The builders were the Koni, though calling them a single people oversimplifies things. The evidence points to several groups of differing origins, some arriving from the east and some from the northwest, who came together on the escarpment and over time fused into one identity. Some Koni still trace their roots to what is now Eswatini. They settled in large hilltop villages, the biggest measured at more than five kilometres across, ringed by smaller homesteads. At its height, between roughly 1500 and 1820, the society may have numbered anywhere from nineteen thousand to fifty-seven thousand people. What made it remarkable was not monuments to kings but the sheer ingenuity of ordinary farming, written across the hills in dry-stone walling that has survived three centuries of weather.

The terraces were not thrown up all at once. Walls grew course by course as farmers chased the soil, adding stone to catch earth that rain would otherwise have stripped away. Homesteads expanded in clusters that mirrored the families inside them, the stonework itself a kind of record of marriages and growing households. Farming was women's work, and it was the foundation of life here in a region where cattle could not always be kept safely. Sometime in the eighteenth century maize arrived and began displacing sorghum: easier to grow, if less prized. Beyond their fields the Koni were traders, moving cattle, salt drawn from local alkaline springs, and iron likely imported from Phalaborwa, plugged into long-distance exchange networks that reached well beyond the escarpment.

Power among the Koni was strikingly decentralised. Chiefs handled defence and migration, advised by councillors and headmen chosen on age, rank, and skill, but they hoarded little authority over daily life. That looser order held until the upheavals of the early nineteenth century. After the Ndwandwe withdrew from the region around 1825, a commoner soldier named Marangrang rallied the Bokoni fighters, deposed the squabbling chiefs, and ruled as something closer to a king from the fortress of Khutwaneg near Machadodorp. He won battles but ruled cruelly, and his rise marked the violent end of the old way of life. By the 1820s the great stone-walled settlements were emptying as war reshaped the entire highveld.

When white researchers first studied the ruins, many reached for what locals now dismiss as "the exotic theory," crediting some vanished foreign civilisation rather than the people whose descendants still lived nearby. Radiocarbon dating demolished that idea: the Lydenburg sites predate the Pedi kingdom that some had assumed built them. Aerial surveys from the 1960s and 70s revealed site after site, and the patient work of archaeologists like Revil Mason and T.M. Evers slowly built the case for who had truly lived here. The most thorough modern account, the 2014 book Forgotten World by Tim Maggs, Alex Schoeman, and Peter Delius, finally put Bokoni on the historian's map. The recovery comes not a moment too soon. Many ruins lie on private land, and stones have been carted off for new building, walls and rock engravings damaged by looting, cattle, and casual vandalism. A landscape that took centuries to build is still, quietly, being lost.