"What are they going to do with the head?" I wondered as the noose on the strap tightened around the prime ministers stiff neck."
Friday, June 17, 2011
Where apartheid statues go to die - In The Paper - Mail & Guardian Online
Where apartheid statues go to die - In The Paper - Mail & Guardian Online:
A 19.5 kyr vegetation history from the central Cederberg Mountains, South Africa: Palynological evidence from rock hyrax middens
A 19.5 kyr vegetation history from the central Cederberg Mountains, South Africa: Palynological evidence from rock hyrax middens: "Publication year: 2011
Source: Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 15 June 2011
Lynne J., Quick , Brian M., Chase , Michael E., Meadows , Louis, Scott , Paula J., Reimer
In arid and semi-arid areas such as southern Africa, rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) middens represent an exceptionally valuable source of late Quaternary palaeoenvironmental information. Pollen and stable isotope data derived from two rock hyrax middens extracted from De Rif in the Cederberg Mountains of the southwestern Cape, casts new light on climatic changes that occurred across the last glacial-interglacial transition (LGIT) and the Holocene (19.5 – 0.7cal kBP) and how the region's vegetation responded to these changes. Significant changes in vegetation community composition would be expected in response to environmental changes characteristic of the contrast between ‘glacial’ and ‘interglacial’ climates....
Research highlights: ► Pollen from hyrax middens casts new light on palaeoenvironments in the Cederberg. ► Stable isotope data from the same middens reveals marked climatic variations. ► Mountain fynbos remained dominant at the site throughout the LGIT and Holocene. ► Some differences between glacial and interglacial vegetation structures were evident."
Source: Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 15 June 2011
Lynne J., Quick , Brian M., Chase , Michael E., Meadows , Louis, Scott , Paula J., Reimer
In arid and semi-arid areas such as southern Africa, rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) middens represent an exceptionally valuable source of late Quaternary palaeoenvironmental information. Pollen and stable isotope data derived from two rock hyrax middens extracted from De Rif in the Cederberg Mountains of the southwestern Cape, casts new light on climatic changes that occurred across the last glacial-interglacial transition (LGIT) and the Holocene (19.5 – 0.7cal kBP) and how the region's vegetation responded to these changes. Significant changes in vegetation community composition would be expected in response to environmental changes characteristic of the contrast between ‘glacial’ and ‘interglacial’ climates....
Research highlights: ► Pollen from hyrax middens casts new light on palaeoenvironments in the Cederberg. ► Stable isotope data from the same middens reveals marked climatic variations. ► Mountain fynbos remained dominant at the site throughout the LGIT and Holocene. ► Some differences between glacial and interglacial vegetation structures were evident."
Monday, June 13, 2011
Quote of the week
Regarding forced removals in in the 1770s.
"Neither Sparrman nor anyone else of the time thought for a moment of the grievous wrong which had been done by the land robbers who had seized upon all their hunting grounds, surrounding the mountains of their ancestors, the ancient men who had adorned their numerous cave dwellings with innumerable paintings showing the history and hunting achievements of their race for unknown generations. The hundreds of whom he speaks had been most unceremoniously dispossessed of their country, and all their mountain streams had been appropriated to gratify the territorial greed of a few score men, who called themselves civilized because they had guns in their hands"Stow, G.W., 1905. The native races of South Africa; a history of the intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu into the hunting grounds of the Bushmen, the aborigines of the country, S. Sonnenschein & Co.; Macmillan Co., London; New York. p. 165
My Brilliant Career: Looking after the ancestors - Times LIVE
My Brilliant Career: Looking after the ancestors - Times LIVE
Lindsay Marshall is the curator at Maropeng, where she takes care of exhibitions and works to encourage a new generation of scientists, specificallypalaeo-scientists. She speaks to Margaret Harris about finding concepts that will catch visitors' imagination
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Move to sort out Voortrekker statue caused a stir - Times LIVE
Move to sort out Voortrekker statue caused a stir - Times LIVE: "
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 Times LIVE | Move to sort out Voortrekker statue caused a stir Times LIVE "I spoke to someone from Absa and explained that, because the statue was more than 60 years old, they would need a permit from Heritage Western Cape before they could remove it." Raymond said the building originally belonged to Volkskas bank. ... |
Church slammed for cutting down trees - Independent Online
Church slammed for cutting down trees - Independent Online: "
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 Independent Online | Church slammed for cutting down trees Independent Online THE Dutch Reformed Church in Durbanville is being served a notice forcing it to replant 28 blue gum trees it removed from the property without permission from Heritage Western Cape (HWC). The church is not allowed to make changes to the site without ... |
Strontium isotope evidence for landscape use by early hominins : Nature : Nature Publishing Group
Strontium isotope evidence for landscape use by early hominins : Nature : Nature Publishing Group
Cool research coming out of (partly) UCT.
