Our tale begins in 1932.  Actually, it begins with the Anglo-Boer War in 1899.  Actually, it begins in about 900AD when the first discernible settlement on the Limpopo arose.  Actually, if you really think about it . . . But no, for the sake of this re-telling I’ll have it begin in 1932, when a young man named J.C.O. van Graan went out hunting one day near his parents’ farm in what is today Limpopo Province.  Van Graan was a smart, precocious young man, a student at the University of Pretoria who was especially fond of history.  Since Limpopo is dry and hot in almost any season and van Graan was out hunting for such a long time, he became thirsty and stopped at an African homestead on a neighboring farm called Greefswald to ask for a drink of water.  The homesteaders gave van Graan water in what he noticed was a very intriguing ceramic bowl, which he offered to buy.  The family told him it was not for sale, since it came from “a secret hill” close by.  Of course, this only interested van Graan more, and so he left only to return later with his father, E.S.J. van Graan, and three other local men.  It’s not clear exactly how, but upon their return, the van Graans stumbled upon an African man known in the record only as Mowena, whom they urged, bribed, and threatened to show them the way to the “secret hill”.  Finally, literally, as Leo Fouche wrote, “shivering with fright”, Mowena pointed the way to the hill.  It’s very easy to imagine what it looked like on that day, the intimidating hill rising straight up out of the somber mopane bush, maybe silhouetted against the huge gray sky that sometimes precedes storms in the Limpopo, possibly even with a dramatic lightning bolt flashing and a rumble of thunder, sort of like this:

That’s not actually Mapungubwe Hill but a smaller one nearby known as “Little Mapungubwe”, but you get the idea.

The van Graans followed Mowena’s directions and young van Graan was the first to ascend the hill.  Van Graan, after reportedly recovering from the shock of having a group of bats fly in his face, realized that a staircase was carved into the side of the hill quite deliberately.  As the van Graans arrived at the top of the hill, they found potsherds, glass beads, grinding stones, and as they dug into the dirt, they began to realize the extent of what they had found there.  A fevered debate ensued between the treasure hunting party about what to do with their discovery: some thought they were grave robbing and that they should report it to the authorities, others wanted to keep their find hidden so they could keep it for themselves.  Finally, van Graan the younger decided to report his find to his history professor at the University of Pretoria, Leo Fouche.  Fouche came out to Greefswald, negotiated with E.E. Collins (the farm’s owner) to obtain legal rights to excavate the site.

Staircase up Mapungubwe

Fouche began excavating in April 1933, before the concept of a southern African Iron Age even existed, leading him to interpret his fins as part of a “cultural site” belonging to the local community.  Fouche’s research did not get much farther than the first monographs, however, before the wave of 1930s Afrikaner Nationalism took hold of the University of Pretoria.  This meant that education focused solely on imparting Afrikaner ideals and the National Party line.  For Fouche, archaeology was grouped under the new anthropology department called Volkekunde, in which archaeology was used to give “scientific” evidence for apartheid policies of ethnic separation.  So, the Mapungubwe finds were stored at the University of Pretoria, later put in a museum that wasn’t available to the general public, and sat there for decades without information being widely released about the finds there.

Obviously, this version of events has a lot of points where one can take exception.  For a discovery story, the discovery seems to start fairly recently and the van Graans are clearly the protagonists.  Also, the land where Mapungubwe is located was claimed by Boer settlers in the time following the Anglo-Boer War, and many Africans were evicted to make that farm, which gets left out of the story.  In the SANParks children’s comic book, they make Mowena the protagonist and include a storyline about the beliefs of the local Africans in their ancestors at Mapungubwe and the story centers around a supposed curse that befalls the men who initially found the site, which has echoes of the King Tut curse.  In the end, the book leaves the artifacts in the museum and the sangoma (basically a traditional healer) of the Mapungubwe community displeased.

From "Kingdom of Gold: The Curse of Mapungubwe", SANParks

The point of this long-winded story is that while there are points that I may have problems with and I may not like how it’s presented, but there’s no denying that it’s the kind of story that would get the average person completely hooked on the site.  Again, take a look at the King Tut story.  I remember being told about it when I was a kid and thinking how cool it was, as I’m sure did the millions of people who came to see the exhibit on its second US tour in the last few years.  The question, then, is: is this how we want to get people interested in a site?  Do we put out a story that might not be the most political thing but would get public interest up and hope they figure it out later, or do we present a more politicized version of it, alienate some people, and hope others come around.  And as far as kids go, what version is acceptable to present to them?  And rather than answering those questions I’ll leave you with more pictures of Mapungubwe:

Grinding stone sitting on top of the hill

A mofhuva carved into the rock on Mapungubwe. This is a game that people still play today and is kind of like mancala.

