Patterns of Settlement and Subsistence in Southwestern Angola

I include in this presentation, the introductory essay, and a series of maps and diagrams of my study in Angola in 1958-59. The whole document has been published by the National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council. Publication 1096. 1963. It was part of the Foreign Field Research Program sponsored by Office of Naval Research. Report No. 18.

My doctoral dissertation is the first place where I demonstrated my interest in understanding a landscape that was extraordinarily different than those of the Euro-American world. I came to know that modern Americans live in a nearly completely artificial world. My life there had a profound impact on my thinking. Southwestern Angola was, with the exception of a few small Portuguese settlements and the small town of Sa de Bandera (Lubango), an “undeveloped” land.

I include the Table of Contents to show what I studied. I looked and mapped the character of the building types, settlement forms, agricultural systems, pastoral activities, and the other economic activities that the people practice.

The Table of Contents indicates the scope of the study.

The economic activities may be characterized in four categories: Hunters and Gatherers; cattle herders; farmers, and farmers who herd animals.

The several regions of Angola may be distinguished by the dominant food crop grown.

Each ethnic grouping has a distinctive house type. Examples are shown below.

Bushman huts

Herders’ hut style

Cone on Cylinder style

Rectangular style

Methods of storing grain are also distinctive.

The ways that huts, storage units, and cattle corrals are also distinctive.

The essence of this part of the study was to map the various types of houses, grain storage, and settlement type. In addition I studied the vegetation types and the physical topography on which the scattered farms were settled. One way I diagrammed this was catenary cross sections of several areas. Examples of two natural topographic sequences are shown below. Major vegetation types and soil types are indicated.

I ended the study with a description of the history of the settlement of the area by Portuguese, starting in 1617. It was still a Portuguese colonial colony when I did my study.