U-M expert explains archaeological significance of small African country, a vital source of freshwater and crucial to the study of biodiversity
President Donald Trump says "nobody has ever heard of" Lesotho, the tiny southern African kingdom that is the target of U.S. aid cuts and may lose trade access to the American market.
University of Michigan archaeologist Brian Stewart has studied extensively in the country, examining the behavioral complexity of the region's previous hunter-gatherer inhabitants and how early members of our species adapted to its mountainous environments.
Over 15 trips to the country, Stewart has explored when and why people first began using Lesotho's mountains intensively, studied how hunter-gatherers adjusted their diets and technology to suit new environmental and social conditions, discovered how ancient people exchanged ostrich eggshell beads to reinforce social relationships, and revealed how their spiritual traditions reflect their ecological history.
Nature correspondence: Lesotho matters
Stewart and co-authors Nthabiseng Mokoena-Mokhali of the National University of Lesotho, Liteboho Senyane of the University of Johannesburg and Peter Mitchell of the University of Oxford published a commentary in Nature speaking to the archaeological importance of Lesotho.
For those who aren't very familiar with Lesotho, what are some things people should know about the country?
Lesotho is a country in southern Africa about the size of Belgium. It is one of only a handful of sovereign nations to be completely surrounded by another, in this case South Africa. Most people in Lesotho are southern Sotho or Basotho (singular Masotho) and speak Sesotho, an isiNtu (Bantu) language closely related to Setswana and Sepedi. However, ethnic minorities also live there, including Zulus, Xhosas and various non-Africans (mostly Europeans and Asians).
Visitors are often struck by the country's beauty-a rugged landscape of high, craggy mountains cut by deep valleys with caves, waterfalls and forests. Nicknamed the "mountain kingdom" and the "kingdom in the sky," Lesotho's terrain is composed almost entirely of mountains. Called the Maloti (Sesotho for "mountains"), they are mostly covered in temperate, prairie-like grasses. Lesotho also has the highest low point of any nation on Earth. Along the country's eastern border with South Africa, the Maloti fall away abruptly to form the Drakensberg Escarpment, named uKhahlamba or "barrier of spears" by the Zulu on account of its dramatic cliffs set beneath jagged peaks.
The Maloti receive some of the highest rainfall in southern Africa and the Orange River, Africa's largest south of the Zambezi, rises in Lesotho's northwest. For a parched subcontinent Lesotho is thus a vital source of freshwater, which is the country's main export. From large hydroelectric dams in the highlands water is pumped hundreds air miles into South Africa to provide for use in agriculture and mining as well as drinking water for major urban centers like Johannesburg.
As its nicknames suggest, Lesotho is a constitutional monarchy. Founded in 1824, it became a British protectorate from 1868 until its independence in 1966. While its people suffered colonial subjugation, they were not subjected to the racist brutality of South Africa's Apartheid regime. In fact, Lesotho became a refuge for many anti-Apartheid activists and other dissidents fleeing South Africa during those tumultuous decades. Both then and more recently, Lesotho's relationship with its much larger neighbor has sometimes been politically turbulent, but the two economies are tightly intertwined and the international border is crossed thousands of times a day by people doing business or visiting family and friends, similar to that between the US and Canada.
The Basotho have a rich history and vibrant cultural traditions of which they are justifiably proud. They are perhaps best known for their blankets, which they wrap around themselves in myriad styles as an exterior layer of clothing to keep out the cold and rain. Made from mohair and merino wool, two of the country's other major exports, these intricately patterned blankets are beautiful and wonderfully warm. They recently received international attention as prominent components of Wakandan clothing in the Black Panther film series, in which they acted like force fields that protected their wearers from harm. Given how well they repel rain and wind, this portrayal isn't far off!
Can you describe the work you've done in Lesotho, what some of your findings have been?
I have been conducting archaeological research in Lesotho since 2008, excavating a series of large rock-shelters in the southeastern highlands with deep Stone Age deposits. These archaeological sequences are important because they shed light on the development of human resourcefulness and resilience through time. We now know that our species, Homo sapiens, not only evolved its anatomical form within Africa, but also its basic adaptive capacity-an unprecedented aptitude for behavioral flexibility. This was forged over hundreds of thousands of years as our ancestors there found ways to survive and thrive in the face of dramatic swings in climate.
Southern Africa is central to this story, but most work there has focused on coastal and near-coastal areas where food is relatively plentiful and environments are mild. Although fluctuating sea levels alternatively exposed and drowned huge tracts of continental shelf and reshaped the landscape, collectible marine resources like shellfish and terrestrial plant foods would have offered stable fallbacks. Their attractiveness means these areas would have supported human populations at higher densities than inland areas, which were probably used more sporadically when environmental conditions or human innovations permitted. I am trying to understand the strategies that people devised to successfully inhabit these sorts of places, and particularly some of the more challenging inland environments where resources were scarcer, less evenly distributed and/or more seasonally restricted than those found along the coasts.
