Using the Archive to Formulate a Chronology of Rock Art in the Southwestern Cape, South Africa.University of Cape Town, 2014

Abstract

inhospitable terrain of the Maloti-Drakensberg to their advantage. This analysis illuminates the BaPhuthi as a culturally hybrid, ethnogenetic polity that attracted and discharged a disparate following as needed, while maintaining a degree of solidarity and chiefly hierarchy. The thesis details the BaPhuthi's peripatetic settlement strategy: BaPhuthi leaders established multiple dispersed political seats throughout their territories south of the Senqu River, which they would frequently activate and deactivate, enabling them to settle their heterogeneous following within their territories. It then explores archaeological corollaries of BaPhuthi lifeways: historical analysis suggests that the BaPhuthi's archaeological footprint would be ephemeral (despite their polity's regional significance), and archaeological approaches to Iron Age Farming Communities (based in the historical identities described above) currently do not fully accommodate polities such as the BaPhuthi. The thesis discusses a methodology designed to address the archaeology of the BaPhuthi polity and its results. Considering how the BaPhuthi fashioned a diverse, heterodox chiefdom that manipulated the ambiguities of colonial rule encourages revisiting prevailing conceptions of how cultural identities and economies are rooted in contingent historical circumstances; drawing on comparative cases from North and South America suggests revising longstanding views of the Maloti-Drakensberg as a marginal colonial theatre and repositioning heterodox actors as capable of influencing the terms of colonial encounters.

Research on File Management Mode under the Background of Digital Campus

“…Under the background of digital campus, due to the rapid increase in the number of electronic documents and the difference in management methods, the traditional guiding theory cannot fully adapt to the management of documents in the information age, thus resulting in the electronic file life cycle theory [5]. This paper is mainly based on the theory put forward by the Electronic Files Committee of the International Archives Council.…”

The Death of the Agama Lizard: The Historical Significances of a Multi-authored Rock-art Site in the Northern Cape (South Africa)

“…The |Xam homelands, however, contain much rock art that can be securely associated with colonial contexts, depicting items of material culture that firmly situate it in the nineteenth century. Colonial imagery has long been a topic of interest for scholars of southern African rock art, particularly in the southwestern Cape (Hall & Mazel 2005;Johnson et al 1959;Mguni 2013;Yates et al 1993). More recently, research focused on the nineteenthcentury rock art of the Maloti-Drakensberg (Blundell 2004;Challis 2012;Mallen 2008;Ouzman 2005;Smith 2010) has come to characterize it as a useful-albeit problematic-form of 'indigenous archive', offering perspectives on the colonial encounter independent of those recorded by settler-penned historical documentation: these arts have been understood as part of the identity-formation processes accompanying the emergence of multi-ethnic or creolized raiding bands in the region at this time.…”