South Africa is covered in stunning rock art. Most of this art was made by Khoisan communities and it includes engravings found on the boulders in the interior parts of the country and paintings found in the shelters on the mountains that fringe the interior plateau. The rock paintings in these shelters are incredibly sophisticated; they are small and have complex shading. They are also often superimposed in many layers,made over many years—sometimes centuries.These qualities make it very difficult to record the imagery. The standard practice over the last three decades has been to photograph the images and to make a direct tracing of the panels. Tracing is a laborious affair and requires significant training and experience for proficiency.

New digital techniques allow for images to be enhanced and for some invisible images to be made visible again. Developments in digital photogrammetry have also allowed for the accurate stitching of multiple two-dimensional photos into an accurate three-dimensional model of rock art shelter walls. In the Department of Human Sciences (DHS) at KZNM, two scholars are working on different projects related to digital photogrammetry and rock art. Dr Justine Wintjes is looking at how to reconstruct rock art panels that were destroyed through the removal of sections—some of which are now housed in the KZNM—by digitally integrating removed sections with the material that remains at the site. Angela Ferreira, a volunteer at the museum, is working on how to produce digital tracings from three-dimensional renderings of rock shelters. Both these projects hold the potential to revolutionise the recording of South African rock paintings.

The KZN Museum hosted a roundtable discussion on issues surrounding human remains housed in South African Museums and how best to deal with repatriation of remains collected unethically. Part of the legacy of colonialism, human skeletons were often given to, or acquired by, museums in South Africa often under dubious circumstances. The Khoesan peoples were significantly affected by such unethical acquisitions. The skeletons within museum collections in South Africa today raise many challenges for how to deal with these remains and how to identify and repatriate them to relevant communities. Museums have often been slow to respond to such issues and to deal with restitution.

A new initiative, being led by Dr Wendy Black of Iziko Museums (Cape Town), seeks to map a new consensus amongst museum curatorial personnel on how best to deal with issues surrounding human remains within museum collections. To this end Dr Black hosted a one-day roundtable discussion on 25 October 2019, with personnel from Iziko Museums of South Africa, KZN Museum, Wits University, McGregor Museum, Albany Museum, Bloemfontein Museum, Ditsong Museum, the University of Stellenbosch, and the Department of Sports, Art and Culture (DSAC). The discussions were fruitful and the contributors were able to share their concerns and potential solutions to these issues. The participants were also able to comment broadly and provide important input on the Draft National Policy on the Repatriation and Restitution of Human Remains and Heritage Objects, currently in the process of refinement by DSAC.

It is the job of every museum to grow its collections. In 2019, the KZN Museum purchased an important collection of items collected among the BaTonga people of the Zambezi River Valley. The BaTonga, who number about 300,000 were forcibly resettled from their homes in the valley by the oppressive Rhodesian administration to enable the construction of the Kariba Dam in the 1950s. The Tonga language is widely spoken in Zimbabwe today as it is an important lingua franca. The items were collected in the Siabuwa area, south of Kariba in north-western Zimbabwe in the 1970s by Thomas Huffman, as ‘scientific mementos’ arising from his ethnoarchaeological study of the relationship between architectural structures, pots and population numbers. Items included in the purchased collections include drums, thumb pianos, clothing, headrests, hunting weapons, and stools. The collection was accessioned and then fumigated before being catalogued, photographed and stored in the collection rooms.