Highland Lesotho is one such place. As with Africa's other high mountain regions - East Africa's volcanoes, the Ethiopian Plateau, or the Atlas Mountains, for example - the Maloti are like a temperate, cold weather "island" punctuating a much warmer lowland "sea." The rigors of mountain living raise the question of why humans would want to venture into, let alone inhabit, these kinds of places when apparently more forgiving environments were present nearby? Specific resources must have attracted them and my research is helping determine what those were, the strategies people devised to obtain them and how those strategies changed through time. One major draw was the highlands' stable supply of freshwater and the plant and animal resources dependent on it. My research suggests that human occupation of the highlands intensified during phases when areas of the surrounding lowlands were environmentally volatile or occasionally arid. At other times people appear to have used the highlands more opportunistically, perhaps to gain access to other resources like high-quality stone for tools, medicinal plants and seasonal opportunities to hunt and fish.
At times when people were full-time residents of the highlands rather than seasonal visitors, my work also elucidates how they adapted when local conditions changed. Vegetation in the Maloti is arranged in horizontal belts like layers of a cake, with productivity and nutrition decreasing as one goes up in altitude. The highest vegetation belts are nutrient-poor afro-alpine communities that are unattractive to the large herbivores of interest to human hunters. Today, afro-alpine environments in Lesotho occur above 2,100 meters (6,500 feet), but during most of the time earlier members of our species were around these belts were lower because the climate was colder. More of the mountain landscape being covered in this vegetation means game animals would have been harder to find and windows for summertime hunting were shorter. Phases of severe cold saw people swap out large game for riverine fish, which represent a fat-rich and virtually inexhaustible resource that can be mass captured with things like nets, weirs, baskets and drag screens.
Sometimes these sorts of readjustments were not enough and it appears that human societies were obliged to abandon the highlands for millennia on end. Precisely where they moved is unknown, but my research demonstrates that they created and maintained social networks stretching hundreds of kilometers all around-to the coast and, in the opposite direction, deep into the interior. Living hunter-gatherers nurture these kinds of long-distance friendships so they have somewhere to go when things at home take a turn for the worse. Recently I have also begun exploring how such events impacted the belief systems of mountain peoples, and how their spirituality itself was leveraged and modified to help them cope with change.
In your comment for Nature, you mention that Lesotho is archaeologically important in four ways. Can you expand that here?
Lesotho is archaeologically important in many ways, but space constraints led us to highlight four. The first recognizes that Lesotho has produced ephemeral but unmistakable evidence for the presence of hominins before Homo sapiens. This evidence comes in the form of distinctive stone tools called handaxes. Teardrop or almond-shaped, these are known to have been made by pre-sapiens species, including Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis, during a very long archaeological period called the Acheulean that lasted from 1.8 million to 300,000 years ago. Numbers of handaxes have been recovered at altitudes exceeding 2,500 meters (7,500 feet) above sea level, elevations at which most people experience altitude sickness (hypoxia). We have long known that Homo erectus was active at similar altitudes on the margins of the Ethiopian Plateau as far back as 1.8 million years ago. We do not yet have ages for Lesotho's Acheulean sites, but the small sizes of the tools reported so far suggest that most date to a later phase of this period during or shortly before the emergence of our species some 300,000 years ago. This might make sense given that although the Maloti are lower in altitude than the Ethiopian Highlands, their position further from the equator makes them much more seasonal and their harsh winters more difficult for earlier hominins to deal with.
Our second reason Lesotho is archaeologically important concerns the evidence it possesses for how early members of our species adapted for life in seasonal mountains. The principle limiting factor to life in such places-for plants, animals and humans alike-is temperature. From this perspective, it is interesting to ask in which climatic conditions people first occupied the mountains on a permanent basis and whether specific technological innovations made that possible? As just one example, sewn clothing, shelters and other thermal barriers were probably essential for inhabiting the highlands on a year-round basis, and it is unsurprising that the most common stone tool types we find were useful for leather working. This appears to be true even of highland archaeology we have dated to 80,000 years ago, and we are actively working to understand how much farther back in time the manufacture of cold-weather leather-working stretches. Soon we are publishing some newly obtained evidence that speaks to this issue and feeds into larger debates about the origins and developmental trajectory of sewn clothing on a global scale.
Third, insights from Lesotho are central to modern understandings of rock art worldwide. Specifically, nineteenth-century statements made by one of the last hunter-gatherers in the region represents the only first-hand explanation of what San (Bushman) rock paintings mean by someone who painted them. However, these statements' real significance was not appreciated until a century later when rock art researchers in the 1970s began to draw parallels with the growing body of ethnography documenting rituals performed by Kalahari San groups, particularly the trance dance. Previously cryptic remarks concerning death, bleeding from the nose, dancing, healing, charm medicine, elands, being 'spoilt', rain animals and going underwater, when viewed through an ethnographic lens, recalled the behaviors and experiences of Kalahari shamans in trance. Crucially, they also resonated powerfully with a remarkable range of themes commonly depicted in the rock art. By triangulating between these three reference points-the Lesotho testimony, Kalahari ethnography and rock art-shamanistic reading of the art was formulated, which today remains the most influential paradigm in southern African and global rock art research.
