Uncovering distant past
Since 2010, the P5 Project, led by Arizona State University associate research scientist Dr Erich Fisher, has had an international team of more than 20 researchers – including archaeologists, geologists, excavators and students – who visit Mpondoland for six to eight weeks at a time.
The researchers aim to learn how hunter-gatherers lived, ate, evolved and used the land’s resources in the Wild Coast.
On a visit this week, Fisher said Mpondoland was an extremely important site because it provided the only evidence of coastal foraging (eating seafood) during an Ice Age in South Africa.
Fisher hopes the information found and analysed by his team will help conservationists understand the area better so as to preserve and protect it.
“The world is facing drastic climate change which has effects [like] the depletion of fish stocks, warmer oceans and a change in natural habitats.
“Our analysis can provide a long-term history of the Mpondoland area – how it changed, what resources were always available, the animals that lived there and the long-term vegetation history of the area.
“This can assist conservationists to understand the area and its history better and so look after it [and] repopulate it,” Fisher said.
The P5 project – Pondoland Paleoecology, Paleoenvironment, Paleoclimate, and Paleoanthropology – has already yielded a ton of stone tool artefacts , soil, charcoal and plant and shell remains which shed light on how humans lived and evolved in the area over the past 300,000 years.
The fragments of pre-history are dated using radiocarbon and luminescence dating. The remnants are curated and analysed at the P5 lab, set up in a spacious hall at the East London Museum – the hub of the archaeological project.
Some are also sent to labs around the country and elsewhere for further analysis by specialist members of the team.
“To understand humans who lived during those times, we have to recreate their environment, the climate, and the animals that lived on land and in the ocean.
“We have to reconstruct their entire world and what it was like 10,000, 50,000 or more years ago,” Fisher said. –