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"It's About TIME"

An exhibition marking the passage of time on the Greater Cederberg landscape.

Time is a very slippery concept, fundamental to life but hard to define. It is most obvious through its impact on objects as they decay, on people as they age, on places as they change and on landscapes as they weather. The landscape is an accumulation of evidence from past times, all of which have survived the passage of time to be visible today. Some traces are ephemeral such as the seasonal patterns of plant and animal life, others are more lasting such as the remains of farming practices and the structures of recent permanent settlement. Fields, roads, graveyards and buildings tend to dominate
our view of the natural environment. Less visible but very longlasting are the artifacts of precolonial people; stone tools, rock paintings and foodwaste that have survived in fragmentary form for thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years. Older still are the fossilized remains
of former living creatures, the elephants and lions that no longer live here, and the extremely ancient skeletons and tracks of long extinct life forms. The land itself is a surviving trace of all of the geological events that have formed, warped, shaped and sculpted it into the form we recognize today. And there is the night sky. Hunter gatherers of the recent past, trilobites of the more distant past all saw this enclosing sphere. It has survived a billion years with little change. The landscape is a time machine in which we can travel, and through those fragments that survive, experience the past.


Heuweltjies

These termite mounds were built more than 20 000 years ago.
Once you have seen these mounds in the wheatfields of the Cape you will never forget them.
But what are they?
They are old termite mounds now flattened by planting and ploughing.
The termites have altered the ground and
caused differential plant growth.
This is why they show up on air photographs.


First Family

Stories told 130 years ago by San, speaking the /xam language.
In the beginning, according to San mythology, there was an odd family: the mantis, his wife the dassie and their adopted daughter the porcupine.
There was also his sister the blue crane, his other children and his grandson the mongoose.
This early world changed into the present one not by a long process of evolution but as a result of a series of dramatic events, recounted in stories.


Andriesgrond

A rock shelter occupied frequently during the last 10 000 years.
Thousands of painted caves in the Cape were occupied as well as painted.
Excavations in these sites reveal evidence of plant and animal food consumption,
whereas the paintings show what people were thinking.
It turns out these are very different, people ate dassies, tortoises and many plant foods, but thought about eland and hartebeest.


Olifants River

Jan Dankaert last named this river 350 years ago.
The Olifants river was named by early colonists because they saw elephant herds here, but an earlier name for part of it was Tharakamma.
Paintings of elephants are very common along the banks, suggesting that these animals have long been a significant part of this landscape.
Only the paintings survive.


Early Stone Age

Hand axes were made between 1 000 000 and 250 000 years ago.
Remarkably, the hand axe has been a recognisable feature of early stone tool technology for over a million years.
It may have served as a very reliable, multi-purpose tool rather like a modern Swiss Army knife.
They are abundant along the Cape river banks.


Dassie Calendar

Cederberg dassies are all born in November.
Dassies are born in cohorts at a very particular time of the year, November in the south western Cape, and their teeth erupt in order at very particular times.
Because of this, every dassie skull can be ascribed to a particular season of death. In the archaeological record, they act as a kind of calendar, recording the season of site occupation by hunter gatherers.


Ceder Trees

Ceder trees have existed for 40 million years.
Most tree species keep a record of the years by putting on annual rings that are thicker or thinner according to rainfall.
The Ceder of the Cederberg, really a cypress, is restricted to high, isolated stands, but maintains an archive of information on past climate.
It is clinging to survival.


Karookop

The shales at the base of Karookop formed 390 million years ago.
Trapped forever in the muds of millions of years ago, fossil remains of shellfish, trilobites and other beasts, reflect brief moments in time.
Many animals in these deposits are long extinct, and record climatic conditions dramatically different from those of today.
Swamps are part of the local past.


Krakadouw

The last /xam speaker of the area died 250 years ago.
Colonising people usually express their ownership by renaming the features of the land they have occupied.
But, as in the case of many rivers, mountains and passes of the Cape, earlier names, in this case those of the San hunter gatherers and Khoe pastoralists, survive in some
form.
A douw is the old name for a path or pass across the mountains, though few still know this.


Striations on rocks

Glaciers moved across the Cedarberg area 460 million years ago.
Hard as it is to imagine, Clanwilliam was once the site of massive glaciers that had moved from the north causing dramatic changes to the topography.
The glaciers scraped the underlying land form and on melting left behind substantial piles of rocks they had transported across the ancient continent of Gondwana.
They are still here.


Soom Shale

Melting glaciers created lakes here 450 million years ago.
The weird and exotic fossil forms of the Soom Shale mostly became extinct and have left no traces among modern animals.
These creatures lived in glacial lakes that gradually filled in by the deposition of paper-thin annual layers of silt and mud settling slowly to the bottom and preserving the tiny skeletons.


