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We suggest a model for how some foragers may have become stock-keepers in the past. Forager bee-keepers stay in one place, and cultivate a storable and exchangeable product, honey. This desired product has been used by the Okiek forager bee-keepers of Kenya to obtain livestock from their pastoralist/agropastoralist neighbours. We believe that amongst foragers such as these the transition to livestock keeping would not have been as difficult as is sometimes postulated. We describe parallels between sheep, bees, their products and their keeping, which are informative to the debate. The difficulty for archaeologists is that the archaeology of bee-keeping is largely invisible. There are exceptions, interactions between foragers and bees are painted in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg mountains, KwaZulu-Natal. Here too, are paintings of sheep that we suggest are old and represent how foragers may have thought of sheep during first encounters.

Faye Lander’s research interests include the rock art of southern Africa, the transition to livestock-keeping and human-animal relations. She completed her masters in 2014 with a thesis titled, ‘An investigation into the painted sheep imagery of the northern uKhahlamba-Drakensberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’.  She is currently looking at the movement of the first agriculturists into southern Africa and forager responses to this spread as part of her doctoral degree in Archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Thembi Russell completed an undergraduate degree at UCT in Archaeology and Biochemistry and, for her honours research, went on to look at the relative chronology of rock paintings in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg. During her PhD at the University of Southampton she explored how people and things moved on the landscape in the past. On completing her PhD in 2002, she was employed at the Rock Art Research Institute at Wits and later transferred to the Department of Archaeology, where she now holds a research post. Her research projects are focussed on the rock art of the Northern uKhahlamba-Drakensberg and the spread of Bantu-language speaking agriculturists in southern Africa.