I love my work. I love that it takes me to new places, teaches me about ancient communities, and allows me to tell our origin story in museums throughout South Africa and Africa.
I get to meet new people, learn new things, and am often challenged - physically and in my own beliefs.
I am a researcher, a PhD candidate, and in some ways, a lifelong student. I love my work - and am grateful that I am one of the few people who gets to say that.
But I also love what my work contributes to. Like this paper, published in April 2023, where I analysed Later Stone Age stone tools collected at a site of South Africa's Kalahari Basin called Kathu Pan 6, and contributed to the lithics section.
By researching a piece of our ancient past, I am painting a picture of how intelligent and innovative our distant relatives were - and how that helped us evolve into the successful species we are today.
Researching human behaviour
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). I am also a recipient of the Advancing Womxn fellowship given by the Human Evolution Research Institute (HERI) through the UCT Vice Chancellor’s For Womxn by Womxn initiative.
In a word, I am an archaeologist. My research focuses on social transmission, or the human interaction, interconnectedness and sharing of ideas across the Kalahari Basin during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (MIS), an interglacial period dated to between 130 and 74 thousand years ago (ka).
I want to understand whether there was coalescence or social fragmentation among hunter-gatherer communities in the region during this time. Knowing this is important because the transmission of socio-cultural information is considered as one of the crucial components that enabled hunter-gatherers to survive and thrive.
Studying social transmission in the past also helps us to compare cultural diversity across different periods and regions, how it evolved and the factors that influenced it.
Social interaction in ancient South Africa
In fact, there is still debate within the academic community about the timing and how much social interaction was going on between our ancient relatives, especially in southern Africa.
Some research argues that, in comparison to later ‘glacial’ periods in MIS 4 and MIS 2, the MIS 5 period I’m studying was generally characterised by regional fragmented interactions and limited cultural transmission in southern Africa.
However, these views derive from the more exhaustively studied southern South African coastal regions, and have not taken into account sites from the region’s hinterlands. Others, like the researchers in this paper, similarly suggest human populations were regionally differentiated and socially organised by territories.
In my work, using the case study of the Kalahari, I aim to assess whether and to what extent hunter-gatherers were largely disconnected from each other across the subcontinent, as predicted by previous researchers.
Hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Basin
My PhD specifically examines early human social transmission during MIS 5, using lithic assemblages from the Kalahari Basin as proxies to understand the nature and extent of interaction.
With the primary aim of establishing a multi-disciplinary understanding of hunter-gatherer adaptations in the region, this research is being done under the supervision of HERI’s Dr Yonatan Sahle, from the UCT Department of Archaeology, and Dr Jayne Wilkins, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia. The work also falls under the umbrella of the North of Kuruman project directed by Wilkins.
The work builds on previous research that implies lithic assemblage variability and similarities provide a unique window to social transmission, population interaction, and interconnectedness in the past.
With this in mind, I am analysing MIS 5 lithic samples from the Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter (105 ka), Florisbad (121 ka), Kathu Pan 6 (74 ka), Erfkroon (99 ka) in South Africa, and ≠Gi (77 ka) and White Paintings Rockshelter (94 ka) in Botswana.
Sampling a wide range of sites from the southern African deep interior ensures an extensive coverage of the Kalahari region. This is important because it corrects the geographic bias toward coastal regions in southern Africa and bridges an important research gap.
The value of this work is widely understood by the greater palaeoscience community, with support coming from HERI, and South Africa’s GENUS and DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeoscience, as well as the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), and the Australian Research Council.
Contributing to future archaeology
While my research is still in progress, I continue to analyse data and contribute to a greater understanding of patterns indicating social interaction in the southern African region.
In early 2023, I published a paper in the journal Reference Module in Social Sciences with Wilkins, examining Early Stone Age archaeology, gaps and what the future holds in southern Africa.
Importantly, we suggest more is known about this period in South Africa, but that less research is being conducted in other southern African countries.
Rectifying this, with work like mine and from others among the next generation of researchers in archaeology, can help paint a better picture of who we are, where we came from - and how we came to be the complex beings we are today.