LAUSR

Indigenous pastoralists at Walvis Bay on the Namib Desert coast were drawn into global commerce at the end of the eighteenth century. A hundred years later, they were impoverished and peripheral to colonial settlement, but their resilience and traditional reliance on the endemic !nara melon gave them a unique cultural identity and a way into the informal domestic market. Subaltern and subservient in the past, the Topnaar today are creating a niche in the modern Namibian economy. I present a background historical archaeology and some of the challenges facing the Topnaar through the subjective voices of a number of historical and current stakeholders. There may be parallels between the story of the Topnaar in the Namib and the archaeology of indigenous communities in Australia, the Americas and elsewhere in the world.