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Mixed farming (the ‘Iron Age’) was introduced to the summer rainfall areas of southern Africa early in the first millennium AD and did not evolve from the local Later Stone Age. In southern Africa this introduction is linked to Eastern Bantu-speaking people. Domesticated cattle, sheep and goats and the important cereals, sorghum and millet, were introduced along with iron and copper production and stylistically distinctive Early Iron Age pottery. The archeological sites that preserve this early farmer ‘package’ are relatively small permanent homesteads. In the first millennium AD regional political hierarchies were small and settlements were organized around central cattle enclosures. Through ethnographic models, it is inferred that the spatial layouts of these settlements underpin the importance of cattle in social and ritual life, particularly for bridewealth payments. In the northern region of South Africa, more complex farming chiefdoms developed between 900 and 1200 AD (the Middle Iron Age), culminating in the first class based state with its capital at Mapungubwe in the thirteenth century. Wealth and ritual and political power were based upon trade with the south east African coast and received goods from around the Indian Ocean rim. This system collapsed towards the end of the thirteenth century, and Great Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe State rose to power. The second millennium AD (the Late Iron Age), is important because the archaeology provides a history for the majority of present-day Sotho/Tswana, Nguni and Venda-speaking South Africans. Sotho/Tswana and Nguni-speaking farmers expanded further southwards up to the climatic limits of summer rainfall agriculture. From the sixteenth century the identities of these farmers comes more sharply into focus through the survival of their own oral records. In the second half of the eighteenth century a process of political centralization occurs that takes on different forms in different areas. The development of large Tswana towns and the Zulu State under Shaka dating to early in the nineteenth century are two outcomes of this process. These developments are in part responses to colonial expansion, and through the nineteenth century these farming communities were progressively stripped of their independence.