Heritage Cases

This project seeks to further the insights we have on corbelled houses as an architecture type that straddled multiple social and class identities. Of critical importance here are the issues around what happened to Khoekhoen and San identities, the period between the 18th and 19th century greatly affected indigenous ways of life and led to the creation of new identities such as the Basters, the Griqua and Koranna to mention a few. Recent research in the region has highlighted that these corbelled houses are emblematic of the complex processes of cultural interaction. In order to further explore these issue, archaeological and documentary evidence are combined to interrogate the biographies of two corbelled farms in the Carnarvon and Fraserburg districts of the Northern Cape - Gansvely 554 in the north of Carnarvon and Driefontein 464 in the south of Fraserburg . Both farms have multiple corbelled house complexes situated on them, and the question regarding these corbelled how the sequence of their construction speaks to the issues of identity, social position and economics. The theoretical application of the archaeology of frontiers as well as the archaeology of contact and interaction would contradict such a simplistic view of the architecture type. Recent research conducted by the historical archaeology research group has linked the settlement patterns of some of these corbelled houses to Nama organisational patterns (Hancock 2013), furthermore, research by Kramer (2012, 2017) has linked the architecture type Baster (Griqua) construction practices and research by Kramer (2012) and Lupuwana (2021) has argued that these houses emerge as a direct result of the processes of interaction and cultural exchange and as a result both authors have argued that the corbelled houses potentially are influenced by the Khoekhoen maitjeshuis form as well as other forms of corbelling as this architecture type was also used and utilised by the early Iron age Tswana societies.