Archaeological excavations at the Middle and Later Stone sites of Bushman Rock Shelter and Heuningneskrans in Limpopo Province (2014-2029)

In short

The Ohrigstad River Catchment project studies the traces left by past hunter-gatherers at two large rock shelters, Bushman Rock Shelter (BRS) and Heuningneskrans (HNK), located on both sides of the Ohrigstad River in Limpopo Province, South Africa. The project began in 2014 and involves collaborators and students from Europe (France, Austria, Portugal, Poland and Germany) and southern Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique). It is funded by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Commission on Archaeological Excavations (“Commission des fouilles”), and has benefitted from the continuous support of IFAS-Research. Between 2020 and 2024, it also received scientific and financial support from the ANR, as part of the “The Mile Stone Age” project (dir. G. Porraz and C. Tribolo). The project is run under the auspices of the South African Heritage Resource Agency (SAHRA). The main partners in South Africa are the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the Lydenburg Museum in Mashishing, and Echo Caves in Ohrigstad.   

The Ohrigstad River Catchment project aims at understanding hunter-gatherers’ cultural trajectories and lifeways on the edge of the Highveld from the Late Pleistocene (ca. 120 000 years ago) until the Holocene (ca. 10 000 years ago). The remarkable organic preservation and the rich archaeological heritage at both Bushman Rock Shelter and Heuningneskrans provide a rare opportunity to document past interactions between Stone Age groups and their changing environment.

Where?

Bushman Rock Shelter (BRS) and Heuningneskrans (HNK) are located in the district of Ohrigstad (Limpopo province, South Africa), in the northeastern edge of the Drakensberg range. Both shelters are situated respectively on the left and the right bank of the once major Ohrigstad River, which joins the Blyde River about 30 km to the east in a large canyon, known by visitors and tourists for its spectacular scenery. The sites are located in the high-altitude Savanna biome (Highveld), close to the contact with the lower altitude, humid Lowveld and Mozambican plain.

What?

Southern Africa preserves a remarkable archaeological heritage, which documents the cultural developments of Homo sapiens, from the emergence of our species in the Middle Pleistocene until the late Holocene. The excavation at BRS and HNK documents key moments in the deep history of hunter-gatherers in the region, in particular a phase of cultural burgeoning around 100,000 years ago, and the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene around 10 000 years ago, associated with marked climatic shifts.

Although somewhat forgotten since, the significance of BRS and HNK was already recognised by previous researchers: BRS was first excavated from the late 1960s until the mid-1970s under the lead of Prof. Hannes Eloff, from the University of Pretoria; HNK was briefly excavated in 1968 by Peter Beaumont, from the Mac Gregor Museum in Kimberley. Both excavations highlighted long (ca. 8 meters) and well-stratified sequences of archaeological deposits documenting human occupations associated with the Middle and the Later Stone Age. The new project builds on previous work at both sites to further characterise these chrono-cultural sequences, which constitute major references for past environments, as well as cultural dynamics of Pleistocene and Holocene hunter-gatherers in the interior of southern Africa.

The rich archaeological assemblages (stone tools, items of personal ornaments, bone tools, pigments, and remains of animals) allow to reconstruct the lifeways and subsistence patterns of human groups living in the Ohrigstad catchment area. The ongoing project focuses on refining the chronology of the occupations, using new dating techniques not available during Eloff’s and Beaumont’s time (e.g. Optically Luminescence dating). It develops a multi-proxy approach to provide a detailed reconstruction of the life of past hunter-gatherers in their environments.

How?

Fieldwork started in 2014 at BRS, and in 2019 at HNK. Several scientific goals have been achieved. In the field, the team has cleaned, excavated and documented carefully several stratigraphic profiles. These stratigraphic profiles can be seen as the open pages of a book, where each layer tells a part of the site’s history. Most layers document specific human activities: making fire, dumping ashes as part of cleaning the site, discarding empty snail shells, cooking parts of animal carcasses, processing hundreds of marula kernels, burying hot coals in the soil to keep warm at night, reshaping the used edges of stone tools, grinding ochre to produce red powder, or making ostrich eggshell beads – to name but a few examples. 

To record these profiles, photogrammetry was used both before the excavation and after. This technique allows to produce a 3D, high-resolution model of the profiles based on hundreds of pictures, which are merged using the Agisoft Metashape software. These profiles constitute the foundations of all types of analyses. They can then be sampled by a range of specialists, in order to conduct different types of analysis: micromorphology (the microscopic study of sediments), optically stimulated luminescence dating, phytolith analysis, identification of ancient sedimentary DNA, etc.

At BRS, a new chronological framework for the Middle Stone Age deposits places them within Marine Isotopic Stage 5, from around 100 to 120,000 years ago. The Middle Stone Age deposits are characterized by an exceptional organic preservation and abundant artefacts associated with clear technological changes. Several innovations have been documented, in particular the emergence of a new type of tool, end-scrapers, together with the use of bone retouchers, which are extremely rare in Africa.

The careful excavation of the Later Stone Age deposits at BRS has clarified the nature of the contact with the much older Middle Stone Age deposits, and the study of the rich mineral and organic material provides critical information on the transition from the Pleistocene into the Holocene at the site. This high-resolution, multi-proxy research will constitute a reference archive for the interior of the subcontinent.

Amongst other lines of evidence, the study of grooves on the shelter’s wall, both at BRS and at HNK, highlights a clear relationship between the Later Stone Age human occupations in the valley.

The ongoing excavation at HNK follows the same scientific objectives of clarifying the chrono-cultural sequence, sampling for micromorphology, dating, phytoliths and pollens. The project ultimately aims at integrating the archaeological and palaeoenvironmental archives of both sites, which would have been occupied by the same human groups during the final Pleistocene and the early Holocene.

