Heritage Cases

Motivation for the proposed work: Eland Cave The primary narrative regarding the peopling of the eastern part of South Africa is that it witnessed a lengthy hunter-gatherer occupation extending back hundreds of thousands of years (Mazel 1989) followed by the introduction of African Bantu-speaking agriculturists around 2000 years ago (Whitelaw & Moon 1996). This might not, however, be correct. Rock shelter excavations in the northern uKhahlamba-Drakensberg supported by the C14 dating of rock art has enabled the construction of a 5000-year old sequence of hunter-gatherer occupation of the region (Mazel 1984, 1989, 1990, 1992b, 2022; Mazel and Watchman 1997, 2004; Wright and Mazel 2007). Material recovered from some of these excavations has led to suggestion that there might have been pastoralist presence in eastern South Africa around 2000 years ago (Lander and Russell 2015; Mazel 1992a, 1992b, 2013, 2021a, 2021b (in press), 2022). Support for this possibility derives from, for example, the excavation of Collingham Shelter where hunter-gatherer lithic assemblages of over 10 000 pieces occur in conjunction with fine-walled pottery and copper beads in the 1800-1900-year-old deposits; the latter items are typically associated with pastoralists (Mazel 1992a; see also Mazel 1992b). The possible early pastoralist presence in or close to the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg is supported by the presence of finger paintings in the region (Mazel 2013). Description and interpretation of uKhahlamba-Drakensberg rock art has overwhelmingly concentrated on fine line paintings. There is, however, another style of rock art in this region, which tends to be overlooked. Review of the 338 rock art sites that Mazel recorded in the region between 1979 and 1981 (Mazel 1981, 1984) has shown that at least 49 sites (i.e. 15%) contained finger paintings in the form of handprints, finger smears, smudges, and daubs. We can be reasonably confident that the hunter-gatherers did not make the finger paintings, which are usually associated with pastoralists (Smith and Ouzman 2004). Dating of the sheep/goat bones from Mazel’s Eland Cave test excavation in 1980, which have been identified by Klein (1980), and confirmed by Antonites (2019), provides the opportunity to further shed light on the possibility of a pastoralist presence, even if only ephemeral, in the eastern part of southern Africa around 2000 years ago. If these bones or at least some of them are dated back to around 2000 years ago this will provide strong evidence of the presence of pastoralists in the eastern South Africa at the beginning of the first millennium AD and substantially change our understanding of the peopling of this region. References Antonities, A. R. 2019. Report on the faunal material from Eland Cave, South Africa. Klein, R. 1980. Eland Cave fauna. Unpublished report on record at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum. Lander, F.E. and Russell, T. 2015. Fat-tailed sheep and thin-walled pots: contextualizing rock art and pre-agriculturist pottery within the last 3000 years in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Southern African Humanities 27: 113–63. Mazel, A.D. 1981. Up and down the Little Berg: archaeological resource management in the Natal Drakensberg. M.A. thesis. University of Cape Town. Mazel, A.D. 1984. Archaeological survey of the Natal Drakensberg, Natal, South Africa. Journal of Field Archaeology 11: 345-356. Mazel, A.D. 1984. Diamond 1 and Clarke's Shelter: report on excavations in the northern Drakensberg, Natal, South Africa. Annals of the Natal Museum 26(1): 25-70. Mazel, A.D. 1989. The Stone Age peoples of Natal. In Duminy, A. and Guest, W. eds. Natal and Zululand from earliest times to 1910: 1-27: Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Mazel, A.D. 1989. People making history: the last ten thousand years of hunter-gatherer communities in the Thukela Basin. Natal Museum Journal of Humanities 1: 1-168. Mazel, A.D. 1990. Mhlwazini Cave: the excavation of late Holocene deposits in the northern Natal Drakensberg, Natal, South Africa. Natal Museum Journal of Humanities 2: 95- 133. Mazel, A.D. 1992a. Early pottery from the eastern part of southern Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 47: 3-7. Mazel, A.D., 1992b. Collingham Shelter: the excavation of late Holocene deposits, Natal, South Africa. Natal Museum Journal of Humanities 4: 1–52. Mazel, A. 2013. Paint and earth: constructing hunter-gatherer history in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg, South Africa. Time and Mind 6 (1): 49-58. Mazel, A.D. 2021a. Dancing in the dark with firelight: the power of shaded paintings in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg and surrounding areas, southeastern Africa. In Charette, C., Mazel, A and Nash, G. (eds). Indigenous Heritage and Rock Art: Worldwide Research in Memory of Daniel Arsenault. Oxford: Archaeopress: 1-13. Mazel, A.D. 2021b (in press) Sheep and baboon paintings in Junction Shelter: shedding light on the history of Didima Gorge and surrounding areas, South Africa. Southern African Humanities. Mazel, A.D. 2022. Mountain living: The Holocene people of the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg, South Africa. Quaternary International. 611-612: 190-210. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2021.04.039 Mazel, A.D. and Watchman, A.L. 1997. Accelerator radiocarbon dating of Natal Drakensberg paintings: results and implications. Antiquity 71 (272): 445-449. Mazel, A.D. and Watchman, A.L. 2003. The dating of rock paintings in the Natal Drakensberg and the Biggarsberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Southern African Humanities 15: 59-73. Whitelaw, G. & Moon, M. 1996. The ceramics and distribution of pioneer agriculturists in KwaZulu-Natal. Natal Museum Journal of Humanities 8: 53–79. Wright, J.B. and Mazel. A.D. 2007. Tracks in a Mountain Range: Exploring the history of the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.