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History: About six kilometres out of Vereeniging the double-way Hertzog Road to Heidelberg crosses a bridge over the Klip River, a tributary of the Vaal River. Immediately beyond the bridge to the right of the road the Klip River Quarry is situated.
In this quarry the engineers of the Department of Roads, in 1920, exposed a layer of gravel, which contains a great variety of stone implements that prehistoric man had fashioned for his needs hundreds of thousands of years ago. Like the well-rounded boulders in the gravel, many of the stone implements were rounded as a result of abrasion and roiling in the ancient river bed, while the implements were comparatively sharp, showing that man had lived in the vicinity of Vereeniging while the gravels were being deposited in the bed of the river then 15 metres higher than it is today.
The first to recognise the importance of these deposits was Prof. C. van Riet Lowe, who was at that time acting as Civil Engineer to the Department of Public Works. It was, however, not until 1935, when he took charge of the Archaeological survey of the Union of South Africa, that Prof. Van Riet Lowe was able to carry out systematic investigations of the deposits in this quarry. The excavations yielded a rich reward and proved the importance of the site in the story of Stone Age Man in Africa. With the assistance of the well-known Abbé Breuil further important discoveries were made here in 1942. The Abbé concluded that Stone Age Man lived in Vereeniging when the bed of the \Taal was at least 30 vertical metres above its present level. More important still, as a result of his previous investigations in Portugal and Morocco, he could show that precisely similar Stone Age remains to those found in Vereeniging also exist in ancient raised beaches in Western Europe and north-west Africa.
Collections of stone implements from the Duncanville and Klip River sites are today to be seen in museums in London, Paris, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and Cam- bridge (England) but the most comprehensive collection is housed in the University of Witwatersrand. ‘The Vereeniging area’, writes Prof. Van Riet Lowe, ‘has its own niche in the field of science as well as a wide and appreciative audience in America, Europe and, of course, Africa.
Proclaimed 1943"
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