south africa (Other Keyword)
1-16 (16 Records)
The exposure of the wide continental shelf of the Agulhas Bank during the gradual regression of the shoreline from 45,000 years ago, culminating in the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), opened up a vast new area for foragers. Humans with well-established coastal resource exploitation strategies would have naturally shifted their foraging range to the south, following the regressing shoreline. During this period, the South African technological record underwent a critical transition from the prepared...
Building a Network: Territorialisation and Deterritorialisation in 13th Century northern South Africa (2017)
Regional social complexity in southern Africa is closely tied to the rise and development of the Mapungubwe polity of 13th century South Africa. Expanding political power and influence meant that Mapungubwe increasingly articulated with communities on its periphery - a relationship that is reflected in shared material culture. These hinterland sites are all located in areas where there is an absence of earlier twelfth century occupation, which suggests a process of active settling of these areas...
The Cape Point Maritime Cultural Landscape: Lighthouses, Shipwrecks, Baboons and Heritage Tourism in South Africa (2015)
Since 2004, the Cape Point Nature Reserve has been part of the Cape Floral Kingdom, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The spectacular reserve has an abundance of wildlife, historic shipwrecks and a lighthouse. A shipwreck hiking trail is a popular feature. Heritage visitation combined with nature tourism is a key component in South African economic growth today. The Cape Point area is a good example of showcasing a global maritime cultural landscape in a broader context and this study explores the...
Colonizing the Colonial: Viewing Influence through the Lens of Coarse Earthenware at the Dutch East India Company Cape of Good Hope, South Africa (2016)
Archaeological collections are more than a record of form and function. Historiographic analyses can assist in placing material remnants in their broader social context. Investigations of the production, producers, use and users of locally produced coarse earthenware at the 17th- and 18th-century Dutch East India Company Cape of Good Hope illustrate the complex fractals of cultural influence in this particular multi-cultural context. Here, like in many colonial situations, power was exerted not...
Creating the ‘Imagined Community’ of Mapungubwe (2017)
Mapungubwe’s influence spread deep into the regional hinterland, drawing in far-flung communities, trade networks and people. The traditional picture of a centripetal economy however has been challenged recently by work at these so called peripheries, indicating unexpected levels of autonomy and material wealth. While the place of these newly explored hinterlands need to be re-theorised and their agency acknowledged, there is danger in swinging the interpretive pendulum too far towards a...
Identifying a Luso-African Slaver in Cape Town: An Overview of the Archaeological and Archival Evidence for the São Josè Paquete d’Afrique (2016)
In December of 1794 the São Josè Paquete d’Afrique foundered off of Capetown while transporting nearly five hundred slaves from Mozambique who were destined for northeastern Brazil, resulting in the death of over two hundred souls. This presentation reports on how ongoing archaeological work on site combined with archival work in Africa, Europe, and South America have enabled identification of the shipwreck. It reflects on some of the insights research about this event is providing about the...
Long and Continuous Record of Climate and Environmental Change from Speleothems of the Cape Floral Region of Southern South Africa (2015)
South African climate is determined by the alternating influence of subtropical trade-winds bringing rainfall to the east coast during summer and temperate westerlies causing rainfall in the south-west during winter. High growth season temperatures favor C4 grasses in the summer rainfall region whereas C3 grasses dominate the winter rainfall region. Pinnacle Point on the central south coast has mixed summer-winter rainfall and C3-C4 vegetation. Millennial and longer time-scale changes in...
The Material Legacy of Late Colonialism in South Africa (2013)
This paper explores the legacy of late colonial mineral extraction in South Africa through its architectural and archaeological remains. Key sites of the late 19th century diamond fields, particularly the labor compounds, do not figure into portrayals of the history of the diamond rush at the De Beers corporate diamond museum. The aim of this paper is to examine how material sites and archaeological remains can tell the story of the tightly interlocked corporate-colonial project in Southern...