Finally, the old museum located inside the rock shelter at BRS (“Museum of Man”) was renovated in 2021, with the support of IFAS-Research. New information panels were installed and a revised tour was designed in collaboration with the local tour guide, Jacob, who takes visitors across the shelter.   

Who?

The programme is codirected by Aurore Val (CNRS – UMR 7269 LAMPEA) and Guillaume Porraz (CNRS – UMR 7269 LAMPEA, and posted at IFAS-Research from 2013 to 2016). The scientific team involves specialists from European institutions, including the CNRS and French universities (Aix-Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux), the Austrian Academy of Science in Vienna, the University of Warsaw in Poland, the Universität Tübingen in Germany, and the  LARC, Patrimonio Cultural in Lisbon in Portugal; and from institutions in South Africa (University of the Witwatersrand, Lydenburg Museum, North-West University, and University of Cape Town), Zimbabwe (University of Zimbabwe in Harare) and Mozambique (University Eduardo Mondlane).

The excavations are conducted as a field-school. Every year, students from various institutions in France and southern Africa are welcomed to the excavation fieldwork, where they receive first-hand training on excavation and lab techniques. Several students have then joined the scientific team and are pursuing a degree as part of the project. In 2026, four Masters projects and two PhD theses have been completed, two PhD projects are in progress, and three post-doctoral research projects have been conducted.

Since its beginning, the project involves local workers from the village of Leboeng, who assist in the excavation and the lab work.

The project has received funding from the Excavation commission of French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, IFAS-Research, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the ARKAIA Institute at Aix-Marseille University, the French National Research Agency (ANR), the South African National Research Foundation (NRF), the University of the Witwatersrand and the Fyssen Foundation.

Results

> Val A., Tribolo C., Schmid V., Igreja M., Texier P-J., Mercier N., Galy A., Pécheyran C., Barbotin G. and Porraz G. (2026). “Bone retouchers and end-scrapers side by side at Bushman Rock Shelter: exploring a ca. 100,000-year-old technological imbrication”, Journal of Human Evolution 217, 103845. https//doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2026.103845.

> Porraz G. and Val A. (2023). “Bushman Rock Shelter and Heuningneskrans, two neighbours from the Ohrigstad River catchment (Limpopo Province, South Africa) “. In: Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa: Hominin behavior, geography, and chronology. Edited by A. Beyin, D.K. Wright, J. Wilkins, A. Bouzouggar, D.I. Olszewski. Cham: Springer International Publishing. 1311–1325.

> Puech E., Bamford M., Porraz G., Val A. and Théry-Parisot I. (2021). “Evaluating sampling methods in charcoal-rich layers and high diversity environment: a case study from the Later Stone Age of Bushman Rock Shelter, South Africa”, Quaternary International 593–594: 36-49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.11.018.

> Martin, L., Galy, A., Barbotin, G., Claverie, F., Pons-Branchu, E., Tribolo, C., Mercier, N. and Pécheyran, C. (2022). “Isotopic imaging using fsLA single-collector ICP-SFMS for direct U/Th dating of small archaeological carbonates”. Analytical Chemistry 94: 3046–3055. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.analchem.1c02241.

> Rifkin R.F., Vikram S., Ramond J.B., Rey-Iglesia A., Brand T.B., Porraz G., Val A., Hall G., Woodborne S., Le Bailly M., Potgieter M., Underdown S.J., Koopman J., Cowan A. Don, van de Peer Y., Willerslev E. and Hansen A.J. (2020). “Multi-proxy analyses of a mid-15th century ‘Middle Iron Age’ Bantu speaker palaeo-faecal specimen elucidates the configuration of the ‘ancestral’ sub-Saharan African intestinal microbiome”, Microbiome. 8:62. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-020-00832-x

> Douze K., Igreja M., Rots V., Cnuts D. and Porraz G. (2020). “Technology and function of Middle Stone Age points. Insights from a combined approach at Bushman Rock Shelter, South Africa”. In H. Groucutt (ed), Culture history and convergent evolution: Can we identify ancient populations using material culture? Springer Nature: 127–141.

> The 2019 Lesedi. Field Notes #21 was a special issue dedicated to southern African prehistory; it included several articles on Bushman Rock Shelter and Heuningneskrans.

> Porraz G. and Val A. (2019). “Heuningneskrans and the Stone Age sequence of the Ohrigstad river catchment on the eastern border of the great escarpment, Limpopo Province, South Africa”, South African Archaeological Bulletin, Field & Technical reports 74 (209): 46–55. ISSN: 00381969

> Porraz G., Val A., Tribolo C., Mercier N., de la Peña P., Haaland M.A., Igreja M., Miller C.E. and Schmid V.C. (2018). “The MIS5 Pietersburg at ‘28’ Bushman Rock Shelter, Limpopo Province, South Africa”, PloS ONE 13 (10): e0202853. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202853.

> Dayet, L., Erasmus, R., Val, A., Feyfant, L. and Porraz, G. (2017). “Beads, pigments and early Holocene ornamental traditions at Bushman Rock Shelter, South Africa“, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 13: 635–651.

> Porraz, G., Val, A., Dayet, L., de la Peña, P., Douze, K., Miller, C. E., Murungi M., Tribolo C., Schmid V. and Sievers, C. (2015). “Bushman Rock Shelter (Limpopo, South Africa): A perspective from the edge of the highveld“, The South African Archaeological Bulletin 70 (202): 166–179.

More on the Bushman Rock Shelter project:

> In 2024, IFAS-Research went on a visiting mission at Bushman Rock Selter and Heuningneskrans. Read the report of this visit here.