Raevin Jimenez is an assistant professor in the Department of History at University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceNote on Spelling and Reconstructed FormsIntroduction1. Antiquating Ancestry: Mobility and Gendered Social Transformation, Ninth Century2. Being Southeastern in a Social Mosaic: Regional Ties, Ancestral Roots, and Gendered Decorum in the Making of Togetherness, Tenth–Eleventh Centuries3. Scattered Households, Nested Women: Gender and Mobile Communities in the Southeastern Uplands, Eleventh–Thirteenth Centuries4. Gathering Men and Collecting Help in the Southeast Woodlands, Eleventh–Sixteenth Centuries5. Dominion of Youths: Gender, Materiality, and Elite Groupwork in the Upper SoutheastConclusionAppendixNotesBibliographyIndex

“The most important work on precolonial South Africa in over a decade. A daring examination of historical linguistics that rewrites and reconceptualizes the region’s past.” - Paul S. Landau, author of Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries "Brilliantly places practices of gendered comportment and respectability at the center of the political and social history of southern Africa across more than a millennium, changing what we thought we knew about everything from early demographic processes to Zulu and Xhosa practices of power centuries later. A tour de force!" - Kathryn de Luna, author of Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa