This volume documents the analysis of excavated historical archaeological collections at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. The corpus provides a rich picture of life and times at this distant outpost of an immense Dutch seaborne empire during the contact period. Representing over three decades of excavation, conservation, and analysis, the book examines ceramics, glass, metal, and other categories of artifacts in their archaeological contexts. An enclosed CD includes a video reconstruction plus a comprehensive catalog and color illustrations of the artifacts in the corpus. The parallels and contrasts this volume reveals will help scholars studying the European expansion period to build a richer comparative picture of colonial material culture.

The origin and development of the South African Jewish community is one small part of a vast and varied literature on the formation of 19th-century diasporic communities, worldwide. Records include ships' passenger lists, transit placements, immigration papers, memoirs, reminiscences and letters home and abroad. However, unedited, unbowdlerised memoirs that purport to tell how it actually was are few and far between. Such are the manuscripts of two members of the Schrire family. The reb and the rebel contains three previously unpublished autobiographical works mainly covering the period 1892-1913: A diary, a poem and a memoir. The first two were written by Yehuda Leib Schrire (1851-1912), and are set in a number of countries including Lithuania, Holland, England and South Africa. The third is by his son, Harry Nathan (1895-1980). Few of the early immigrants to South Africa were writers, let alone poets, and the social history provided in these documents embellishes and enlivens the picture of South African Jewish communities at the turn of the 20th century. Neither was ever intended for wide distribution nor for the discipline of an editor's pencil. Two manuscripts literally penned by Yehuda Leib Schrire, in pre-Ben Yehuda Hebrew, were intended as memoirs, reminders of his struggles to help his children understand his picaresque life. The account by his son Harry was written as a family memoir. Both writers chose their words carefully and neither script could be called hasty or even informal. Yehuda Leib transcribed his original diary into a neat, readable record and he embellished his epic poem with lavish scholarly allusions; Harry, on the other hand, deliberately wrote as he spoke, and with such intentionality that he forbade the transcriber to change the original in any way whatsoever. The voices of these two men differ. One is a foreign immigrant and the other, a Cape-born native of South Africa. Threads of his European Talmudic learning are braided tightly into the travels of Yehuda Leib, while Harry's words are studded with turn-of-the-century Cape Yiddish such as once echoed through the alleys and parlours of District Six. You might catch an indignant yowl as Yehuda Leib recalls his former colleagues, and sense his wife patting his arm as he stamps his stick. You might hear the rattle of tea cups as his wife Lily interrupts Harry's recollections of the old gang commandeering the corner of Harrington and Commercial streets almost a century ago. These manuscripts are the stuff of which history is made. Their publication represents a labour of love by their editors, translators and donors.

This volume documents the analysis of excavated historical archaeological collections at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. The corpus provides a rich picture of life and times at this distant outpost of an immense Dutch seaborne empire during the contact period. Representing over three decades of excavation, conservation, and analysis, the book examines ceramics, glass, metal, and other categories of artifacts in their archaeological contexts. An enclosed CD includes a video reconstruction plus a comprehensive catalog and color illustrations of the artifacts in the corpus. The parallels and contrasts this volume reveals will help scholars studying the European expansion period to build a richer comparative picture of colonial material culture.

This volume shows how hunter gatherer societies maintain their traditional lifeways in the face of interaction with neighboring herders, farmers, and traders. Using historical, anthropological and archaeological data and cases from Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia, the authors examine hunter gatherer peoples--both past and present--to assess these relationships and the mechanisms by which hunter gatherers adapt and maintain elements of their culture in the wider world around them.

This text is a presentation of the diverse themes that constitute the past at the Southern tip of Africa. Human and carnivore evolution, colonial slavery and apartheid, science and romance are all intermeshed to show how we create the past and also, how we understand the present.;The palaeontological findings of Raymond Dart, Robert Ardrey and Glynn Isaac are lined up against a famous dispute about carnivore evolution that flourished in the heyday of apartheid. Pioneering exploration of the globe is set against archaeological surveys and romantic quests in the African desert, and the dark days of colonial slavery at Cape are contrasted with the bright prospects of Nelson Mandela's legacy in South Africa today.