In an essay that consists of nine pages the many precolonial systems prior to the nineteenth century and their native peoples such as the Ashanti are examined. There are seven bibliographic sources cited.
Name of Research Paper File: D0_SNPrecol.rtf
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Ashanti confederation -- just one example of the many nation-states that existed at the time. Moreover, according to historians the potent influence of the Ashanti Kingdom on Ghana is inestimable
(McCaskie, 1995). This essay will examine some of the more tangibly documented pre-colonial systems of peoplehood dating up to the 1800s, relevant to ancient Africa.
The history of Botswana is in general the history of the Kalahari area (intermediate between the more populated savanna of the north and east), and the less
populated grassland of the south and west. Although reduced to a peripheral role in southern Africa for most of the 20th century, at other times Botswana had been a central
area of historical development. People speaking the Khoisan language have lived in Botswana for many thousands of years, and the Depression Shelter in the Tsodilo Hills has evidence of
continuous Khoisan occupation from about 17,000 BC to about AD 1650. During the final centuries of the last millennium before Christ some of the Khoi people of northern Botswana converted
to an agrarian lifestyle in which the herding their cattle and sheep on the rich pastures was their near total preoccupation. In addition, the farming of grain crops (and
the speaking of the Bantu language) was carried gradually southward from the Equator. Then by about 20 BC such farmers were making and using iron tools on the upper
Zambezi (Oriji, 1994). The earliest dated Iron Age site in Botswana is an iron-smelting furnace in the Tswapong Hills
near Palapye that dates back about AD 190, and is probably associated with Iron Age farmers from the Limpopo valley. The remains of small beehive-shaped houses made of grass matting,