Modern development threatens Northern Cape prehistoric site

Modern-day growth is threatening to isolate thousands of ancient relics at one of South Africa’s richest early prehistoric sites in the Northern Cape.

Steven James Walker, of the University of Cape Town’s Department of Archaeology, says his team has been working with developers and with the South African Heritage Resources Agency to preserve the Kathu site, which risks becoming an enclave surrounded by modern development.

The Kathu Townlands site, between Vryburg and Upington, is estimated to be between Early to Middle Pleistocene – 700 000 and 1-million years old – and, according to researchers, may once have resembled the Okavango.

The site is of archaeological significance because it houses thousands of Earlier Stone Age tools such as hand axes, many of which have been uncovered during archaeological excavations.

A collaboration between archaeologists from the University of Cape Town, the University of Toronto in Canada, and the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, involved fieldwork at the site during 2013.

A report on the research findings published in the Plos One journal describes the Kathu site as a “complex and massive archaeological context” that warrants further research.

See a photo essay on Middle Stone Age tools and shells at Maropeng here.