Rachel King

Before the flood: Loss of place, mnemonics, and ‘resources’ ahead of the Metolong Dam, Lesotho

Natural resource extraction projects such as dams and mines entail alteration to or destruction of natural and cultural landscapes. Heritage mitigation efforts often propose compensating for or salvaging material heritage, largely because this can be inventoried and evaluated alongside economic and environmental resources. Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is often overlooked, despite the fact that tangibles, intangibles, and economic resources together constitute the impacted landscape. Writing from the perspective of western Lesotho’s Metolong Dam, we view landscape as an embodiment of intangible heritage to explore what ‘landscape loss’ consequent on dam-building entails. We contend that this process involves dissociating intangibles from their material correlates, and transforming landscape experiences by dissolving and re-constituting boundaries and ‘resources’ in line with developer perspectives. We suggest that considering interdisciplinary approaches to landscape theorisation and ICH achieves a more nuanced view of how landscape loss and ICH interrelate, and thus improves mitigatory practice.

Introduction: De-centring ethical assumptions by re-centring ethical debate in African archaeology

Institute for Culture and Society, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Penrith, New South Wales 2751, Australia; School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford, OX1 2PG, United Kingdom and Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, PO Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa; Archaeology, School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia 6009, Australia and GAES, University of the Witwatersrand, PO Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa

How to develop Intangible Heritage: the case of Metolong Dam, Lesotho

After ten years and extensive debate of UNESCO’s Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage (2003), workable definitions and frameworks for safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) are either emergent or non-existent. This is particularly significant in the case of heritage mitigation associated with large-scale construction projects: where these entail population resettlement and/or landscape loss, recording ICH is necessary both for impact assessment and mitigation and for helping impacted-upon communities cope with trauma. Nevertheless, there is little discussion of how to implement ICH safeguarding frameworks in salvage contexts. This paper focuses on attempts to record ICH impacted upon by western Lesotho’s Metolong Dam. We highlight the practical shortcomings of existing ICH definitions and safeguarding protocols. We discuss the methodology used at Metolong and its ethical entailments, and take inspiration from UNESCO policy (and debates thereupon) and other sources in an attempt to find a workable framework for ICH recording in development contexts.

THE ‘INTERIOR WORLD’ OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MALOTI-DRAKENSBERG MOUNTAINS

Over the last four decades researchers have cast the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains as a marginal refuge for ‘Bushmen’ amidst constricting nineteenth-century frontiers. Rock art scholarship has expanded on this characterisation of mountains as refugia, focusing on heterogeneous raiding bands forging new cultural identities. Here, we propose another view of the Maloti-Drakensberg: a dynamic political theatre in which polities that engaged in illicit or ‘heterodox’ activities like cattle raiding and hunter-gatherer lifeways set the terms of colonial encounters. We employ the concept of the ‘interior world’ to refigure the region as one fostering subsistence and political behaviours that did not conform to the expectations of colonial authority. Paradoxically, such heterodoxies over time constituted widespread social logics within the Maloti-Drakensberg, and thus became commonplace and meaningful. We synthesise historical and archaeological evidence (new and existing) to illustrate the significance of the nineteenth-century Maloti-Drakensberg, offering a revised southeast-African colonial landscape and directions for future research.

Voluntary Barbarians of the Maloti-Drakensberg: The BaPhuthi Chiefdom, Cattle Raiding and Colonial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa

values of preserved fatty acids using a new reference database for modern animal fats. These results also reveal that the animals giving rise to these fats subsisted on a wide range of different forages composed of C3 plants, varying combinations of C3 and C4 plants and diets comprising primarily C4 plants, suggesting that the ecosystems existing across the span of the early to middle Holocene in North Africa were extremely varied. This demonstrates that δC values of lipids from ceramics provide a valuable environmental proxy, through vegetation driven signatures (C3 versus C4), and can thus be used to determine spatiotemporal variations in vegetation and humidity. The remarkable preservation of diagnostic plant lipid biomarkers, notably long-chain fatty acids (C20 to C28) and n-alkanes (C23 to C33) in organic residues from sites in the Libyan Sahara and at Kadero, Sudan, has enabled identification of the earliest processing of plants in ceramic vessels. Carbon number distributions and δC values indicate that in the Libyan Sahara vessels were likely used to process edible water plants, wild cereals and emergent macrophytes. These signals persist in residues from the Early Acacus to the Middle Pastoral periods, suggesting that aquatic plants were exploited by both huntergatherers and mobile pastoralists. High frequencies of organic residues dominated by palmitic acid, and low in stearic acid, also suggest the processing of oil seeds in the vessels.

