Heritage Cases

Planned fieldwork in September 2019 will look for suitable speleothems (stalagmites/flowstones) for collection for palaeoclimate analysis from two localities: Makapansgat Valley, near Mokopane, Limpopo Province and Ngodwana near Nelspruit, Mpumalanga. Speleothems from Makapansgat will be collected from modern caves (e.g. Ficus Cave); sampling will be discrete and will be accompanied by the collection of water samples. Speleothems from Ngodwana will be collected from abandoned lime mines; sampling will be discrete. No more than six speleothem samples will be collected and shipped to the UK for analysis. In both localities there will be no interaction with, or removal of, archaeological, palaeontological or building materials. This proposed work is part of a larger project to understand the Late Miocene to Recent (last 7 million years) climate history of South Africa. Speleothems from modern caves will be dated using uranium-thorium methods and the cave environment will be studied using water samples and in-cave measurement of temperature and carbon dioxide. Speleothems from lime mines will be dated using uranium-lead methods. Climate proxies will be established using stable isotope and trace element geochemistry. The goal of this work is to understand inter-annual to millennial scale climate variability in southern Africa; this work will also help to understand the climatic context of hominin evolution in Africa. Below are examples of recent publications conducted by the applicant in the field of South African speleothem research.