Sue Blaine
1 August 2008
Johannesburg — CAPE Town should be taking more advantage of the fact that it has a 17th century castle still standing and largely unscathed, says South African-born archaeologist Prof Carmel Schrire.
"It's the prime encounter site (the encounter between indigenous South Africans and the Dutch, who settled in 1652). It should have its own archaeologist, the collection should be curated at the Castle and there should be continuous excavation there.
"It's a wonderful site. It's still standing and that's extremely unusual. In most countries it would be under another building. There's a Dutch West India (Company) equivalent in Albany, New York. It lies under a hideous clover-leaf (flyover on a highway)," says Schrire, who is a full-time researcher at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey in the US.
Things were not always going so swimmingly for the Castle, which Schrire says is constantly on the brink of falling down because it is so damp - at the turn of the last century there was talk of tearing it down to make way for a railway station, but Marie Koopmans-De Wet, who sadly appears to have a greater reputation for being a socialite than a heritage conservationist, saved it.
"Mrs Koopmans-De Wet made a big thing of it and now we know more about the Cape ceramic industry, about the Cape's trade with Asia," says Schrire.
Schrire is working on a book about these topics, using evidence she has taken from what has been excavated at the Castle, and says for this alone the Castle, built in 1666, is an invaluable archaeological site.
"When I publish we will have the detail of the ceramic trade. There are thousands and thousands of pieces of ceramic that tell you how it was done. We have some information from shipwrecks, but they are difficult to excavate, if they haven't been pillaged already. The Castle is fantastic, and probably only half a percent of its archaeology is done," she says.
Getting artifacts out of the ground is only the first part of archaeology. What is found has to be analysed and that takes a long time, says Schrire, who in 1984 initiated a major programme in the historical archaeology of European contact and settlement at the Cape.
Schrire is world-renowned in archaeological circles and her work on historical archaeology (where researchers have both text and artifacts to work with) has given a better picture of what life was like in Cape after the Dutch arrived in 1652, says Prof Martin Hall, the University of Cape (UCT's) own's deputy vice-chancellor, himself an archaeologist.
"We are very proud and certainly very lucky to have her as a South African," he says.
Oddly enough, for someone who professes to have chosen the career "because I wanted to drive around in a big Land Rover, smoking, cursing, and finding treasure", Schrire says she enjoys the office-based work of sifting through the bits and pieces dug up.
Then she adds a proviso that makes sense: "If you can make discoveries". But what Schrire might see as a "discovery" might seem mind-numbingly boring to the casual observer.
In 2004 she excavated the house of the "Last Jew of Auschwitz" in the Polish town of Oswiecim, where the Nazis built their most notorious death camp, finding things such as a metal razor, stoneware crockery shards, a wrench, the sole of a woman's shoe and the bones of animals that the Klugers, the family that lived in the house, were likely to have eaten.
"It's in the ordinariness of the archaeological record that the enormity of the thing gets to you. There they were, minding their own business, and the Nazis move in. When you expand it to understand what the Klu ger family were part of, the horror gets to you. Six million people!
"The massacre of the Jews was the biggest and most contrived massacre in history. Nothing was unplanned. I was asked to excavate the Klu ger house because people in Europe are looking at European heritage now that the old national states are being submerged in a general European Union," she says.
Schrire is taking the story of what was unearthed at the Klu ger house to a conference on massacres, hosted by Australia's University of Newcastle, next month.
"The Australians are still fighting over whether the aboriginal people were massacred by intent, or by disease. I'm going to talk about the Auschwitz thing. That's the massacre par excellence. It's such a peculiar thing to have done (excavate the Kl uger house). No one has excavated the death camps. They've become sites of memory, heritage sites and the maintenance is incredibly costly. They even keep the old 1930s barbed wire. Do you know why? Because of Holocaust denial. If they removed one thing those guys could have something to say. Isn't that interesting?"
Schrire studied archaeology first at UCT before going on to the University of Cambridge and the Australian National University. She is still an honorary professor at UCT, where she spends a few weeks every year working.
"SA is a great place for archaeologists. We have really great sites because the coast has got a particular configuration of mountains and the sea, with caves and dunes rich in calcium so that things are nicely preserved, and up in the old Transvaal area there is limestone, and limestone preserves," she says.
Add to this easy access, and a tradition of rigorous scholarship, and "archaeology booms on" despite SA's other problems, such as crime.
"One of the great things is that people in authority don't make it excruciating to get a permit. Some countries just can't get it together, they are too busy finding out how to charge you. Fieldwork in SA is very interesting and challenging. It's challenging to find good sites," she says.
The secret to this is? "Talent," she replies, not very helpfully.
Archaeology's techniques parallel those often used in forensics, as does the branch of anthropology crime author Kathy Reichs has made popular. (Reich s' books have not much interested Schrire.)
"It's about reconstructing events in the past. It doesn't matter whether you work out how Little Foot died, or how Mr X died being stabbed yesterday," she says.
Little Foot is the nickname given to an extraordinarily complete fossil hominid skeleton found by paleoanthropologist Ronald Clarke in 1994. He came across it while searching through a box of fossil bovid fragments that had been found at Sterkfontein, north-west of Johannesburg, in the 1970s and set aside.
While preserving history and heritage is extremely expensive, Schrire points out that using Sterkfontein and the other sites that make up the Cradle of Humankind as tourism centres means it pays its own way.
Cape Town's Castle could do the same if more was done to showcase it, says Schrire, drawing on her experience on the advisory board of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, a private non-profit organisation dedicated to perpetuating and revitalising Virginia's cultural, architectural and historic heritage.
"These things become an absolute magnet for tourists and schools and things. Tourists love to look at archaeological sites, but we need a full-time archaeologist there. There has never been a full-time archaeologist there, but that's what they do in England, the US and Europe. It costs money, though, and this country isn't up for that," she says.
Despite this, Schrire finds it "comforting" that SA's colonial past was not obliterated after 1994 and she is busily working through what has been excavated at the Castle, trying to better interpret the impact of European contact and settlement at the Cape on the people already there.
"What's the central lesson? One would like to think that archaeology gives you lessons. The lesson is that life is brutal and it's bloody," she says.
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