Cape Rocks

The sediments of the Cape Mountains were deposited between 480 and 250 million years ago.
The Cape mountains were formed by the deposition of thousands of metres of sands, silts and muds by massive rivers and in shallow oceanic basins.
Once deposited these layers were consolidated by pressure, warped by movements of the crust and weathered by the elements to form the mountain folds that characterize the modern topography.


Technology

The Olifants river was first occupied 1 000 000 years ago.
The Olifants River has witnessed along trajectory of technological change and innovation.
Early inhabitants used stone for their artifacts, but later people learnt to use ostrich eggshell and bone, introduced paint, ceramics and metal into their toolkits.
This technological sequence is written in surviving artifacts.


Ostrich eggs

The earliest eggshell water flasks are 65 000 years old.
Ostrich eggs make handy containers for storing and transporting water.
The earliest traces of this in the archaeological record are fragments of intentionally perforated and decorated eggs from the rock shelter at Diepkloof in the western Cape.
These eggs were marked perhaps as signs of ownership and lie buried in the caves along with fireplaces and food debris.


Eland

Eland became locally extinct but have been reintroduced.
The eland is very significant in the mythology of surviving San people, being a prized kill of hunters, an animal that symbolizes the passage from boy to man and girl to woman, but most significantly the favourite creation of the mantis.
Not surprisingly perhaps, it is the most frequently painted animal in local rock art.
These thoughts survive.


Invasive aliens

It will take 100 years of effort to eradicate invasive alien trees.
Introduced either accidentally or with some good intent, invasive aliens have become a major problem in the Cape, extending their ranges along watercourses and denying water to local indigenous plants.
A range of insects has been introduced to try to limit or reduce the spread of these pests, but the process will take time.


Rock Paintings

Paintings were made between 1 000 and 25 000 years ago.
A major achievement of precolonial hunters and gatherers is their extensive corpus of rock paintings.
Dominated by human figures, but including substantial numbers of large animals, this art undeniably reflects a world view marked by respect for other beings and probably served as a reminder of a set of crucial values of lost societies.
The landscape is still marked.


Fynbos

The Fynbos plant kingdom is over 5 million years old.
The Cape fynbos is rich in underground geophytes, a rich storehouse of carbohydrate well known to gatherers of precolonial times.
Women dug the corms, bulbs and tubers from the ground with digging sticks.
They certainly recognized the seasonal fluctuations in corm growth, visibility and palatability and used this to mark the passage of time.


Coastal caves

Caves along the Cape coast have been occupied for 100 000 years.
Almost all caves and rock shelters in the Cederberg have fragments of marine shell in them, reflecting some kind of connection with the coast.
Pendants and other artifacts were probably carried across the land by people who moved in tune with the changing seasons.
Thank You

Sponsors
The Living Landscape Project gratefully acknowledges the generous support and sponsorship of the Department of Environment and Tourism; the University of Cape Town; Xanita; AvenueTrust; Business Arts South Africa; Craft Signs; Prophoto Labs; Scan Shop; TransHex; Iziko Museums of Cape Town.
The Team
This exhibition was conceived and imagined by John Parkington, Gwen van Embden, Stefan Blom, Neil Rusch, Richard Mason and Sandra Prosalendis.
It was implemented under the leadership of Gwen van Embden and Stefan Blom with a team of willing, generous and creative workers at the Living Landscape including Melina Constance; Bertie Zass; May Basson; Alvida Booysen; Denise Fransman; Liezel Hofman; Melissa Kleinsmith; Thurston September; David v.d.Westhuizen; Willem Basson; Elizabeth Beukes; Elize Beukes; Selina Follet; Willem Fransman; Nosimphiwe Nohako; Johanna Koopman; Charlene Zimri; Francois Swartz; Louisa Brummer; Giovanni Hageman; Eric Geya; Eugene Koopman; Margaret Koopman; Denville Meyer; Abraham Syster Wilmarie Titus; Wilson Tsolo; Monica Mncameni; Anna Arries; Nadia Fredericks; Debra Fredericks; Sheron Engelbrecht; John Basson; Nosimilo Xhantini; Venesia Evans; Frederick Beukes; Rhianwen Beukes; Jadin Arries; Heidi Cloete; Edmund Swarts: Johanna Hesselman; Margaret Nel; Nicolette van Rheenen; Bukelwa Qulu.
Research and other contributions were made by Casey van Embden; Pippa Skotnes; Ed February; Phillip Hine; Nick Wiltshire; Jeremy Midgley; Mike Picker; Tracy Prosalendis; John Hoffman; John Rogers; John Almond; Graham Avery; Sarah Wurz; Petro Keene; Herbie Klinger, Beryl Eichenberger, Lindi Melle and Claire Bourquin.
The trustees of the Krakadouw Trust are:
Val West, Crain Soudien, Albertus Erasmus, Marco van Embden, Jacob Klaase and John Parkington.

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