Historical Time versus the Imagination of Antiquity: Critical Perspectives from the Kalahari

Anthropologists have long distinguished between the narrative forms of myth and history in human retellings of the past. Evans-Pritchard in his lecture ‘Anthropology and history’ noted the different character of myth and history, stating that myth ‘is not concerned so much with a succession of events as with the moral significance of situations, and is hence often allegorical or symbolical in form’. In interpreting archaeological evidence about the past, there lies a crossroads between the possibility of becoming historical in Collingwood’s sense, and the self-conscious propagation of myths. Technological opportunism appears to be a modus operandi for people making beads in the Kalahari, and the use of a variety of materials does not seem to be constrained by conservative notions of tradition.