120 Years in 120 Objects

Join the KwaZulu-Natal Museum in celebrating the museum’s 120^th year of orbiting the sun. Staff and guest curators have chosen one object or item per year of our existence to highlight to the public. Visit the website and our social media platforms regularly to see the latest object and keep an eye out for information about a physical exhibition later this year!

Today’s Object is from 1926

The Eland Cave Hunting Kit by Ghilraen Laue, Curator of Special Collections

(Photo: M. Lombard)

 In 1926 Dr. Ernest Warren, the director of the Natal Museum (as it was then known), received a letter from J. S. Lombard offering to sell a Bushman hunting kit which he had found in a cave in the Drakensberg. The hunting kit was bought by Warren for the sum of £6 10s and accessioned into the museum’s collections. The items received were: a bow, bowcase, quiver, 21 arrows, a curved metal blade, a short blade in a leather sheath, a small leather bag containing a solid substance, and a wooden spatula for applying poison to the arrows.

The shelter where the items were found, now known as Eland Cave, is located in the ukuHlamba Mountains in KwaZulu-Natal near the Cathedral Peak area. Archival reports indicate that in 1870 Bushmen were living in the vicinity of Eland Cave but that by 1873 most had disappeared. Some reports have Bushmen still living in secluded ravines in the Didima Gorge as late as 1885. A Mr Robinson who saw the hunting kit before it was removed noted that it was found next to what appeared to be a Bushman bed made of grass. He believed that the grass bed and hunting kit were so well preserved that it was unlikely they had been there for 40-50 years. He concluded that a lone Bushman must have continued to live in the area long after the rest of his people had disappeared.

In July 2023 the results of a study of poison residues, including samples from the arrows mentioned above, were published (click here to see the publication). The biomarkers indicate that the poison on the arrows was most likely of plant origin, specifically from the genera Adenium and Sansevieria.

120 Years in 120 Objects

Join the KwaZulu-Natal Museum in celebrating the museum’s 120^th year of orbiting the sun. Staff and guest curators have chosen one object or item per year of our existence to highlight for the public. Visit the website and our social media platforms regularly to see the latest object and keep an eye out for information about a physical exhibition later this year!

Today’s Object is from 1984

South Africa’s Oldest Spoons by Aron Mazel, Associate Researcher, Newcastle University

Nkupe rock shelter, in northern KwaZulu-Natal, has one of the largest collections of bone tools ever found in South Africa. Over 400 bone tools were excavated here in the 1980s (Pictures 1 and 2). The San hunter-gatherers, who occupied the rock shelter between 6500 and 2500 years ago, made these exquisite artefacts.

While awls and points were the most common bone tools that the Nkupe hunter-gatherers made (Pictures 3 and 4), the most extraordinary find was two, and possibly three, bone spoons. Found in 1984, these spoons are 4000 years old and, therefore, they are the oldest spoons that we know of in the country. One of them is whole, another is broken but clearly the same item as the whole one (Picture 5), and the third, while broken and not as distinctive as the others, appears similar enough to be considered a spoon.

No other ancient hunter-gatherer bone spoons have been found in KwaZulu-Natal or elsewhere in South Africa. This makes the spoons quite unique. We don’t know why the hunter-gatherers didn’t make more spoons. It’s possible that marine or freshwater shells (on a marine shell in the KZN Museum’s collections, click here), such as the brown mussels, often found in hunter-gatherer rock shelter excavations, may have been more commonly used as spoons.

Picture 1: Nkupe floor area

Picture 2: Nkupe end of excavation 1984

Picture 3: Nkupe bone awls

Picture 4: Nkupe bone points

Picture 5: Nkupe bone spoons

Rock Art of Setukane Mountain, Waterberg Limpopo Province

On Thursday the 1^st of August 1895 the missionary Hermann Schlömann made an ‘arduous mountain trek’ to see Bushman paintings on the edge of the Waterberg. He was amazed by both the preservation of the site and the skill of the painters. Nearly 130 years later, Dr Ghilraen Laue, Human Sciences Department, KwaZulu-Natal Museum, and Professor Lyn Wadley, Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, made the same climb to find the paintings. Even though the site's rough position was marked on a map 25 years earlier by the Rock Art Research Institute, it still took four hours, scrambling through the thick and thorny overgrowth, to find the site. In an area where many sites are poorly preserved the paintings of Setukane Mountain (Tafelkoppe) stand out, not only for their remarkable preservation but also for the diversity of imagery.

The many paintings cover about 9 meters of the inner wall of the shelter (Photo: L. Wadley)

Left: Two finely painted giraffe (Photo: L. Wadley). Right: The body of this ostrich was most likely originally painted in black pigment which has now disappeared (Photo: G. Laue).

When Schlömann visited the site the Bushman painters no longer lived in the area, but the local inhabitants still visited the site to pray in ‘times of extreme distress’ such as severe drought. Although the meaning of the paintings was no longer understood the site was still seen as a powerful place. Over 50 years of research into Bushman rock art have shown that the art was intimately related to the image-maker’s beliefs, rituals, and interactions with the spirit world.

Left: Dancing figures enclosed in a roughly painted circle (Photo: L. Wadley). Right: Animal headed ‘non-real’ creature (Photo: G. Laue).

The site is on land now owned by the Majadibodu Community Trust and the mountain still holds a special importance for the people. The name ‘Setukane’ means ‘smoking’ as in something burning. Thabitha Mmakgabo Tebogo Seloba (nee Majaibodu) (1924- 2018) who was born close to the mountain told how when the time for ploughing was approaching people would see beautiful seeds on a specific rock on the mountaintop, but if one tried to bring the seeds down they would disappear.