View from the top of the hill

The project that I’m working on now focuses on the role of archaeology in educational programs in South Africa.  That’s the short cocktail party-friendly synopsis, at least.  Here’s the longer explanation plus context:

Post-apartheid, archaeology began to be discussed in South Africa as a way to heal some of the wounds of a very painful segregationist past for a couple of reasons.  First of all, under the apartheid government, black South African history was not taught in schools.  Where it was taught, it was re-written to present South Africa as an empty country that settlers happened to find with lots of really excellent farmland, or that, if an educator had to admit to some black Africans living in the subcontinent, these were technologically and socially inferior to the white settlers.  Where archaeology was conducted under apartheid, the findings were kept among archaeological circles only and finds were not displayed to the general public.  So entire generations grew up not knowing about the far-reaching traditions of rock art, the complex assemblage of lithic and faunal remains generated throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene, and the farming/herding settlements of the Holocene and the trade that they established with people as far away as Tanzania and the Indian Ocean, to name a few.  In addition to simply denying people access to knowledge, this policy of non- or misinformation meant that there are incredibly few South African-trained archaeologists working in South Africa today relative to countries in Europe or the Americas.

The second reason for archaeology to become a hot topic around the 1994 elections is that it offered a past that (in theory at least) everyone could share in.  Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki both talked repeatedly about the past as a time untouched by the racism and violence of apartheid and the liberation struggle.  Mbeki especially touted South Africa’s archaeology in his African Renaissance (especially the technological advances of a place like Mapungubwe, where we have evidence of iron-working, gold artifacts, and Indian ocean trade) as a rallying point for the country, urging them to embrace and be proud of a past of technological and social achievement greater than anywhere else on the continent.  I should add that this doesn’t make Mbeki an exemplary leader by any means and definitely doesn’t undo the poor decisions he made before stepping down as president.  He did, however, do a lot to put archaeology in the spotlight and so I have to keep coming back to him whether I like it or not.

So, to recap, archaeology in South Africa gives us a way to heal past wounds, to move forward to celebrate a “Rainbow Nation”, and to empower a new generation not only of trained archaeologists, but of people who are proud of their heritage.  In theory.  In practice, it gets a bit more tricky.  Releasing finds and information that had been kept from the public requires changes in academic institutions and museums that have been slow to happen in some cases.  Also, because a lot of archaeological sites are on lands from which black South Africans were evicted, these sites get caught up in land claim disputes and are thus tied up in legal difficulties for a while.  What’s more, who gets to re-write the past and what do they get to say?  How do individual ethnic groups (however they self-define or are defined) get represented in this new version of the past?

And then there’s environmental conservation.  A large number of South Africa’s archaeological sites are in national parks (mostly managed by SANParks), and when national parks develop plans to manage their natural resources, they also have to include heritage resources and decide how to communicate both the natural and the archaeological to the public.  Especially in education, archaeology and nature conservation usually get lumped in together, often with some interesting consequences (do we really take care of elephants the same way we take care of rock art?).

So all of these issues are wrapped up in my dissertation.  I’m not even sure I can call it a topic since it’s so thorny and has so many elements to it, and so part of the process I’m in now is figuring out how to tackle this beast.  I should add some context and say that all of this constitutes my master’s in World Archaeology (World meaning NOT Europe or Classical) at the University of Oxford, which I’m finishing in June.  The whole project is something I started at Stanford University where I did my undergrad in archaeology and anthropology.  I spent a summer working for the Clanwilliam Living Landscape Project, which is a sort of community-based archaeology program run by John Parkington of the University of Cape Town designed to show people living in Clanwilliam (in the Cederberg Mountains of the Western Cape) how to derive benefits (educational, tourist, etc.) from the rich archaeology of the region.  I developed the education programs there for a summer, got into the topic, and then went back to do another field project at Mapungubwe National Park the following year.  I’ll talk about Mapungubwe a lot later so I won’t go into it much now, suffice to say that it’s SANParks’ only park declared on the basis of its cultural rather than natural heritage.  Mapungubwe, Clanwilliam, and a third site at Kamberg in the Drakensberg Mountains that I’m planning on going to later this year, constitute the case studies in my dissertation and the fieldwork on which I’ll be basing my conclusions.

That introduction complete, time for a disclaimer: I want to emphasize that all the information I put on this blog is within the bounds of my human subjects protocol as determined by the Stanford Internal Review Board and nothing I put on here will contain photos of or information about any informants without their permission.  Also a content disclaimer: if any of this sounds way too crazy and far-fetched, works by Lynn Meskell, Peter Mitchell, William Beinart, Martin Hall, Nick Shepherd, John Parkington, and Jane Carruthers just to name a few can give a lot more background and probably a much more cogent discussion of the topics I mentioned here, and will also confirm that I am not totally full of baloney.