Archæological Investigations in the Northern Transvaal

Abstract

REMARKABLE results obtained since 1933 in the excavation of two sites in the Zoutpansberg District, Northern Transvaal, have evoked so many inquiries that Prof. C. van Riet Lowe, director of the Bureau of Archæology, University of South Africa, has been authorized by the Archaeological Committee of the University of Pretoria, the body conducting the investigation, to prepare a preliminary report, which appears in Antiquity of September. The two sites, Mapungubwe, and the adjacent and earlier site, Bambandianalo, are situated on a farm near the junction of the Shashi and Limpopo rivers, about” one hundred and sixty miles south-west of Zimbabwe, and just over fifty miles due west of Messina, where there are extensive remains of pre-European copper workings. The farm is now the property of the Union Government, having been purchased on the urgent representations of Prof. Leo Fouche. This public-spirited action has proved of inestimable benefit to the advancement of archaeological studies in South Africa by making possible the scientific excavation of sites hitherto undisturbed. Notwithstanding the spectacular situation of the Mapungubwe fortress with its dry-stone walling on an inaccessible sandstone cliff, one hundred feet high, and the wealth of gold and other cultural objects found here, in the associated cemetery, and on the earlier site of Bambandianalo (see NATUBB, 137, 1024), these sites do not differ essentially from other sites in the region and in Rhodesia, including the Zimbabwe explored by Dr. D. Randall-Maclver and Miss Caton-Thomp-son; but these latter have suffered from the disturbance of treasure hunters and unauthorized excavation. Hence it has now been possible to establish with certainty a cultural sequence, from which it is inferred that the earlier of the two cultures found here, that of a copper-working pastoral people, may represent the earliest wave of the incursion into what is now South Africa of the Bantu-speaking peoples.