Heritage Cases

Faraoskop is a small rock shelter on the end of a rocky sandstone ridge some 5km north of the small town of Graafwater in the Western Cape. Quite hidden in the rocks and hardly visible from below the ridge, the shelter nevertheless offers a good view across the sandy coastal plains to the shoreline, 30km to the west. In the late 1980s the landowner illegally removed deposits from the shelter that included some remarkably well preserved artefacts of reed, bone and leather, as well as the remains of seven human burials. When we heard of these finds we visited the owner, retrieved the artefacts and skeletal remains and visited the site to check the condition of any remaining intact deposit. It was clear that he had substantially pitted about half of the surface area, but that there seemed to be more than a metre of sediments preserved in the front parts of the site. Our excavations a year and two years later, undertaken by Antony Manhire and Roden Yates, were designed to understand better the contexts of the removed burials and to assess the potential for further, more systematic excavation. After cleaning out the disturbed upper levels around the back wall, we were able to remove carefully a further 5 intact burials from a very small portion of the rear of the shelter, and to describe a stratigraphy that extended more than a metre into clearly Pleistocene levels with good bone preservation and substantial stone tool assemblages. Radiocarbon dating of six of the skeletal remains from both landowner and archaeological excavations produced a set of uncalibrated ages between 2000 and 2150 years with standard deviations of about 50 years. The radiocarbon dates for organic material from the sediments, mostly charcoal, showed an episodic utilization of the cave with occupation in the last 1000 years, between 2000 and 2600 years, around 4500 years and intermittently between 10000 and 16000 years. Most other Western Cape sites also show such episodicity of occupation and some along the nearby Verloren Vlei show occupation at almost precisely the same times as Faraoskop. Careful accessioning of the human remains revealed that there may have been seven or eight distinct individuals, not all of them represented by complete skeletal elements. Adult males and females, one juvenile and two young children were identified and aged. Stable carbon isotope analyses of eight of the individuals generated values that cover a relatively narrow range between -16.5 and -18.5 per mil, illustrating a fairly similar diet with very little sea food. A site report has been published (Manhire 1993) with a brief description of stratigraphy, stone tool assemblages and raw material usage, organic artefacts, faunal and plant food remains. Since then the remarkable phenomenon of so many associated human burials so narrowly restricted in time at a single site has been mentioned but never significantly interrogated. We plan to do this in the project outlined below.