The P5 project archaeological reconnaissance along the Pondoland Coast, South Africa (2015)
South African sea caves preserve evidence for early modern humans’ longstanding interest in coastal resources. However, changes in coastlines location throughout the Pleistocene prevented the development of long-term and continuous records of coastal foraging and there are still many outstanding questions about when, where, and how coastal foraging developed. Pondoland (Eastern Cape Province) is one of the few places where we may be able to fill in these gaps. An exceptionally narrow...
Peering into the past Cape vegetation during the Last Glacial Maximum using species distribution modelling and dynamic global vegetation modelling (2015)
The Cape has a rich archaeological record that spans the Quaternary. Understanding shifts and changes of vegetation across this landscape will help to contextualise this record and understand the prehistoric resource paleoscape. In order to do this we couple high-resolution regionally downscaled climate simulations of the Last Glacial Maximum, landscape features (e.g. geology, aspect, slope) and two different approaches to modelling vegetation: species distribution modelling (SDM) and dynamic...
Revisiting Grassridge rockshelter in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa: results of the 2014 field season (2015)
Grassridge rockshelter is located at the base of the Stormberg Mountains approximately 200 km inland in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Previous excavation by Dr. Hermanus Opperman in 1979 focused primarily on the Later Stone Age (LSA) and Holocene occupations at Grassridge, but he also identified an underlying Middle Stone Age (MSA, ~300-30 ka) sequence containing abundant typologically MSA lithic material, well-preserved faunal remains, and charcoal. With particular interest in the MSA...
S.S. Thomas T. Tucker (1942): Updated Research on a Wrecked U.S. Liberty Ship in South Africa (2017)
S.S. Thomas T. Tucker, a U.S. Liberty Ship operated by the Merchants and Miners Company on behalf of the US Maritime Commission, was part of the 42-ship convoy carrying material to the British African Front during World War II. The ship was reported lost in action carrying an assortment of British lend-lease and wartime purchase cargo. This disarticulated beach shipwreck site provides an ideal educational opportunity for students to conduct basic pre-disturbance archaeological recording,...
A Saint Jude’s Box for Zooarchaeologists In the Making (2015)
Taking on graduate students and shepherding them through the harrowing process of becoming PhD’s is something few faculty take lightly. Within the rigorous methodological sub-discipline of Zooarchaeology, even fewer would commit to the requisite long and close apprenticeship with students whose backgrounds lay "outside of the box" of faunal-focused research. Yet, Diane populated her research cluster with a dynamic mixture of scholars from disparate backgrounds, just as she kept the famous...
Variation in Site Use through Time: Find distribution at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1, (Western Cape, South Africa), from Marine Isotope Stage 3 through the Last Glacial Maximum (2016)
Fluctuating sea levels during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS3) resulted in radically shifting environmental zones and shoreline position along the southern African coast. Investigation of the intensity of site use and find types relative to modeled coastline proximity provides insight into early human responses to such environmental perturbations. Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (KEH1), a coastal cave site in Western Cape Province, is the only documented locality along the modern coast that preserves a...
War on the Homefront: National Division and South Africa's Battle of the Atlantic 1939-1945 (2018)
In 1939, the Union of South Africa was caught unprepared for war. Lacking a servicable navy, the Union Defense Force was neverthelss tasked with protecting Allied supply lines through the Southern Ocean. Despite establishing a series of coastal defenses and RADAR stations to this end, Allied merchants rounding the Cape continued to suffer heavy casualties. As these losses mounted, competing ethnic, cultural, and political factions within the Union began using the U-boat war as fuel for their...
What Drives the Variability in MSA Lithic Assemblages from Sibhudu Cave, South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After over a decade of excavation and analysis at the Middle Stone Age site of Sibhudu in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the team from the University of Tübingen has established a uniquely complete and well-documented record of cultural change from the end or the Middle Pleistocene until...