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The Kalahari Debate began in the 1980s amongst Anthropology, Archaeology, and History about how the San people and hunter-gatherer societies in southern Africa have lived in the past.
Richard Borshay Lee conducted early and extensive ethnographic research among a San community, the !Kung San. He and other traditionalists consider the San to have been, historically, isolated and independent hunter/gatherers separate from nearby societies. Wilmsen, Denbow and the revisionists oppose these views. They believe that the San have not always been an isolated community, but rather have played important economic roles in surrounding communities. They claim that over time the San have become a dispossessed and marginalized people. Traditionalists or "isolationists" scholars include Lee and Irven DeVore. The revisionists or "integrationists" scholars were led by Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow.
Both sides use anthropological and archaeological evidence as evidence for their position. They interpret cave paintings in Tsodilo Hills, and they also use artifacts such as faunal remains of cattle or sheep found at San sites. They even find Early Stone Age and Early Iron Age technologies at San sites, which both sides use to back their arguments.
In Lee's 1979 book The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society, his main goal was to be fully immersed in the !Kung San culture so that he could fully understand their way of life. He was puzzled as to how these people seemed to be living such an easy and happy life that relied heavily on hard work and the availability of food. Most of his studies of the San took place in the Dobe area, near the Tsodilo Hills. He was adopted into a kinship and given the name /Tontah which meant “White-Man.” He claims that the San were an isolated hunter-gatherer society that changed to farming and foraging at the end of the 1970s. Most of Lee's historical data comes from Oral history told by the !Kung San because they did not have anything written down. According to Lee the San were originally afraid of contact with outsiders.
Lee reports that the men did the hunting and hard labor while the women did housework. He later found out that the San weren't just hunter-gatherers, but also herders, foragers, and farmers. In his book he states, “I learned that most of the men had had experience herding cattle at some point in their lives and that many men had owned cattle and goats in the past.” He claims that they have learned all of this on their own. The San wanted wage pay for farming and taking care of cattle, goats, and sheep. This was their new way of life.
The revisionists believe the !Kung were associated with Bantu languages-speaking overlords throughout history, and involved with merchant capital. They believe the San in the Kalahari are a classless society because they are actually the lower class of a greater Kalahari society. The revisionists believe the !Kung San were heavily involved in trade. They believe the San were transformed by centuries of contact with Iron Age, Bantu peoples-speaking agro-pastoralists. This argues against the idea that they were a well-adapted hunter-gatherer culture, but instead advanced only through trade and help from nearby economies.
Other evidence revisionists point to includes Early Iron Age products found in Later Stone Age sites. This includes metal and pottery found in the Dobe, Xia, and Botswana regions. Cow bones have also been found in northern Botswana, at Lotshitshi. These products are believed to be payment to the San for labor of caring for or possibly herding Bantu cattle.
One specific instance is where Lee called out Wilmsen for mistaking the word “oxen” for “onins”, which meant “onions” in an old map of the Kalahari region. This discovery would make the San herders before the arrival of the anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s and not after the 1970s, as Lee believes. This instance gave rise to Lee's article "Oxen or Onions." In the article, Lee points out other flaws he believes he has found in Wilmsen's argument. Critiques of Wilmsen's work say that the cattle paintings could represent San stealing cattle rather than herding them. Another attack on Wilmsen's work was that the amounts of pottery and iron found in Dobe and Botswana regions were so small they could fit in one hand. The small numbers of these artifacts make some scholars believe they are insufficient to be able to make such a claim. The same is true of the cattle bones found in Botswana. The small numbers of cattle bone fragments found on San archaeological sites have made scholars question Wilmsen's argument.
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