• Museum Archaeology Workshop
• Anthropological Collections
• Archaeological Collections
• Archaeology without borders

PhD, University of the Witwatersrand

Archaeology of interaction (hunter-gatherer/farmer interaction in southern Africa); changing hunter-gatherer identities; Later Stone Age archaeology.

During my undergrad years, I was interested in many aspects of southern African archaeology, making it difficult to choose one above the other to focus on for postgrad studies. Luckily, my chosen field of research - interaction - allows me to combine aspects of Later Stone Age hunter-gatherer and Iron Age farmer archaeology, as well as rock art, in order to investigate hunter-gatherer/farmer interaction in the Shashe-Limpopo confluence area of South Africa's Limpopo Province.

I am chiefly interested in seeing how hunter-gatherer identities shifted from the pre-contact to the contact period, and the ways in which hunter-gatherers responded to the various groups of farmers (including Zhizo and Leopard's Kopje people) who settled in the area up until AD 1300. The social structures, boundaries and constructed identities underpinning such interaction, as well as changes in the way in which hunter-gatherers interacted with and used their landscape (places and spaces) are also of great interest to me.

Although my current research focus is the Shashe-Limpopo region, I would like to investigate the kinds of interaction that occurred between hunter-gatherers and farmers in both KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, and hope to pursue projects in these areas in the near future.