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especially the free burgher farmers. The latter were company employees who contracted out of company service from 1657 onward to farm on their own account. The crucial role played by land, the symbolism involved in the layout of farm complexes, and the linking of these with questions of personal identity and status are central themes in this work, which is argued out against a background of compatible forms of hermeneutic theory (Brink 1997).

Early–eighteenth–century drawing of the Vergelegen estate

(Cape Archives)

Antonia Malan’s research began as an application of Deetz’s approach to probate inventories with the aim of discovering how Cape colonial people utilized internal space and how this use of space informs us about social values and lifeways. Her work is comprehensive in that it covers both the Dutch and the British periods of occupation and deals with dwellings of the poor as well as those of the wealthy. Using both documentary material and archaeological excavation, she attempts to reconstruct the story of a whole eighteenth-century city block to demonstrate how rich and poor mixed and moved in and out over a long period in this part of the town (Malan 1998). Of late, Malan has been using narrative based on archaeological knowledge, but blending fact and fiction innovatively, in an attempt to reproduce something of the spirit of Cape slave life and to capture something of the identity of slaves as people.

This kind of innovation is necessary for the historical archaeology of Cape slavery, because thus far, the marks of slavery in the archaeological record have proved to be elusive. It is not at all clear to archaeologists why this should be so, but part of the problem is that Cape slaves were housed very differently from their counterparts who lived on the large slave plantations of the Americas. Even though the term slave quarters appears in probate inventories and other documents, small-scale archaeological investigations on suburban properties (for example, by Hall at Taborah and Brink at Saint Cyprian’s School) where slave quarters are believed to have existed have yielded no artifactual evidence that even remotely points in the direction of a slave signature or suggests any form of slave resistance. Similarly, virtually nothing about Cape slavery has come to light from any large-scale excavations—not even from the site of Vergelegen near Somerset West.

At that opulent early-eighteenth-century country estate of Governor Willem Adrian Van der Stel, a building clearly marked on contemporary documents as a slave lodge was excavated by Markell during the 1990s. In such a specific context it was hoped that evidence of slave lifeways and owner-slave relationships would be found, but such was not the case. A great deal was learned about the architecture and its changes through time, but there was again no artifactual evidence that could be said to characterize slavery or slave resistance. The ceramic assemblage, for instance, typically comprised Chinese and Japanese porcelains supplemented with coarse earthenwares and some stoneware from Germany and China (Markell 1993). One surprising find in the slave lodge, however, was the skeleton of a woman buried under a floor. Isotopic analysis of teeth and bones (Sealy, Morris, Armstrong, Markell, and Schrire 1993) registered a childhood diet different than that of northwestern Europeans of the time and probably reflects a tropical origin. The most that can be said is that this finding would be consistent with a slave identity.

Slaves were divested of their identities and listed in official documents as movable property along with goods and animals. Most often they were not allowed to keep their own names but were given new ones by their owners. Since they were seen as objects rather than as people, it was not deemed necessary for them to have possessions