Module 13
Pre-History
Note that in terms of the Heritage Act, if you find a Stone Age, Iron Age or any other historical artefact you may examine it, but you must replace it exactly where you found it and report it to the responsible authority, which in the case of Melville Koppies is the Management Committee, 888 4831, 782 4797 or 788 7571.
Early Stone Age
The criterion distinguishing between Men-like Apes and Ape-like Men in the evolution of mankind is apart from some skeletal features the ability to make tools. The oldest tools,( called Oldawan from where they were first found), are sharp stone flakes struck off a stone core with a stone hammer. Cores are recognised by concave scoops around the periphery and percussion lines on top. The flakes, irregularly shaped, concave or rough one side and convex the other, were used for cutting and scraping skins and bones as the first humans were scavengers. Flakes are common in all stone ages, but the Oldawan are identified from the age of the strata in which they are found, namely 2.5 million years to 150 000 years ago. They were made by the earliest predecessors of modern man. As their tools and skeletal remains have been found at nearby Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, they would have roamed in family parties in the thick bush then along the Westdene and Braamfontein Spruits, in the D.F.Malan and Barry Hertzog poorts and the Auckland Park and Melville valleys.
In the succeeding phase of the Early Stone Age, about 1.4 million years ago, the Acheulian, early man had invented large bifacial tools, that is, tools shaped by flaking off unwanted material both sides. They were large, heavy, pointed hand axes and chisel edged cleavers for chopping, cutting or possibly killing trapped animals. The weight of these tools suggests this early man was very muscular. Possibly reflecting man’s stage of mental development, Acheulian tools were made to a common pattern throughout Africa, Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. These people too were scavengers and lived in valleys and along streams. As their remains have also been found at Sterkfontein, they would also have been in the bush around Melville Koppies.
Middle Stone Age
The next development, about 250 000 years ago and lasting to about 30 000 years ago, is associated with the immediate predecessors of modern man. Instead shaping the tool after striking it off the core, the core itself was shaped and a striking platform prepared before the tool was struck off. This process makes possible parallel-sided blades and sharply pointed flakes ready for immediate use. Such tools have one shaped side, the other smoothly convex, with possibly minor touching-up, and are smaller than the Acheulian. Some of their flakes had one side flattened for fastening onto handles or shafts. Middle Stone Age people were hunter-gatherers. Their camps were widespread, often in caves. Contrasting with the uniformity of Acheulian Period, there is some regional variation due to the materials used and possibly due to the emergence of genetic and linguistic differences. A campsite with these tools has been exposed at Melville Koppies, a metre underground next to the Iron Age furnace.
Late Stone Age
The start of the Late Stone Age is put at about 20 000 years ago, but in some places there is an overlap with the Middle Stone Age. It corresponds roughly with the appearance of Modern Man some 40 000 years ago. The Age is characterised by innovation. Their camps have revealed pottery, hearths, fire sticks and digging sticks. The tools vary according to material used-wood, bone or stone-or purpose-scraper, adze, knife blade, borer, arrow or spear-head. They are usually small and delicate and generally reworked to the required shape with one side blunt for attaching to a handle or shaft. There is a campsite at Melville Koppies, on the nature trail at the bottom of the last flight of steps up on to the ridge.
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Reference
Deacon, H.J. & Jeanette (1999) Human Beginnings in South Africa, David Philip, Capetown, Johannesburg.
Iron Age
Between 15 000 and 10 000 years ago, different environments and barriers to contact moulded Africans into 4 genetic populations which linguists have correlated with the 4 major language groups. The Capoids speaking the Khoikhoi and San languages on the steppes and savannahs of Southern Africa, the Caucasoids speaking Afro-asiatic languages along the North African coast and down into the Horn of Africa and the Tall Negroids from the Sahara and bordering Sahel speaking Nilo-Saharan. The languages of the fourth group, the Pygmoids,living in the tropical forests and bordering woodlands, have not survived, but merging with those of the Tall Negroids produced the Niger-Congo group of languages of West Africa of which Bantu is a member.
A period of benign climate in the Northern Hemisphere saw great changes in the lives of the peoples of that region. Sorghum, millet and root crops such as yams, initially gathered, were systematically reaped then cultivated and people settled near their fields. In more fertile areas as populations increased homesteads became villages. Regular rains turned large parts of the Sahara into grassland with rivers and lakes. People moved in and trade routes developed across it. Along these routes,from the Near-East some 10 000 years ago, came pottery and the know-how to make it and some 2OO0 years later domesticated sheep and goats then cattle. These further increased food supplies- pottery improved cooking and storage, livestock turned plants into milk and meat. Both raised the ceiling for population growth and intensified the exploitation of immediate surroundings. When some 5000 years ago conditions deteriorated through climatic change and the Sahara dried up the normal pressures for surplus population to find new land were greatly intensified and there was large scale movement and conflict.
Linguists place the origin of the Bantu family of languages near the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers. Here 5 000 years ago a Late Stone Age community lived in moist woodlands growing yams, legumes and other crops, fishing and hunting
About 3 500 years ago (1 500 BC), population increase and pressure from other communities, particularly Nilo-Saharans driven south by the drying up of the Sahara, led many families and clans to migrate.
