Perspectives on human–animal relationships are changing in archaeology and related disciplines. Analytical models that distinguish foraging from food production remain popular, but scholars are beginning to recognize greater variability in the ways people understood and engaged with animals in the past. In southern Africa, researchers have observed that wild animals were economically and socially important to recent agropastoral societies. However, archaeological models emphasize cattle keeping and downplay the role of hunting among past farming groups. To address this discrepancy and investigate human–wild animal interactions over the last ~ 2000 years, we examined zooarchaeological data from 54 southern African Iron Age (first and second millennium AD) farming sites. Diversity and taxonomic information highlights how often and what types of animals people hunted. Comparisons with earlier and contemporaneous forager and herder sites in southern and eastern Africa show that hunting for social and economic purposes characterized the spread of farming and rise of complex societies in southern Africa. The long-term cultural integration of wild animals into food-producing societies is unusual from a Global South perspective and warrants reappraisal of forager/farmer dichotomies in non-Western contexts.

考古学和相关学科对人与动物关系的看法正在发生变化。区分觅食和食物生产的分析模型仍然很流行，但学者们开始认识到过去人们理解和与动物打交道的方式存在更大的差异。在南部非洲，研究人员观察到野生动物对近代农牧社会具有重要的经济和社会意义。然而，考古模型强调养牛，淡化狩猎在过去农业群体中的作用。为了解决这一差异并调查过去约 2000 年人类与野生动物的相互作用，我们检查了 54 个南部非洲铁器时代（公元一千年和二千年）农业遗址的动物考古数据。多样性和分类信息凸显了人们狩猎动物的频率和类型。与南部和东部非洲早期和同时代的采集者和牧民遗址的比较表明，出于社会和经济目的而进行的狩猎是南部非洲农业传播和复杂社会兴起的特征。从全球南方的角度来看，野生动物与粮食生产社会的长期文化融合是不寻常的，需要重新评估非西方背景下的采集者/农民二分法。