Magaliesberg Snippets
Archaeology (1)
Stan & Desiré Kantor
Every picture tells a story and how much so the stones and rocks that we find around us. Understanding the geological make-up of these objects gives us a clearer picture of how the earth was formed, but from these rocks and stones, man also shaped stone tools and other artifacts. Some 2000 years ago, Iron Age man migrated from the north into the southern parts of Africa, bringing a new way of life into the Stone Age dominated area.
They lived in settled villages, cultivated domestic crops such as sorghum, millet, ground beans and cowpeas. They herded cattle, sheep and goats and produced ceramic wares with distinctive styles and they smelted iron, producing their own iron tools. Similar to modern day society, these early settlers needed to establish an infrastructure to maintain a workable community. One would assume that a team of ‘specialists’ would move ahead of the migrating group to find a suitable site. It would have to have sufficient water for drinking and for their crops as well as workable clay, either from a river bed or wetlands. There should also be arable land for their crops and for grazing for the animals. Iron-ore would have to be available for producing their metal requirements and this would necessitate a plentiful supply of hard wood for the furnaces. Other types of wood were required for both cooking and construction material for their homes. As the various Iron Ages developed and walling developed for defence purposes, the availability of rocks also became a priority.
George Leith recorded the first detailed records of archaeological information in the Magaliesberg between the years 1894 – 1899. In the Wonderboom caves implements were found of middle and later Stone Age periods, as well as artifacts from the three Iron Age periods. Leith’s collection was purchased by the Transvaal Museum after his death in 1903 and went into storage. The collection has only recently (2006/7) been unpacked (by the authors) and sorted into drawers for exhibition purposes. Much of the Wonderboom caves material found their way to America, Australia and the European continent. This included human and baboon skulls found by W.L. Distant who visited the caves in 1897.
Adjoining the Wonderboom Nature Reserve (above Hoërskool Wonderboom) a Stone Age site was discovered in 1955 by Dr. H. Hanisch. This site, which for its size is probably the richest deposit in the world, was exposed when the municipality cut a road into the hillside. The road opened up a deposit of material to a depth of between 6 and 8 feet and consists of tools, cores and waste flakes thrown away by Stone Age man when shaping his implements. These Wonderboom dwellers were highly skilled in their art and not having been rolled by water action, the tools are generally in a perfect state of preservation. One of the interesting aspects of this site is the presence of large numbers of prepared cores of the Victoria West types. This technique was developed in South Africa tens of thousands of years before making its appearance in Europe. There are many Iron Age sites spread across the Magaliesberg area. Some of the more important sites are Kruger’s Cave, Olifantspoort, Roberts’ Farm, Cedarbergkloof Cave, Bultfontein, Strauss, Remhoogte, Broederstroom, Ifafi and Jubilee Cave.
Archaeologists are interested in the study of technology and culture. Technology represents societies’ way of responding to environment to ensure survival. Culture represents behaviour based on technology. There are three broadly related, but distinct, technologies based on iron and copper production.
1. The Early Iron Age represented a technology based on iron production, pottery production, sheep/goat farming and hunter gathering. The people sheltered in clay-floored and walled huts. They did not build stone walls. Circa AD350-AD600.
2. The Middle Iron Age – here we have traces of a technology based on iron (probably also copper), pottery production. sorghum, cattle/sheep/goat farming and supplemented by hunting and gathering. The huts were of a design more complex than Early Iron Age huts but still no trace of stone wall building. Circa AD1100 – AD1500.
3. The Late Iron Age – stone wall building is the main technological feature, distinguishing it from earlier stages of the Iron Age. Iron, copper, tin and pottery production reached a climax. Food economies were based on cattle/sheep/goat farming, sorghum cultivation and hunting and gathering. Hut building was more refined with the single floor space of earlier stages but now including divisions of up to three or 4 areas and in some cases, sliding door entrances. Circa AD1500 – AD1800.
(From Origins of Black People of Johannesburg and the South Western Central Transvaal AD350 – 1880 – Revil Mason). The African Experience – by Roland Oliver, details the process of iron smelting in the Iron Age. Pure iron melts at 1540oC and no such temperature could be achieved in any furnace invented before the 19th Century AD. Prior to this, iron smelting consisted in the reduction of the ore by heating it between layers of charcoal to around 1200oC, until most of the slag melted and drained away, leaving a somewhat contaminated but. nevertheless, workable ‘bloom’ – a mixture of solid iron, slag and unburnt charcoal, which could be broken up and further purified by reheating and hammering in the smith’s forge. Even for this limited operation, the pyrotechnic skills required were considerable. For every smelt a furnace had to be built of clay and provided with pottery tuyères – pipes designed to conduct air from eight to ten bellows placed in a circle around the furnace into a combustion chamber. The ore had to be collected from a source and carefully loaded into a furnace along with twice the quantity of charcoal made from slow-burning timber. Once lit, the fire had to be bellowed continuously for something like sixteen hours.
