In February a family living above the beach near Turtle Creek, outside Plettenberg Bay, decided to extend their home. Contractors arrived and started to dig.
Then a skull was uncovered, and work came to a halt. Police were called in, followed by forensic anthropologists from UCT. It was quickly established that this was an archaeological rather than a forensics , matter, and the skeleton was carefully excavated and brought to UCT.
“Plettenberg Bay is a nice place to live now, and it’s been a nice place to live for a thousand years,” says Alan Morris, professor of human biology at the university.
The skeleton is now in a box at the medical school, with the skull resting on a small cushion to stop it rolling about. A brown paper bag contains the ribs, and another the bones of the hands and feet.
This is UCT 620, a girl in her late teens who probably spent in the region of 1 500 years in her grave above the sea – until it was uncovered this year.
Morris is a forensic anthropologist, a man who can read the stories that bones tell.
He occasionally works with police, but also with archaeologists in a bid to find out about the lives of people who lived in the Western Cape thousands of years ago.
The girl – the pelvis and the skull show that she was female – would have been about 1.48m tall, and had had at least one child, possibly two.
She had an excellent set of teeth without a single cavity, but they were ground down in a way that you find only on much older people today.
This indicates that she was a member of a hunter-gatherer group, an impression supported by the fact she had been buried in a sitting position, with her knees up near her jaw, and her hands folded between her knees. The bones indicate she had suffered from anaemia at some point, and had been ill as a child.
She was alone – there was no sign of any other graves – and nothing was in the grave with her. All this points to the fact that she was a forebear of Khoikhoi, who buried their dead in a sitting position, wrapped in a kaross.
“The cultural clues indicate she was buried some time between 1 500 years ago and 500 years ago,” he said.
He said that she could have been there for 3 000 to 4 000 years, but that the burial style indicated that she was buried more recently.
Morris says she was thin and small, but probably well-toned and healthy. There is no sign of why she died so young.
With the permission of Heritage Western Cape, a piece of her rib about 2cm long will be sent to Canada for further testing: radio-carbon dating will give a much closer idea of when she died, stable carbon isotope testing will give an idea of her diet, and trace element analysis will indicate where she had been.
Does any of this matter?
Morris believes it does. The issue, however, can have political connotations.
In his book, Missing & Murdered – a personal adventure in forensic anthropology, Morris describes the 2003 discovery of the unmarked historic cemetery in Prestwich Street, Green Point, clearly the graves of some of the city’s poorest residents. The site had been uncovered during building development, and a group based at the District Six Museum argued that the dead should not be disturbed.
“Ultimately their motivation was not primarily about the disturbance of the graves, but about the development of Cape Town and how communities should be empowered to control the development,” he writes.
In his book Morris says the activists refused to allow even the most basic assessment of who was buried on the site. But he believes they could have uncovered a vast amount of information about health, lifestyle and demography from the skeletons.
Later, one of his students gave talks on the subject at schools in Belhar and “was overwhelmed by the interest and response of both the students and the teachers”.
Eventually the Prestwich Street site was developed, but the developer had to fund the building of an ossuary where the bones were interred.
Morris says Prestwich Street was an issue of control of heritage and the inequality of land ownership, but different attitudes prevail elsewhere in the country.
And the ossuary is not necessarily the end of the story.
“My guess is that eventually there will be a request for analysis of the remains, as the activists who fought the excavation move on to other projects, and (as) people in the descendent communities want more information,” he writes.
Research does not have to be disrespectful, says Morris, in an interview at the UCT medical school. “I’d argue that understanding more about the people of the past is the way in which we could most honour the people who have gone before. The more we know about the past, the more we understand about the present, and where we’re going in the future.”
The study of skeletons for forensic purposes focuses on the individual – the police want to know who the person was, and why he or she died. Archaeological study, however, focuses on the community rather than on the individual.
For the price of a piece of her rib, UCT 620 will tell us about the people she came from, and the history of her time and place.
“She is not to be seen as an individual research specimen, but as a representative of another time and place, to help us understand as much as possible about the heritage of her community and how we got to where we are today.”
So what will happen to UCT 620?
She will remain in her drawer in the Skeleton Store, among the other 600 or so there, available for research to registered researchers. She will be treated with care and respect, custodian of the secrets of the past. - Sunday Argus
l Missing & Murdered – a personal adventure in forensic anthropology, by Alan G Morris ( Zebra Press).