Celebrating Fifty Years of Archaeology-Remembering Past Staff: Dr Bronwen van Doornum

Bronwen Louelle van Doornum was born on 25 May 1976. She started her bachelor’s degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1994 and completed her doctorate in Archaeology at the same university in 2009. Van Doornum’s doctoral thesis was on hunter-gatherer interaction with farmers in southern Africa, particularly in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area. She joined the KwaZulu-Natal Museum in 2004 as a Senior Curator in the Department of Human Sciences. Her research focus was on the Later Stone Age archaeology of southern Africa. Other than research, van Doornum was involved in various community outreach programmes and she also gave public lectures aimed at enhancing the role of the museum at large. Van Doornum died tragically in a car accident near Warden while returning from Gauteng to Pietermaritzburg on 19 October 2015.