Current Projects

The FYI Mpumalanga stonewalled sites project

The Mpumalanga Escarpment contains archaeological and historical riches of quite staggering proportions. For 150 kilometers a continuous belt of the ruins of stone walled homesteads traverses the escarpment. These villages were embedded in thousands of hectares of terraced hillsides and linked by hundreds of kilometers of walled, paved roads. They bear witness to a dense population and to the investment of vast amounts of labour in infrastructural development along with extraordinary levels of agricultural innovation and productivity.

A visitor to the region, say 300 years ago, could not have ignored this bustling world or easily turned a blind eye to the solutions it offered to the perennial problems of human existence: Farming in manner which maximized the possibilities offered by a particular environment, surviving the sometimes vicious vagaries of the weather, regulating internal conflict, protecting residents from external threat, pacifying the gods, and ensuring a flow of benefits from both local and long distance trade.