The exodus followed two directions. One, due east, skirting the tropical forest, hunting and gathering as no suitable places for permanent settlement were found, reached lakes Kivu and Edward, west of Lake Victoria 500 years later, where they were able to resume fishing and yam farming. Others went south along the coast or followed north-south river valleys through the tropical forest., settling in clearings to fish and grow yams. With later migrants leap-frogging the earlier, the southern limits of the forest were reached about 500 B.C. Here a barrier was encountered - dry woodland on poor soil. Some reached a better watered plateau in central Angola, others went east towards lakes Mweru and Bangwelu in eastern Zambia.
'Then occurred three developments which affected the subsequent history of the Bantu speaking migrants. How to make iron appears to have been discovered in Central Turkey about 1 700 B.C. Initially kept secret, the Phoenicians gained knowledge of it and took it across the Mediterranean to Carthage. Berber traders brought it across the Sahara to West Africa. Furnaces dating to 600 B.C. have been found at sites occupied by the Nok community, neighbours of the Niger-Benue people. Kept secret within families or clans the knowledge spread slowly, but it reached the Bantu-speakers at the Great Lakes about 100 B.C. enabling them to dominate the whole area around Lake Victoria within half a century.
The second was the introduction of the banana and the plantain from Arabia or India, probably in the first century B.C. This represented such an enormous increase in food supply that a population explosion resulted causing further migration.
The third was the assimilation of Afro-Asiatic and NiloSaharan speaking peoples who had earlier settled at the Great Lakes and who had domesticated cattle and cultivated cereals. This enabled the Bantu-speakers to penetrate the dry woodlands to the south. This was also, probably, the beginning of the role of cattle as a status symbol as they thrived on the moist grasslands of the Great Lakes.
The southward migration through agriculturally poor country took the form of slash: and burn and the cultivation of sorghum and millet for two or three years until the soil was exhausted, then a further move. Clearing the bush drove back the Tsetse fly, and started the plant cycle afresh with the growth of grass creating an environment suitable for cattle so pastoralists followed.
Reaching Lake Malawi in the first century A.D .the migraion split in three directions. One group followed the Rumvuma River eastwards, reaching the coast about 200 A.D. continuing down it and settling where conditions were suitable. Another moved down the west side of Lake Malawi, crossing the Zambesi about 250 A.D. The third went due west. With cattle and grain, they were able to penetrate and settle the dry woodland of Angola and Northern Namibia and the habitable parts of the Kalahari..The coastal stream continued down the coast reaching the Fish River in 700 A.D. where they were halted by the dry Valley Bushveld.
A group from the coastal stream moved up into the highveld about 350 A.D. and settled in the Magalies Valley. Here more exposed to climatic change they disappeared during a dry spell in 600 A.D. Another stream from the western side of Lake Malawi spreading across Zambia and Zimbabwe reached the Zoutpansberg about 1300 A.D. the Waterberg a century later, the Magaliesberg about 1400 A.D. This time their settlements spread up and down the valley and were maintained through the Little Ice Age from about 1300 to 1500 A.D. During the following warm period settlements grew large, more were established in the valley, in neighbouring valleys and southwards to the Witwatersrand. Over-exploitation of the trees and grassland in the Magalies valley would have necessitated the pasturing of cattle at outlying cattle stations like those below the ridge at Melville Koppies and the movement of the iron-smelters to fresh supplies of wood on the Witwatersrand. This would have been when the furnace near the Lecture Hut was made.
A short dry spell in the early 1700's was followed by almost 60 years of exceptional rains, which transformed even the Karroo and the Kalahari into grassland. This coincided with the introduction of maize. The Portuguese had brought maize to Mocambique in the 1640's and it had spread rapidly across Africa in the 1750's. It was nine times more productive than sorghum or millet, but required warmer and wetter conditions; which the wet spell provided. The widespread cultivation of maize would have fuelled a population explosion and population movements southwards into the Klipriviersberg and Suikerbosrand. There would have been other movements from the Free State northwards and the two would have mingled.
The scarcity of wood on the Free State highveld led to the use of stone for kraal walls, an idea which was taken up by the other Sotho communities living in the Transvaal: This was probably the time the second furnace whose,base was found on the surface., just west of the excavated furnace. The absence of other furnaces on Melville Koppies might be due to their being destroyed when no longer useful or that the Koppies furnaces were outliers from a centre on Northcliff.
After the wet spell came 10 years of the worst drought in recorded history and a population crash. Tens of thousands must have died of starvation particularly on the exposed highveld. Before the people could recover there was another severe drought followed by bloodshed and plundering during the Mfecane, continued by Mzilikatse until he was driven out by the Trekkers in 1837.
Survivors who had hidden in places like. the cave above D.F. Malan Drive or those in the Kloof slowly came out to start anew. They built the lower furnace in the 1850’s and the cattle kraal at the Lecture Hut. On the surface a few metres south of the furnace at the Lecture Hut, surface deposits of slag suggest the possible site of a blacksmith's forge of the same date. It is believed iron making continued and the kraal was used into the 1880's.
References:
Huffman, T.N.(1996) Archaeological Evidence for Climatic Change During the Last 2000 years in Southern Africa in Quaternary Internationai Vo1.33 pp 5560, Elsevier Science Ltd. Great Britain.
Huffman, T.N.(1982) Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the African Iron Age,
Ann.Rev. Anthropol. 11:13350.
Mason, R.(1986) Origins of Black People of Johannesburg and the South
Western Transvaal AD 3501880, occasional Paper 16 of the
Archaeological Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand.
Johannesburg.
Newman, James L.(1995) The Peopling of Africa,
Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Reader, John.(1997) Africa: A Biography of the Continent, Hamish Hamilton
Ltd. London.