Heritage Cases

Kaingo Rock Shelters are located on Kaingo Reserve in the Bulge Rivier District, Limpopo Province (24o 11’ 35.5” South; 27o 81’ 08.8” East). Kaingo is SE of Olieboomspoort, an important long sequence rock shelter on the Rietspruit River (on the farm Fancy 556LQ) along the main road to Lephalale. The small Kaingo Rock Shelters are at the base of a sandstone outcrop. One is on the western and the other on the eastern side of a valley cut by a stream flowing towards the south. The first shelter floor is about 3 m above the stream bank and the second one is about 5 m above the stream bank. The western shelter has a width of ~4 m from the shelter wall to the dripline, while its roof height is about 3 m. The eastern shelter is narrower, 2.5 to 3 m in width. The floors of the rock shelters have some flakes and a variety of ceramic sherds. The depth of deposit is estimated to be between 20 and 50 centimetres at its maximum depth in both shelters. The sediment is dry and apart from the admixture of Stone Age and Iron Age items on the modern shelter floor, they appear relatively undisturbed. Both shelters therefore offer an opportunity to date Middle Stone Age occupation in the Waterberg and to establish, first, whether a gap in occupation does exist between Middle Stone Age and Iron Age and, secondly, if a gap exists, its chronological extent. The sites may also offer the potential to reconstruct Waterberg environment during part of the Middle Stone Age because there seems to be good organic preservation, at least on the surface. A preliminary assessment of the sites’ potential will be made by excavating one square metre to bedrock in each shelter. Sediment cores will be taken for optically stimulated luminescence dating and micromorphology blocks will be made for thin sections to study site formation processes. The hillslope below the shelter has diverse flora that will be recorded during the excavation period so that the modern and ancient vegetation records can be compared. Both Kaingo Rock Shelters have rock paintings in them; the western shelter has late white paintings of fat-tailed sheep on one end of the shelter. The test excavation will be situated at the other end of the shelter, so the paintings will not be affected. Furthermore, geotextile will be placed on the floor of the shelter during excavation so that dust from walking does not affect the paintings and the screening will take place at a distance so that dust does not enter the shelter. After the excavation, the trench will be rehabilitated with the sieved soil from the excavation placed in biodegradable hessian sacks. The sacks will then be hidden with sieved soil, raked over. Research question The earliest archaeological sites presently known on the Waterberg plateau contain Middle Stone Age cultural material in rock shelters and in the open. Only one shelter site on the plateau has been dated thus far and it is important to obtain a chronology. The Middle Stone Age sites are unlikely to be older than 300 000 years ago or younger than 30 000 years ago because this is the span of Middle Stone Age ages elsewhere in South Africa. Assuming that some of the plateau Middle Stone Age sites were as young as 30 000 years ago, there is a curious 29 000 year old gap in occupation of the Waterberg plateau. Later Stone Age occupation on the plateau dates only to the last 1000 years, based on the preliminary work by van der Ryst (1998). We can speculate that the plateau was abandoned for environmental reasons that remain obscure until dates and environmental proxies become available. Understanding the hiatus in occupation and obtaining dates for the sequence is a major research objective. First, however, we need to be sure that a hiatus does exist and this can only be discovered through the dating of several archaeological sites. The demographic movement into the Waterberg at about 1000 years ago is unprecedented elsewhere in South Africa. Hunter-gatherers and farmers appear to have arrived on the plateau simultaneously as part of a symbiotic relationship that lasted for several hundred years.