Secrets in the Kruger soil hold key to a past before Mapungubwe

The ancient city of Mapungubwe holds a special place in the history of southern African society – but an archaeological site located in the heart of the Kruger National Park has archaeologists wondering writes Lucas Ledwaba

IN the introduction to the book New History of South Africa (Tafelberg 2022) the authors pose these pressing serious questions: “Historians of South Africa have always had to face a big challenge right at the starting line: how far back in time should they go to understand the past? What is the heritage of that past, whether recent or more distant?”

In July next year a team of archaeologists from the SA National Parks and the University of Pretoria are set to continue excavations at a site in the Kruger National Park whose findings may change the course of history as we know it now.

This is part of a five year project to unravel the mysteries hidden beneath the soil at the Letaba Archaeological site located in the northern part of the park.

“This site might be more significant than Mapungubwe,” says Dr Xander Antonites during a recent walk about at the site. “South Africa just doesn’t start at Mapungubwe.”

He is an archaeologist from the University of Pretoria and lead researcher on the project.

The Letaba site, which was discovered by archaeologists from the University of Pretoria in the 1980s, is located between a lone dirt road and the Great Letaba river just north of the Letaba Rest camp.

It is not easy to locate the site. It is even harder to imagine that this piece of the Kruger National Park surrounded by dense mopani trees, could have been home to a community of a sophisticated people over a thousand years ago.

According to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), “until its demise at the end of the 13th century AD, Mapungubwe was the most important inland settlement in the African subcontinent and the cultural landscape contains a wealth of information in archaeological sites that records its development.”

Mapungubwe which is located within the Mapungubwe National Park, about 450 km from Letaba, is one of eight World Heritage sites in South Africa.

Mapungubwe is revered as the site of “the rise and fall of the first indigenous kingdom in Southern Africa between 900 and 1300 AD.”

But if what Antonites and his team have found so far is anything to go by, the Letaba Archaeological site could well prove the area holds more significance.

He says they have been finding some of the earliest evidence for sustained trade with the Indian Ocean world at the site “and some of the artefacts that we are finding predate Mapungubwe by about 400 years…”

A walk through the site is like journeying back to another time. Pieces of broken pottery of varying decorations lie in the red sand in open spaces between the dense mopani tree vegetation. Some parts of the landscape reveal what archaeologists say are the remains of earth built huts.

During previous excavations Antonites and his team, which includes SanParks head of archaeology Dr Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu found pieces of broken porcelain identical to those from Persia. They also extracted beads, animal horns, bones and broken clay pots.

Scholars say Mapungubwe thrived between 900 and 1300 AD. But according to Antonites, the finds at Letaba date back to the early iron age period, around 1 800 years ago, almost 600 years before Mapungubwe.

Unesco says about Mapungubwe: “Until its demise at the end of the 13th century AD, Mapungubwe was the most important inland settlement in the African subcontinent and the cultural landscape contains a wealth of information in archaeological sites that records its development. The evidence reveals how trade increased and developed in a pattern influenced by an elite class with a sacred leadership where the king was secluded from the commoners located in the surrounding settlements.”

While the findings at Mapungubwe where excavations were carried out from the early 1930s included human remains, this is not the case yet at Letaba archaeological site. The excavation of the human remains and the general manner in which they were handled, stored in boxes in far away buildings irked some of the descendants of Mapungubwe communities.

This led to a debate on the manner in which archaeologists handle and treat human remains without taking into consideration the spiritual and cultural sensitivities around burial sites and human remains.

Antonites says if it happens that they come across human remains, they will not be excavated.

“Where communities are involved [in case human remains are found] they are invited to perform rituals. We tend to avoid human remains. Our priority is not to find graves, we are here to tell a story about these people,” says Antonites.

Ndlovu, manager of archaeology at SanParks says the organisation’s policy does not encourage the removal of human remains.

Antonites and his team now face the hurdle of trying to unravel the mysteries buried in the sand, of interpreting the hidden meanings in the pieces of pottery and dry bones and broken pots.

However, the fact that the site is in the Kruger National Park where it’s protect by law and guarded, well, unofficially by lions and elephant, is a blessing.

“Conservation areas helps with preservation of these sites. Once its gone, it’s lost forever,” says Antonites.

At least for now Antonites and his team have an idea they are casting their archaeological eyes and minds some 2000 years back in time. But a lot still remains unclear.

“We don’t know who they [the inhabitants of Letaba] were, what they called themselves or what language they spoke,” he says.

The search for answers to these hard questions continues. – news@mukurukuru.co.za