Object Listing

Fractured bone point

Fractured bone point

Fractured bone point

Fractured bone point

Sculpture

Watercolour

Curated charcoal sample

111 pot sherds from Bobartia Road midden weighing a total of 467 g.

A bronze muzzle loading cannon from the shipwreck of the vessel Speaker which wrecked on the East coast of Mauritius in January 1702.
Dimensions of the cannon are length 1410mm, diameter muzzle 140mm, diameter breech 190mm, width trunnion to trunnion 208mm and weight 136Kg
(The vessel the Speaker was a pirate vessel captained first by British pirate George Booth upon its seizure in 1699. After the death of George Booth in 1700, the captaincy of the vessel was taken over by John Bowen until its wrecked in 1702. The crew of 170 purportedly all survived the wrecking.)

Bronze sculpture of a horse head

Bronze kettle

Bronze pot with 6 antelope horns around pot.

The Broster Beadwork Collection is made up of items used traditionally in Xhosa rituals, symbolism and/or personal adornment. 

Intact coprolite sampled from Square M4D1 at Bushman Rock Shelter 

Sample of unidentified bones recovered from a coarse fraction without unique ID numbers, from the excavation of the Later Stone Age layers of Bushman Rock Shelter. The faunal material is bagged into 228 separate samples. Each sample bag is representative of unique units and quadrates.

Sediment samples taken from Square M3b Layer 3 -18 at Bushman Rock Shelter 

One small quartz triangular flake (point) with 3 dorsal removals and with dark brown material sticking on the bulb and the left lateral dorsal face. This residue is probably a remanent of an adhesive compound.

3 samples of OES and 32 samples of Achatina - each sample is a separate object with this batch as the parent id. Codes BRS + sample number

We are applying for a permit to export macro-charcoals from the Later Stone Age layers of Bushman Rock Shelter, to the University of Nice Côte d’Azur to be studied by a PhD candidate, Elysandre Puech, together with her supervisor, Dr. Isabelle Théry-Parisot, a charcoal specialist. The macro-charcoals have been carefully sorted after 3mm sieving during excavation and are from 27 stratigraphic units and 9 hearth-like features rigorously selected among some sub-squares along the Later Stone Age sequence. The main motivation to export this material is the availability, in the Nice laboratory in France, of specific instruments regularly or newly used in the field of charcoal analyses, such as a set of sieves with specific meshes for sampling by size range; a software computer-aided for wood anatomical features measuring; a dendrochronological linear table for tree-ring measurement and a taphonomic charcoal reference collection of different types and parts of wood. These instruments and collection are currently unavailable in South Africa. They will serve to describe both morphologic and taphonomic wood features in the identification of wood taxa, as well as potential particular climatic events and fire wood exploitation. In addition to these specific instruments, the study will be also conducted with the aid of microscopic equipment, including light microscope and scanning electron microscope (SEM), both readily available in the University of Nice. This permit application concerns macro-charcoal remains recovered from the site of Bushman Rock Shelter, Limpopo Province, currently housed at the Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Sedimentary samples will be subjected to DNA extraction protocols and analysed to ascertain the ancient pathogenic (bacterial, viral and fungal) composition of the anthropogenic sediments. The samples derive from Later Stone Age (LSA) levels at Bushman Rock Shelter, Limpopo Province, dated to between c. 10,000 and 15,000 years ago.

Achatina

Achatina