The way in which Thulamela has been excavated has marked a global breakthrough, reports Eddie Koch
THE people who built Thulamela, a medieval citadel in the far north of the Kruger National Park that has recently excited fascination in local and international academic circles, will never know it. But they may have helped resolve one of the most burning issues for archaeologists around the world today.
Ethnic and cultural organisations in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and Israel have recently forced museums and universities to return valuable human remains, many of them collected under dubious circumstances in the 1800s.
The US Congress passed legislation in 1989 that requires all pre-1770 physical remains to be controlled by Native American authorities. Israel recently handed down a new interpretation of the Antiquities Act resulting in the reburial of all human remains younger than 5 000 years.
Susan Pfeiffer, a physical anthropologist at the University of Guelph in the United States, has likened the reburial of skeletons to “book-burning”. Archaeologist Israel Hershkovits, who now sits with empty shelves at the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv because the state recently acceded to restitution demands from orthodox groups, has declared: “It’s the end of anthropology.”
That prospect has been averted by South African scientists working at Thulamela because these academics have, apparently for the first time in the history of archaeology, devised techniques for excavating and reburying the skeletons of Thulamela’s chief and his probable wife that marry community demands with the needs of science.
The arrangement, hammered out between a team of scientists led by archaeologist Sydney Miller and a committee of representatives from communities that have a claim to Thulamela’s heritage, involves taking samples of DNA and carbon isotopes from the skeletons and preserving the data contained in them before the bones are reburied in a dignified ceremony run by the people of the area.
Marius Loots, researcher at the anatomy department at the University of Pretoria, says small samples of DNA and carbon traces will provide scientists with clues about kinship relations that governed the network of African cities that stretched across the Limpopo during the Middle Ages in Africa.
Analysis of the carbon samples taken will provide a vital glimpse into the diet and pastoral habits of Thulamela’s rulers. They will also throw light on how the inhabitants of Thulamela lived off the mix of indigenous plant and animal life, that has been preserved in the Kruger Park.
More importantly, though, Miller along with park officials, is involved in negotiating a way of reburying the bones so that the ceremony satisfies the communities’ cultural and religious need to respect the dignity of their ancestors with the possibility that scientists and researchers might need to reopen the graves for analytical purposes in the future.
The deal represents, in essence, an ability to translate South Africans’ skill for negotiating solutions to deep-rooted political conflicts into a method for solving one of the trickiest ethical questions in archaeology and anthropology today. Although fairly simple in its outlines, this kind of arrangement has apparently seldom been achieved in other parts of the world where efforts to resolve the science-vs-human rights debates have been bedevilled by polarisation.
“As far as we know this is the first time that a negotiated compromise between indigenous organisations and scientists has been worked out proactively,” says Koen Nienaber, another reseacher from Pretoria University. “There are examples from Canada, New Zealand and Australia where some agreements were made but these were usually done after the issue and conflict had already become extremely heated.”
That achievement – the ability to create an academic version of South Africa’s “rainbow” phenomenon in this far-flung corner of the country – was captured in a single snapshot from the official opening of Thulamela this week: a long line of traditional chiefs, brightly bedecked indigenous healers, scientists, politicians, journalists, corporate executives and children who filed solemnly up the hill under the watch of armed game guards to see the sacred site for themselves.
Much of the media coverage of Thulamela has centred on the beauty of the jewellery and cultural artefacts found at the site and the magical quality of the rugged hilltop that is surrounded by a forest of giant baobabs in the remote northern reaches of the park.
Intricately fashioned gold bracelets and beads, hoes, harpoons to hunt hippo, royal gongs from West Africa, pieces of porcelain from the Ming dynasty in China and beads from India indicate the civilisation of which Thulamela formed a part had developed an industrial base as well as intricate trade and diplomatic relations with other parts of the world at a time when the Ottoman and Mogul empires ruled parts of Asia and Henry VIII was beheading his wives in England.
As Environment and Tourism Minister Pallo Jordan said when he officially opened the site this week, the finds have finally debunked the myth that this was part of a dark and uncivilised continent before white men arrived in the 15th century.
But although Thulamela is also special because the graves were scientifically excavated before they could be plundered by gold robbers who denuded many other similar sites of their cultural value, most of this has already been demonstrated by other studies of African settlements in the Limpopo Valley linked to the great Zimbabwe civilisation.
“Thulamela has the advantage of being relatively small, and controlled partial excavation of a formerly pristine site by professional archaeologists has revealed a wealth of detail about its elite inhabitants in a fairly short of space of time,” says Duncan Miller, a scientist analysing Thulamela’s metal artefacts at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) archaeology department
“It is a significant archaeological discovery with huge potential for edifying the public. In themselves the observations from this site don’t appear to be revolutionary, but nicely confirm what has long been known from sites such as Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and other elite walled residences in Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.”
Andrew Sillen, professor of archaeology at UCT, agrees the breakthrough at Thulamela lies not in what lies in its royal graves but in the way their excavation was carried out.
“The key aspect of any reburial agreement between scientists and communities is future access to the burial site. For one thing, it isn’t possible to anticipate what techniques of analysis will be available in the future.
“And, in order to be scientifically legitimate, the results of current investigations would need to be replicable by subsequent investigators. If such future access is contemplated in the current Thulamela arrangement for restitution, this would indeed be a breakthrough.”