Some Archaeological things from the
Northern Cape

Kathu Townlands

The composite picture below shows Kathu Townlands, a field near Kathu in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. It shows the entire landscape at a time after good rain in early April, 2004. Explore the picture by scrolling and zooming. Almost all of the objects among the grass are lithic artefacts - scrapers, cores, cleavers, flakes, all of Acheulean manufacture (approximately 750 000 years ago or more). Estimates of the number of artefacts vary from two billion to ten times that number, and excavations have yielded 6000 - 9000 artefacts per cubic meter over a vast area, the extent of which has not been mapped. The artefacts are made of banded ironstone, which occurs in outcrops at the site.

The picture is long. For best benefit, save it, then look at it in a viewer which allows scrolling and zooming.

Below is a picture of some of the artefacts that can be seen on the surface.

Here is a close-up of one of the tools, a pretty cleaver. Note the banding of the ironstone, the circular formations of calcium
(since the tool's manufacture - there is a lot of ambient calcium in the system) and the scalloped edge where it has been worked off by flaking on the other side.