Kinship terminology is both a part of language and a part of society. Behaviour towards relatives, familial obligations, and rules of incest avoidance and marriage can be diverse even within an ethnographic region. The 'Khoisan' (non-Bantu-speaking) region of southern Africa is extremely diverse in these ways, especially considering the relatively small size of that population group (a few hundred-thousand), but nevertheless has structural features in common over vast distances and even across language group boundaries. Some of these features may be thousands of years old. This project aims to utilise the study of kinship, and especially kinship terminology structures and related aspects of social organisation, to decipher aspects of the history and prehistory of 'Khoisan' peoples. It is part of a larger EuroBABEL group of five collaborating projects, based in different countries, but all working together to find out the degree to which peoples called 'Khoisan' are linguistically and culturally related and how they are related, for example, from common cultural or linguistic origins or through cultural borrowing. The project will be conducted by Professor Alan Barnard (Principle Investigator), Dr Gertrud Boden (Researcher) and a PhD student over a three-year period.