Falling Walls and Mending Fences: Archaeological Ethnography in the Limpopo*

In this article I take my lead from the sentiments expressed by one of my colleagues in South Africa National Parks – a young, black woman who seeks a radical revisioning of archaeology and anthropology in the new South Africa. She wants to see archaeology labour in the service of a newly emergent and more equitable nation, to perform a remedial and therapeutic service that actively counteracts the centuries of colonial oppression and apartheid erasures that have deeply affected the production of the past and thus future possibilities. Given this particular historical conjuncture, archaeology (like all historical disciplines) is being called upon to do double work, a dual project that seeks to address and redress the past and, through the accounts provided, make possible new understandings of identity in present and future social settings.1 1 G. Farred, ‘The Not-Yet Counterpartisan: A New Politics of Oppositionality’, The South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue. After the Thrill is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa, 103, 4 (2004), pp. 589–605. This dual mandate has been willingly embraced by a younger generation of scholars, yet the deeply political valences of South African archaeology continue to be staunchly avoided by others. To begin, I offer a brief outline of my research in Kruger National Park, followed by a description of two very different field projects based around the archaeological site of Thulamela and the various stakeholders and agendas continually being brought into play. This leads into a discussion of the wider impacts of heritage work in terms of local identities and tensions and suggests that recognition and reparations around such contested landscapes continue to be fraught, despite protean political rhetoric and regime change. Throughout I hope to lay some groundwork for a hybrid practice I refer to as archaeological ethnography – a traversing of two distinct, but necessarily enmeshed subfields. I would love to see archaeologists rebuilding not from a technical point of view, but rebuilding from a spiritual point of view. I don't want to leave that for the domain of anthropologists. I am thinking of a verse in the Bible that says, there is a time and season for everything, and there is a time to cast away, and a time to rebuild stones. That verse reminds me of archaeology and the role that archaeologists play when they cast away stones so that they can find things – all sorts of things. And, once they have found understandings, or a sense of that history, they build those tools together. That is the challenge for archaeologists for the history of South Africa.2 2 Interview, South Africa National Parks (SANP) employee, Skukuza, 13 March 2005.