Strontium isotope evidence for landscape use by early hominins
News Write ups:
Views from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana
(repost from john hawks weblog)Views from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana: "
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Sheila Coulson, Sigrid Staurset and Nick Walker [1] (doi isn't working yet, so here's a PDF link, 12 MB) have published a long summary of findings from Rhino Cave, in the Tsodilo Hills of northern Botswana. These hills are huge isolated rock formations, or inselbergs, that jut out of relatively flat surrounding countryside. That makes them highly visible in the folklore and traditions of local people, and some caves in them have been used by people for tens of thousands of years.
Coulson and colleagues describe the setting of Rhino Cave, named for a rock painting within it.
It is...easy to understand how the site evaded detection, as it is perched high on the northernmost ridge of Female Hill and can only be approached by scrambling over, or squeezing between, massive boulders. Gaining entry to the cave is only slightly less arduous. On the western side of the ridge there is a raised, narrow, crawl space that ends with a considerable drop into the site. Alternatively, the wider eastern entrance offers two options: a two-meter jump or a slide down a steep boulder face, followed by a scramble over a rock-strewn opening near the present day floor.
I love these kinds of sites where you know that every lithic was brought in by people. That can tell you a lot about how people used the site, and the authors use that to advantage. But Coulson and colleagues do not yet have new dates for the deposits. The old dates appear too recent and are problematic because of their mismatch with other local MSA sites such as White Paintings Shelter and $ne;Gi, both between 66,000 and 95,000 years old. The Rhino Cave assemblage may be comparable to these in age. The paper reports that substantial amounts of exotic stone materials including silcrete and chalcedony must come from more than 50 or 100 km away, respectively.
Some of the flakes made from exotic raw materials, Figure 5 from the paper. All photos in the article copyrighted and used courtesy of Sheila Coulson.
There is a lot to the lithic collection besides the points, but I think these are interesting and certainly visually striking.
Coulson and colleagues noticed that many of the points were burned, and this was not easily explained by the incidental presence of fires in the cave, nor did it particularly appear to be explained in terms of the 'heat-treating' that people used to make silcrete more suitable for artifact production at some other MSA sites.
In summary, there is a very distinctive pattern of burning at this site. A group of 26 MSA points and their associated debitage are heat damaged to the point of destruction. However, they have not been exposed to long-term burning of the type that is commonly found when an artifact is discarded into a hearth -- a common feature on any number of Stone Age sites. It is suggested that these MSA points and their associated manufacturing debitage were selectively and intentionally burnt in short-term restricted fires that caused their coloring to change to various reddish hues.
This is part of what Coulson and colleagues tentatively call evidence of symbolic or ritual behavior at the site. People climbed up to this out-of-the-way place with colorful stone from far away. The manufacturing debris shows that they made stone points in the cave. And they then left many of those points in the cave, some of them burned and destroyed or abandoned. At a minimum, it's curious. Adding everything together (including the cupules discussed below), it seems clear that the site was not used for purely utilitarian purposes. What that means about ancient social or cognitive systems is not obvious.
The article is open access, and full of amazing full-size color photos. I don't know why everyone doesn't publish their sites this way. For example, here's a photo of the site and night, where Coulson and colleagues experimented with flickering light against the carved wall:
This stone face, which has been pecked at and scooped out for many thousands of years, is the most distinctive aspect of the site. Coulson and colleagues believe that some of the existing marks reflect very great antiquity, and they have natural spalls of the rock face that broke off in MSA times and integrated themselves into MSA layers. Some (maybe most) of the cupules are recent, and the pictorial art inside the cave is also late. But at least some of the surface carving appears to have been MSA in age.
Cupules in rock face, detail.
The paper discusses some evidence for pigment grinding at the site, including smooth-edged pieces of specularite and several small striated sandstone slabs (say that fast five times) presumably used as grindstones. Color goes together with the burning (to enhance color?), but this combination is not found elsewhere. Rhino Cave is in that way unique.
They indicate that the rock face is exposed to flickering daylight through a shaft at certain times, which they attempted to simulate with the flickering light photograph. Really I can't think of any better way to give readers an impression of what it would be like to visit the site.
References
- [Coulson:2011] Ritualized Behavior in the Middle Stone Age: Evidence from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana,
Coulson, Sheila, Staurset Sigrid, and Walker Nick
, PaleoAnthropology, Volume 2011, p.18–61, (2011)
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