Out of Place: Postcolonial Legacy and Indigenous Heritage in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Indigenous peoples the world over are speaking out for their rights in former colonial societies. The term Indigenous, derived from Latin, means within, originating where it is found, or belonging to a particular place by birth or origin, a temporal claim to a place. In an archaeological sense, the San can claim to be the true Indigenous people in all of southern Africa, having lived in the region for thousands of years, before any migrations, and well before any colonial onslaught. Yet in the Northern Cape, South Africa, well-known for a significant concentration of rock engravings and archaeological sites, the current San inhabitants are the most recent arrivals, with no record of an Indigenous population since at least the mid-nineteenth century. In 1999 the South African government resettled some 400 formerly military !Xu and Khwe families of different origins, language backgrounds, and histories in Platfontein without any deliberations about their relation to local boundaries, history or heritage. Indigeneity here is far more complicated and vexing. In this chapter I probe the quest for an authentic Indigenous past of ancient images, to show that the complex history of postcolonial locales demands that archaeologists attend to the dislocations and violence of global forces of the past hundreds of years. The insistence on ancient roots of Indigenous people in a place can effectively deprive them of a role in global history, and of agency in political events. Contested spaces, centuries of conflict, truce, and temporary agreements that fester and erupt with unsurprising regularity are all a part of the context that frames ancient images. We should account for this context when studying them, in order to avoid one-dimensional, simplistic notions of Indigenous heritage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".