Development-led archaeology and ethics in Lesotho

In 2008 the Metolong Cultural Resource Management (MCRM) Project embarked upon an ambitious four-year programme that coupled heritage mitigation with capacity building for heritage management in Lesotho. Ahead of western Lesothos Metolong Dam, a corps of ten Basotho was trained in archaeological field skills and participated in archaeological and anthropological mitigation operations supervised by a team from the University of Oxford. While the MCRM Projects training programme was a success, the Project has recently come to and end and employment opportunities for trainees have not emerged. Infrastructure for heritage management in Lesotho remains under-resourced and there is little indication that future large-scale development projects will promote capacity building in that area. The consequences of this state of affairs will include not only an industrial deficit, but also an impoverishment of workable conceptions of heritage produced by Basotho communities and particular to development in Lesotho. This paper discusses the ethical crossroads at which we find ourselves when capacity building programmes end without producing employment opportunities or enhanced heritage management infrastructure. We explore possible future directions for independent trainee-led co-operatives, regional accreditation and codes of practice for trainees and the devolution of responsibility for ensuring adequate standards of heritage management.

Archaeological naissance at Mapungubwe

The centerpiece of this essay is a southern African board game known as mufuvha at the site of Mapungubwe (AD 1220–1290), an object that visitors closely identify with their relationships to the site but which has largely eluded the attentions of both archaeologists and recent publicity campaigns. In attempting to illuminate why this is so, I submit that archaeological practice at Mapungubwe and the political packaging of South African heritage have created narratives of Mapungubwe incongruous with experiences of local publics. Further, the mufuvha board is implicated in a process whereby archaeology, both as material and as social process, is vernacularized. I demonstrate that interrogating these alternative dialogues is essential to understanding how the archaeological past is constituted, in terms of both popular imaginaries and the creation (or omission) of archaeological assemblages.

Living on edge new perspectives on anxiety refuge and colonialism in southern Africa

Archaeologies of colonialism have have called for exploring the culturally dynamic entanglements of people and objects while acknowledging the violence that accompanied these entanglements. Heeding these calls requires attention to how the state and state power were materialized, particularly in settler colonies where state apparatuses advanced unevenly, insidiously and clumsily. Here, I explore how the (mis)understandings and (mis)apprehensions of people and places that accompanied the halting expansion of colonial frontiers were materialized. Focusing on southern Africas Highveld and Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains, I offer anxiety as a framework for conceiving of colonialisms as epistemic encounters: processes of ‘making sense’ of new people, things and places based on material practices, empirical experience and desire. Through a narrative of the nineteenth-century Maloti-Drakensberg told with archival, archaeological and ethnographic materials, I revisit a longstanding trope of southern African archaeology and historiography: refugia from social distress. I argue that refuge can be taken as a sense-making practice rather than as reaction to stress. I close with thoughts on what an anxiety framework can offer the still-developing field of African historical archaeology.

‘A Loyal Liking for Fair Play’: Joseph Millerd Orpen and Knowledge Production in the Cape Colony

Abstract Joseph Orpens 1874 Cape Monthly Magazine article relating the testimony of Qing, a San man in the Maloti Mountains, is a bedrock text of southern San cosmology. For the last few decades, this article has been the subject of intense scrutiny by rock art researchers and archaeologists studying hunter-gatherer societies. Recently, scholars have questioned whether Orpens encounter with Qing has been appropriately contextualised, citing lingering uncertainties over Orpens motivations and biases that may have informed the article. This paper addresses these concerns through examination of Orpens archival corpus. It draws on new archival data to articulate the development of Orpens personal politics, research motives, and interpersonal relationships within Cape knowledge networks. When examined more broadly, Orpens intellectual career appears primarily concerned with native history and land title rather than a specifically philological or anthropological agenda, and his encounter with Qing as having been overshadowed by his dedication to represent the interests of Basotho sovereignty.

Memories of Metolong: The challenges of archiving intangible heritage in development contexts

In 2012, two of the authors engaged in an Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) study as part of the Metolong Cultural Resource Management project, ahead of completion of the Metolong dam, western Lesotho. Focussing on aspects of living heritage that will be directly affected by the completion of the dam, the study revealed a number of intriguing conclusions, most notably that when it comes to the ICH of landscape, ICH is, in fact, far from intangible. This leads to a number of challenges when we consider the ethical imperative to archive the results of such studies. We oppose the notion that documenting ICH conveys materiality upon it and argue the contrary, that textual documentation of ICH in fact abstracts it from its inherent materiality in landscape. This, coupled with the obligation to provide an archive accessible to all sectors of the community, requires that the archiving and interpretation of such projects be achieved in a non(or not solely) textual manner. In our work we made use of a number of non-textual recording techniques, such as GPS, mapping, and audio-visual documentation, and in this paper we consider other techniques in the creation of physical archives and interpretation methods that could enhance memories of Metolong. The loss of landscape and associated heritage is traumatic, particularly in a development context, where such loss may be sudden, and not necessarily desired by impacted communities: it is recognised that ICH recording can act as a mitigatory tool in allowing communities to retain some records of their lost heritage, but in this paper we argue that this is only the case where this leads to the creation of accessible archives, and that the achievement of this is an ethical imperative for heritage workers.