Our research in the Mapungubwe National Park was featured in the South African National Parks Research Report. Both are short articles and filled with pictures of the team at work and the amazing archaeology.

The Hunter-Gatherer Archaeological Project (HARP), led by Dr Tim Forssman from the University of Mpumalanga, hosted a research colloquium while conducting fieldwork in July, 2022. The colloquium’s purpose was in part to provide an update of the work completed thus far but to also celebrate archaeological heritage in the Mapungubwe region.

Mapungubwe is a globally renowned archaeological site. It was here that southern Africa’s first state-level society appeared around AD 1220. Preceding the Mapungubwe Kingdom were several changes that took place over the course of about 300 years. These included the accumulation of wealth, growth in cattle numbers, craft specialisation, and the appearance of royal and elite groups. While this prehistory is well known, and has been studied for nearly a decade, considerably less is known of local hunter-gatherer societies. To produce a more inclusive rendering of the Mapungubwe landscape’s past, the HARP team aims through archaeological research to recognise and acknowledge the contributions made by past hunter-gatherers to these important socio-political and economic developments.

While conducting fieldwork in the Mapungubwe National Park the HARP team invited local stakeholders to attend a research colloquium to share their study’s findings. In attendance were members of the Mapungubwe National Park, Polokwane Museum and Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve, as well as students from the Universities of Mpumalanga, Pretoria and Oxford.

Dr Forssman opened the colloquium by providing the context and motivation for the study and an overview of progress to date, which involves excavating a prominent hunter-gatherer site, Little Muck Shelter, and exploring the local rock art sequence. Miss Chanté Barnard, an archaeological laboratory technician at the University of Mpumalanga and masters student enrolled at the University of Pretoria, presented archaeological trade wealth found at Little Muck demonstrating that hunter-gatherers participated in the local market economy during state formation. Mr Siphesihle Kuhlase, also a masters student, took this one step further and presented evidence supporting a hunter-gatherer presence at the site into the Mapungubwe period. These studies are significant because they show that hunter-gatherers were living in the area when Mapungubwe arose, but also that they were involved in trade at a time when this wealth was assisting groups rise to royal or elite status.

Two honours students on the project, Miss Sylvia Ubisse and Miss Courtney Knell, provided an outline of their research; to examine landscape settlement histories and stone arrowhead technologies, respectively. Their studies are on-going and will be completed by the end of the year. Also on-going is the work of Miss Angelinah Masolo, a doctoral candidate, discussed here study on place-making and settlement histories among hunter-gatherer groups and particularly how they organised their social landscape over the last 8000 years.

The final speaker was masters student Miss Justine van Heerden. Her study examines engagement between the public and heritage resources and promotes a more inclusive narrative for the region. Her study uses a unique, custom-built travelling museum to display heritage items, such as stone tools, pottery or glass beads, during community engagement initiatives, talks, seminars, or stakeholder meetings. The travelling museum is an important aspect of HARP’s engagement programme and will accompany the team on field trips and to all manner of meetings within, and beyond, the study area.

You can watch a recording of the colloquium below:

We’ve returned from our first excavation season for 2022 and had a very productive week. Enjoy a birds-eye view of the site and excavations.

On Saturday the HARPees head back to the field, and we couldn’t be more excited!

Our first excavation season for 2022 begins on Saturday. A group of 12 trek north, trowels in hand, to continue work at Little Muck Shelter. Our goals are to continue excavating in our internal trench (top-centre in the accompanying image) as well as in two areas outside; one of which appears to be a midden. If all goes well, we should complete some ongoing squares inside the shelter, be able to establish whether or not we have a midden in the open, and further explore an area near to the koppie edge that we opened in October but could not complete. We will still be excavating Little Muck in the June-July trip so whatever we do not complete will be backfilled carefully – using sandbags – and covered until our return.

We look forward to sharing our work with you, so please follow us on Instagram or join our WhatsApp community. If you have any ideas about our #badalbumcover team photo, let us know (for reference, here is last year’s).

See a different perspective of our archaeological sites. This aerial footage nicely shows the sites we are working at, their layouts, and the amazing landscape.

For a quick visit, Tim, Ang (PhD), Siphesihle (Masters), Chante (Masters) and Sylvia (Honours) went to the Mapungubwe region to inspect a few sites in early March.

One of the primary aims was to map Siphesihle’s and Chante’s sites. Siphesihle is working at a very interesting site called Mbere. The site includes a shelter occupied by foragers with an outside homestead that includes residential terracing indicating social hierarchy. On top of the hill is a rain-making site excavated by Alex Schoeman. We hope to understand the forager use of the complex and explore social relations occurring across the site and in different spaces. Chante is working further down the ridge in a portion of Leokwe Hill, a site excavated by John Calabrese. We will begin work in an area that contains evidence of craft production because we want to understand the relationship between the decline of these activities at Little Muck Shelter, 1.5km away, and their rise at Leokwe Hill. Our aim is to explore shifts that took place from AD 1000 in the valley as a result of forager-farmer interactions.

For Ang, we visited a number of shelters that will form part of her work. She will be looking at the social landscape, place-making, and the way foragers used their sites over time. She’ll do this by looking at the excavated sites but also by conducting her own excavations at several locations. These are largely in areas we have not yet explored or are occupied sites that are somewhat unusual, such as Boulder Shelter, which is a large boulder that dislodged from the upper terrace and toppled down, forming a protected area where it came to rest. Ang’s work is going to help us better understand the impact farmers had on forager lifeways and how forager decisions influenced settlement habits and landscape patterns.

Sylvia will be looking at landscape change in the area of Little Muck Shelter. The intention with her work is to understand what settlement changes took place in the extended area of the site to help us understand micro-landscape patterns. The area has a number of important sites in proximity to one another and we want to better understand why these sites occurred in a similar area.

It was a very productive field visit and a great way to begin 2022’s fieldwork and kick off our African Origins Platform grant. Now, we wait until the end of the month when we travel back to the area to begin our first excavations of the season.

A small group of us head north to the Mapungubwe area to kick off 2022 fieldwork. It is an exciting year for HARP with new grants, new projects, and new students all beginning at the same time.

For this trip, we are visiting two sites that we will be excavating later in the year. Our goal is to map the sites and photograph them. These are for Chante Barnard’s and Siphesihle Kuhlase’s Masters studies. We will also be visiting a few shelters that Ang Masolo will be excavating for her Doctorate. Finally, Sylvia Ubisse, who is doing her Honours with HARP, is joining us to view the area she will be undertaking her landscape study.

A final goal of our trip is to present research posters to several people as part of our engagement work. These posters will be in English, Afrikaans, Tswana and SePedi and from this work we will write up the process and challenges we are facing in our attempt to confront the language of our science.