Cape Town - Ancient fossils from the Jurassic, human skeletal remains from the Later Stone Age, African decorative beadwork, Boer War medals, Irma Stern paintings, Cape Town Castle, rock art and rock engravings, ceremonial leopard skins, Groote Schuur wine glasses, stalactites, ancient teeth, a Springbok mascot and even old post office buildings…
Given South Africa’s rainbow nation social status, it’s no surprise at all that its rich heritage is equally diverse.
But keeping proper track of tens of thousands of heritage objects that range from the minute and easily transportable to the immense and firmly rooted, while at the same time providing for citizens’ constitutional right to information about them, has been a well-nigh impossible task... until very recently.
Now, the Cape Town-based South African Heritage Resources Agency (Sahra), the body constituted by the National Heritage Resources Act, has developed an on-line system that has started fulfilling these onerous requirements with remarkable ease and success.
Work on the South African Heritage Resources Information System – usually just Sahris – started in 2005 and went through several early incarnations before serious attention was given to the project in late 2011.
Less than one year later, this on-line heritage resources repository that also functions as a filing mechanism for statutory applications related to development and mining was up and running and had transformed the work of the agency, says Katie Smuts, its national inventory unit manager.
“By August 2012 everyone at Sahra was using Sahris internally and then we went live to the public in April last year. Since then, we’ve stopped receiving any paper-based applications and we’ve also stopped issuing any paper-based comments or permits. Now everything is done on-line, and the system is pretty amazing.”
This month is National Heritage Month, so it’s an appropriate time for Smuts to explain that part of Sahra’s mandate involves maintaining an inventory of the national heritage estate that includes all the heritage resources in the country. That information is supposed to be publicly accessible and to be disseminated to the public at regular intervals. So the agency was funded by the Department of Arts and Culture to develop an on-line system.
Much of the work was done by Nic Wiltshire, an archaeologist by profession but also a “computer-whizz” who joined the agency as project manager after working at Heritage Western Cape. He spent 13 months developing the system that is based on Drupal, an open-source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications, and Geoserver, a popular open-source software server that allows users to share and edit geospatial data.
Sahris has several major applications, Smuts, pictured above, explains.
It’s a repository for information about all archaeological, palaeontological, geo-heritage and other kinds of heritage sites in the country. Also, information about heritage objects is imported into the system from existing records of collections in facilities like museums and universities.
It’s also a repository for information captured by heritage practitioners while they are working on development and mining applications, and it’s used by Sahra officials to comment on heritage aspects of statutory environmental impact assessment (EIA) applications and in the issuing of heritage permits. An enormous amount is already stored in the system that has a 96 terabyte capacity and is housed and duplicated in two secure bunkers in Cape Town and Joburg, making four copies.
The first phase of this digitisation of Sahra’s archives going back to the 1920s has been completed, and currently the details of some 15 000 heritage objects are captured. Some of these are in special collections like the Broster beadwork collection at the Walter Sisulu University in Mthatha, or in audited collections at Genadendal, Groote Schuur and Tuynshuys.
There are also details of some 3 500 declared heritage sites like burial sites, bridges, archaeological deposits and shipwrecks, either Grade 1 (national) or Grade 2 (provincial) and all accurately mapped on a GIS system using Google Earth.
This mapping aspect is “fantastic”, says Smuts, because overlays allow heritage practitioners to look at cumulative impacts. “It’s pretty exciting and currently the only one of its kind in the country as far as I’m aware – possibly one of only a few in the world – that allows you to do this for both archaeological and built environments.” Another first is the palaeo-sensitivity map, significant because there are so few palaeontologists working in South Africa and even fewer of them doing impact assessments.
“This palaeo-sensitivity map is based on the underlying geology of areas. It gives you a visual representation of the likelihood of fossils and the percentage of fossil-bearing deposits in an area. That’s a real boon for developers, particularly where there is a degree of flexibility as to where you can locate your planned development.”
The system also contains some 5 700 processed heritage permit and development applications, Smuts adds. Almost all of the the information stored in Sahris is completely accessible to members of the public who can also upload new data.
l To explore Sahris, visit www.sahra.org.za/sahris
Cape Argus