The Nature of Culture

Abstract

This chapter examines the role of landscapes and natural elements as historic and memory markers, focusing on sacred trees and tree groves as part of the archaeology of the Mandlakazi region in Southern Mozambique. More specifically, it explores how trees and tree groves relate to ancestral figures that held political power and how they are an integral part of local history, and how this connection legitimises identity creation. It also considers how intangible elements such as rituals, community history, and webs of kinship relations are at once embedded and made visible through the use of landscapes and elements of nature in their construction of a collective social memory that encompasses the community of the living and of the ancestors.