Boomplaas Excavation Season 2024: HOMER Orientation

HOMER Orientation! 

Welcome to the first blog post from the Boomplaas 2024 Winter season! The group consists of numerous students from across the world including Brazil, Namibia, and Tanzania. We are beyond excited for the incredible opportunity to work in the field and to grow our knowledge base and skills in zooarchaeology, lithic analysis, and anthropological excavation. For this first week those of us here as part of the HOMER program have been going through orientation. The next 5 and a half weeks, we will be excavating the Boomplaas site. Orientation was based in Mossel Bay nestled within the Garden Route of South Africa, and we had the opportunity to visit multiple cave sites. 

Our first day for HOMER orientation was Sunday May 11th, and here we are almost a week later on the 18th about to head inland to Boomplaas! To start Orientation we were introduced to the major find types we could expect to see at Boomplaas: faunal remains, lithics, and roofspall.

 

 Students familiarizing themselves with Plotted Finds found at Knysna, led by Dr. Cleghorn.

Day 2 was focused on Total Station training, a process which would continue into the next two days. Total Stations are often used in surveying and construction work for they pinpoint accuracy. This accuracy is incredible for excavations as it allows us as archaeologists to "shoot in" finds as data points on a three dimensional grid, allowing us to reconstruct the site in systems like ArcGIS. Day 2 was focused on resections, or how the Total Station finds out where it is in three dimensional space. The day was topped off with a lovely baked ziti made by Dr. Cleghorn.

 

 

Students being trained on Total Stations by MAPCRM employees

Day 3 was a continuation of Total Station training as well as more individualized task training. Luckily in the afternoon we received a small break in the form of a hike between the Pinnacle Point caves! As we hiked between the caves Dr. Cleghorn, Straun from MAPCRM, and ASU PhD Candidate Patrick taught us about South African coastal cave formation and the different lithic types found from the Middle and Late Stone Ages.

View from Pinnacle Point Cave 5-6!

After the short, but highly inclined, hike we headed back for a some labeling find bags and homemade chili from Dr. Cleghorn. The chili more than made up for the tedious process of labeling find bags (pictured below) while watching Cunk on Earth.

On Thursday we finished up learning how to use Total Stations and began our journey to Knysna and the Knysna Cave archaeological site. After a rocky hike along the beach we had made it up to the climb leading to the cave. The climb is so steep that while a brave few can certainly free climb it, those few had to set up ropes and chains for the rest of us to safely make it. Dr. Cleghorn gave us a quick run down of the history of the cave, reaching back into the Middle Stone Age (some 200,000 years ago). 

 We are now back in Mossel bay preparing to head to Boomplaas tomorrow morning. Stay tuned for more updates and posts as the field season continues!

 

Student Felix trying a NumNum fruit