote, for those who have examined them carefully have found no apparent change in the physical features of the country since the earliest deposit was made. The shore was then where it is to-day, though the rocks along it may have undergone some slight alteration of form from the action of winds and waves. Much older are various stone implements shaped by human hands, which have been found in situations where they must have lain undisturbed for an incalculable length of time. For instance, they have been picked up in gravel washed by a stream into a recess when its bed was more than twelve