of their own other than a minimum amount of clothing. At present, it appears that they slept in, or outside the doors of, their owners’ bedrooms or in kitchens, passages, or outbuildings—wherever they could find a corner to lie down. They had no personal space in which to hide personal treasures. They appear to have used the family’s discarded (or perhaps sometimes stolen) eating utensils and spent what free time they had in backyards or on the street. What might well have been treasured objects are occasionally found—quartz crystals, pieces of coral, ostrich eggshell and glass beads, cowries and other shells from tropical waters—but it is not possible to attribute these specifically to slaves.

Even so, considering the large numbers of slaves from Africa and Asia resident in the Cape, where they soon outnumbered their owners, archaeologists are forced to face the fact that they may be doing something wrong. Hall and Markell (1993) have suggested that either the outlines of slave identity have not been preserved, and will therefore never be found, or we need a more-sophisticated methodology to trace such outlines.

Nevertheless, research on slavery in South Africa continues. Using isotopic analysis and ethnography, Cox has been able to establish that skeletal remains discovered near the old VOC battery of Fort Knokke are those of slaves. The study of archival documents enabled her to identify the Portuguese ship on which these slaves were being transported to Brazil when it was wrecked in Table Bay in 1818 (Cox and Sealy 1997), and further research on this material might reveal more about these unfortunate people. Hopefully, too, the excavations under the directorship of Gabeba Abrahams-Willis on the old VOC Slave Lodge (now the home of the South African Cultural History Museum) will yield information that has hitherto remained hidden. A final point of interest regarding slavery at the Cape is that historians and archaeologists are cooperating in the establishment of a slave route for tourists under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.

Related to interest in the archaeology of the underclass at the Cape is what is generally and somewhat loosely termed contact archaeology, meaning the study of contact situations between colonists and local people whose ancestors inhabited the Cape for thousands of years prior to its occupation by Europeans. The oppression suffered by these people and the devastating effect of colonialism on their cultures constitute the main themes of this work.

Thanks to many years of archaeological research by prehistorians, much is known about the lifeways of the two groups of indigenous people encountered by Europeans in the western Cape, even before the establishment of a halfway station by the VOC in 1652. John Parkington from the University of Cape Town and Hilary and Janette Deacon from the University of Stellenbosch focused on the stone-tool-using hunter gatherers known as the San (called Bushmen by white colonists). The interests of Andrew Smith, also from the University of Cape Town, lie with the nomadic pastoralists, the Khoikhoi, who were organized into clans and moved around the western Cape utilizing its rich resources to the benefit of their large herds of cattle and sheep. Understanding interactions between Khoisan (the indigenous poeoples) and colonists means relying heavily on the work of these prehistorians.

The first major work on a historical contact site was carried out by Carmel Schrire when she excavated a (then) remote outpost occupied by VOC soldiers at Churchaven on Langebaan Lagoon (Schrire, Cruz-Uribe, and Klose 1993). Excavators uncovered the foundations of a lodge, a roughly constructed fort on the shoreline, and a third very small building, the use of which remains unknown. These seventeenth-century structures are among the earliest erected by colonists at the Cape. This work is also important because it provides evidence for the tensions inherent in contact situations. Furthermore, Schrire’s argument—that by this time clear distinctions between hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups had already been obliterated—set off a debate that remains unresolved but, in the manner of debates, is encouraging further research. Finally, by way of a gentle reprimand, Hall and Markell (1993) have pointed out the importance of the attention Schrire paid