Abstract
THE treasure-seeker has often been the enemy of real archaeology. Yet sometimes, like the honeybird, he has revealed the path to those wiser and better instructed than himself. So it has been with the romantic story of Mapungubwe. Five farmers in the northern Zoutpansberg district set out to explore a lonely hill in the wildest and most desolate part of the Transvaal. To the natives it was known as the “Hill of the Jackals”, and they regarded it with superstitious dread. It was sacred to the Great Ones among their ancestors. The five adventurers started to dig, and found close under the surface a skeleton with numbers of gold bangles, a bowl of gold plating, and parts of a gold-plated headrest, together with small figures of rhinoceroses in gold plating. The total weight of gold in this single find was 75 ounces.
Mapungubwe:
Ancient Bantu Civilization on the Limpopo. Reports on Excavations at Mapungubwe (Northern Transvaal) from February 1933 to June 1935. Edited on behalf of the Archæological Committee of the University of Pretoria by Leo Fouché. Pp. xiv + 183 + 44 plates. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1937.) 50s. net.
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RANDALL-MACIVER, D. Mapungubwe. Nature 141, 222–224 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141222a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141222a0
