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.