Our fourth and final point deals with the very foundation of Lesotho as a nation state. Lesotho's origins trace back to the actions of a strategic southern Sotho king named Moshoeshoe I. During the Lifaqane, a period of extreme political and social upheaval that lasted through much of the mid-nineteenth century, Moshoeshoe created what would become a powerful polity with a formidable military through skillful alliance building. From his original home in what is today northern Lesotho he led his disparate people, many of whom had been displaced by widespread wars, south to the western lowlands where he placed his court on a mountain stronghold named Thaba Bosiu. There the fledgling nation was attacked repeatedly over many decades, including by encroaching colonial forces. Moshoeshoe and his warriors defeated the Boers and the British many times and he developed a reputation for invulnerability. However, the Boers persisted, taking huge tracts of the southern Sotho's lands. On the eve of a final war in 1867 that Moshoeshoe was convinced he would lose, he asked the British for help and Lesotho became a British protectorate, as mentioned above. Lesotho's early history is thus an awe-inspiring story of Indigenous agency and resistance against colonial aggression.
Does your work include collaborating with local archaeologists and researchers? If so, can you describe the importance of those relationships?
Yes. Building collaborations with local archaeologists and helping Lesotho develop its heritage infrastructure are both major priorities of mine. For many decades archaeology in Lesotho, as in many non-Western countries, was conducted solely by foreign archaeologists. If local people were involved in fieldwork it was as unskilled laborers who assisted in relatively menial tasks like screening the sediments or sorting finds into individual categories. That started to change in the early 2010s when colleagues from the University of Oxford, who were conducting large-scale salvage excavations ahead of a planned hydroelectric dam called Metolong in lowland Lesotho, trained a number of people from nearby villages in archaeological field methods. They picked it up quickly and, after spending two years on that project working at a variety of sites spanning 60,000 years of human history, had become a highly skilled crew of Basotho field technicians.
Subsequent archaeology projects then began to employ them, including my own. For example, members of that crew worked with me on multiple University of Michigan seasons at Sehonghong (2013-2016) and Ha Soloja rock-shelters (2019-2024), both in the southeastern highlands. Those projects involved excavating complex stratigraphies dating from 30,000 to in excess of 100,000 years ago. In 2014-2015 they were employed on a project led by Wits University in South Africa to collect field data for a bid to make Sehlabathebe National Park, one of two in Lesotho, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the park they professionally documented over 100 rock art and surface archaeological sites for the bid, which was ultimately successful. From 2018 to 2023 they were employed on another large dam project called Polihali in the northeastern highlands, for which they have excavated dozens of rock-shelter sites spanning the past 10,000 years. With these and other projects this crew has amassed a decade and a half of fieldwork expertise in diverse contexts, making them some of the most experienced and sought after archaeological field technicians in southern Africa.
Lesotho's first archaeology professor and the lead author of our comment in Nature is Dr. Nthabiseng Mokoena-Mokhali. A specialist in historical archaeology and heritage studies, she took up her post at the National University of Lesotho in 2016. Since then she has been training the country's first generation of archaeology undergraduates, several of which have joined my excavations in the southeastern highlands. One of her former students, another Masotho archaeologist named Nthabeleng Rantso, has become an integral member of my team and was recently accepted into the PhD program at the University of Toronto to work with my project co-director, Dr. Genevieve Dewar. For her dissertation, she will use leading-edge geoarchaeological techniques to investigate the complex interplay of cultural and natural forces that contributed to the formation of the deep sequence we are currently excavating at Ha Soloja near Sehlabathebe. It is terrific to see Lesotho's nascent heritage sector expanding on multiple fronts and with local professionals increasingly leading the way.
Finally, I am trying to raise awareness about the importance of heritage resources among local communities of non-archaeologists, while also making those resources more useful to them and better protected. For example, Lesotho's spectacular rock art is rapidly disappearing, with natural weathering processes accelerated by vandalism. Efforts to promote heritage have understandably been directed at areas affected by hydroelectric dams, but at the end of the day large-scale development projects like dams are hugely disruptive to local communities, villages and landscapes. Meanwhile, tourism remains largely detached from heritage and archaeology, being focused instead on Lesotho's natural beauty. Since 2018, I have been laying the groundwork for the creation and implementation of a financially sustainable ecomuseum in highland Lesotho's Sehlabathebe region. Ecomuseums are community-run initiatives with a regional focus that celebrate, preserve and enhance heritage that is tangible, like archaeology, and intangible, like living cultural traditions. The Sehlabathebe ecomuseum will be an ecotourism horse-trekking and hiking trail connecting a network of significant cultural and natural sites, including Sehlabathebe National Park. Its ultimate goal is to protect this region's extraordinarily rich and imperiled heritage, while fostering economic development by promoting sustainable tourism and providing employment opportunities.
