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'The history of any science is the most revealing approach that a newcomer can employ,'wrote Goodwin (1946). His approach to the history of archaeology in South Africa was initially to compile a commentary on publications up to the mid-1930s that dealt with the information sequentially (Goodwin 1935). About a decade later he up-dated the bibliography and enlarged the commentary'to attempt some analysis of the interweaving elements of time, culture, man and area in the light of past research and publication'(Goodwin 1946: 10). He called it The Loom of Prehistory because'we are now trying to weave these into a patterned fabric, selecting our threads, relating them one with another, and evolving a fabric which should provide the cloth from which something new can be made'(1946: 10-11). Forty years later, one still hopes to weave such a cloth by identifying some of the people, trends and events that have shaped Southern African Stone Age studies.

The geographic focus in this chapter is on South Africa and Namibia with reference to Botswana and Zimbabwe where appropriate. The emphasis is on the history of Stone Age studies in general prior to 1960, and thereafter on the Later Stone Age in particular. Bibliographic works such as the one by Holm (1966) and Summers (1971a) have up-dated Goodwin's lists and detailed reviews of Later Stone Age studies have been published this decade (J. Deacon 1984a; Parkington 1984). Instead of repeating the conclusions drawn, this paper focusses on the goals of researchers over the past century or more, rather than on the results of their work. In doing so, one ineidtably draws attention to …