the growing interest and popularization of prehistoric archaeology in Europe.
South Africa is a colony for which there is a wide knowledge of the collectors’
social background and their links with Europe. They included among their
number geologists, doctors, civil servants, engineers, and soldiers (Mitchell
1998: table 3; 2001: table 2). Interestingly, a group of them belonged to the
highest echelons of South African society and were bonded by ties of marriage
and personal friendship. This group undertook some of the earliest excav-
ations in the 1880s and also published theWrst synthesis of the prehistory of
South Africa. Articles on South African archaeology were sent to local jour-
nals such as theTransactions of the South African Philosophical Societyas well
as to learned periodicals in the metropolis, such as those of the Anthropo-
logical Institute, the Anthropological and Ethnological Society of London,
and the Cambridgeshire Antiquarian Society.
Archaeology formed only a part of the anthropological package. Some of
the newcomers soon became interested in making new discoveries in the new
territories. Thus, in 1905 the collector Louis Evans declared, soon after he
arrived in Natal, that he ‘was prompted to visit the caves of the Drakensberg
to try toWnd evidence of the history of the people, or peoples, who had in the
past times inhabited these shelters’ (in Mazel 1992: 762). For those interested
in archaeology, ancient objects further demonstrated Africa’s primitivism as
well as serving as evidence that not all human societies had evolved at the
same pace. It was widely believed that in Africa cultural development had
been slower than anywhere else in the world. This was argued, for example,
by X. Stainier in hisL’Aˆge de la Pierre au Congopublished in 1899, in which he
highlighted the similarities between modern and prehistoric material culture
and saw them as a proof of the backwardness of the African peoples (Hobart
et al. 2002: 69; McIntosh 2001: 23). In this light, theWnds gathered by South
African collectors were described as having been produced by Bushmen or
San people, reinforcing in this way the perception of them as primitive, as
relics of the past (Shepherd 2003: 829).
EuropeanWndings were in the mind of many. In South Africa, the descrip-
tion of stone tools and the typological sequences built with them followed
Gabriel de Mortillet’s scheme (Shepherd 2003: 828). It has also been observed
that collectors tended to select Middle Stone Age implements, no doubt
because their size made them more visible, but also for the reason that
amateurs found them familiar because of their greater similarity to European
assemblages (Mitchell 2001: 47). Indeed, it was because of this similarity that
some collections were readily accepted in the British Museum and the Pitt
Rivers Museum in Oxford. One of these collections formed mainly of stone
artefacts was sold in 1885 to the British Museum. It had been formed by
a Scottish-born explorer, Andrew Anderson, on his travels during the two
304 Colonial Archaeology