Iron Age sites in northern Botswana’s Okavango Delta 3: Lotshitshi, a Later Stone Age/Bambata/Recent site on the Delta margin

ABSTRACT Lotshitshi is a small site on the edge of the Thamalakane River floodplain on the southern margin of the Okavango Delta, Botswana. A component with Later Stone Age lithic artefacts radiocarbon-dated to the second/third millennia BC is overlain by a component with the same kind of stone tools, but with the addition of Bambata pottery and domestic cattle radiocarbon-dated to the earlier decades of the first century AD. A component with Recent pottery is at the top of this sequence. Although modest in size and content, Lotshitshi adds valuable details to our knowledge of Bambata pottery-making peoples with cattle and provides additional evidence for the movement of peoples during this time from the Chobe-Zambezi confluence region to western Botswana, thus supplementing efforts to understand Early Iron Age population dynamics in southern Africa as a whole.