The 1985 meeting of the Southern African Association of Archaeologists (SA3) in Grahamstown, South Africa, helped catalyse a sea-change in archaeological studies of Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers, heralding the take-up of ethnographically informed, historical materialist studies of past social relations and ideologies to complement and, in large part, take over from earlier ecological and typological emphases. Twenty years on, LSA archaeology risks becoming marginalized in southern African archaeology. This paper discusses why this may be so, but reaffirms the global importance of the subject within the wider archaeological discipline. It then suggests a series of avenues along which future research might profitably be directed, stressing the importance of three themes: expanding the range of ethnographic studies used for comparative and model-building purposes; developing more securely grounded means of relating hypotheses about past social relations to excavated evidence; and building chronologies for Bushman rock art that will allow the fuller integration of parietal and excavated data.