Oxides – minerals made of oxygen combined with other elements. The metallic element iron is found in ore Hematite.
Immediately south of Olifantspoort (Retief’s Farm), Revil Mason and his team from the Archaeological Research Unit, discovered two separate quarrying areas where ledge-like exposures of hematite had been opened up apparently by Iron Age miners. The exposures consisted of shallow trenches several hundred metres long and up to five metres wide but not more than 1,5 metres deep.
What would have been a common sight to hikers 40 years ago in the Magaliesberg, has now almost disappeared from the area – the rock engravings of the Khoisan. Over the centuries, these artists engraved images into the patina of the dolomite rocks. They created masterpieces in the veld of zebra, rhino, ostrich, giraffe, warthog, hippo, leopard, lion, elephant and the many different types of buck. Dominant among the engravings was the eland.
The eland is symbolically the most important animal for the bushman, who say that all other animals are like servants to it. It features in the first-kill ritual that marks a boy’s passage into full manhood, in girls’ puberty rituals – a girl’s passage into full womanhood and also in marriage rituals during which both the man and the woman pass from unmarried to married status.
These are, of course, all very important occasions, but from the point of view of the rock art, it is even more significant that shamans used eland power to pass from this world to the spirit world. All these rituals mark the passage of a person from one state to another and the eland is in each case a symbol of transition that stands between the two states.
For this reason, the eland is the most abundantly engraved and painted animal. (Extract from Rock Engraving of Southern Africa – Thomas A. Dewson).
ROCK ENGRAVINGS
The most common medium for engravings was dolerites, diabases and igneous rocks – when they weather they form an outer crust which, when scraped or pecked away, contrasts in colour with the newly exposed rock beneath. Three techniques were used i.e. hairline engravings (dating back at least 10000 years, scraping and pecking (these were used over the last 3000 years).
During a period of 16 years from 1971 to 1987, Robbie Steel of the Archaeological Research unit of the University of the Witwatersrand, spent part of the time mapping over 500 engravings in the Magaliesberg Valley. He took carbon rubbings of the engravings between the farms, Avondale to the North and Hekpoort to the East, and 49 of these are illustrated in his book, Rock Engravings of the Magaliesberg Valley. Much damage has been done to the engravings on farms that are owned by people who live in the towns and cities and are away from their properties most of the time. However, at least 61 have found their way into the collections of the University of the Witwatersrand, S.A Rock Art Museum, Africana Museum and the National Cultural History Museum, Pretoria.
ROCK PAINTINGS
Not well known is the fact that rock paintings sites exist in the Magaliesberg. A report by the Archaeological Data Recording Centre of the South African Museum, Cape Town, lists 7 rock painting sites (Leeuwenburg 1968).
Harald Pager carried out field work on the Kruger Cave complex in 1972 and 1977 and found 57 paintings which is fairly representative for the average of rock sites in Southern Africa.
The rock face of Kruger Cave consists of recrystallised quartzite of high alkalinity, coated with silica sinter. This rock face, though basically flat, is mostly rough, cracked, multi-coloured, blackened by lichen and covered in dust. For these reasons most of the paintings are scarcely visible and many visitors to the site might have been completely unaware of their presence.
Hardly any of the paintings could be successfully photographed or traced. The copies shown should not be regarded as facsimiles of the originals but as close approximations or interpretations—a term often applied to the replicas of cave art in Europe (Kruger Cave—Revil Mason.
For those wishing to further pursue archaeology, there is The South African Archaeological Society that offers members day outings, field trips and monthly lectures on a variety of subjects. The Origins Centre at Wits University offers visitors a unique experience of Africa’s rich, complex and sometimes mysterious past. With 16 display areas, you can either go on a self-guided tour with an audio-guide player or join a scheduled tour with a guide.
In the Swartkoppies range, north-east of Brits, a Matswana village is being reconstructed by Dr. Udo Kusel, retired Director of the National Cultural History Museum. This village was first settled in 1480. At the moment excavations are still in progress. Stone walls have been rebuilt in the northern section and houses are being reconstructed on the original clay floors. This is probably the first site of its kind that will be reconstructed in its entirety.
Do you not see even stones yield to the power of time,
lofty towers fall to decay and rocks moulder away?
Temples and stature of the gods
to ruin, nor
can the gods themselves prolong
their date or
get reprieve from their fate.
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