to Deetz who, after his visit, set about researching British settler sites near Grahamstown in Eastern Cape Province. A structural study of the architecture and layout of the small town of Salem enabled his team to show how the culture of the homeland had been transformed locally through the combination of elements from the British Georgian order with older, eighteenth-century Cape elements (Winer and Deetz 1990). Part of Deetz’s aim was to compare collections, mainly ceramic ones, with collections from British settler sites in the United States and elsewhere in order to obtain a global perspective of British colonial occupation. This work also serves as an introduction to the archaeology of contact between settlers and African farming communities, and the scope for further work is considerable.

Work at many excavations in Cape Town (for example Paradijs and Bree Street) extends into the British period and the nineteenth century. The inventory studies of Malan and the ceramic studies of Klose were undertaken specifically to enable comparison between the VOC and British periods, and they therefore extend into that century. However, the major nineteenth-century work at the Cape is an ongoing public archaeology project involving research on the part of the city known as District Six. The area was declared a slum by the apartheid government in the 1960s, and its inhabitants were forcibly removed to suburbs further from the city center. Buildings were bulldozed, and District Six became a wasteland.

The archaeology of District Six is now the major focus of the Research Unit for the Archaeology of Cape Town (RESUNACT), established by Martin Hall in order to investigate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Public archaeology is an important feature of RESUNACT, which incorporates a special schools program that is aimed at including teachers and pupils in fieldwork projects. It must, however, be pointed out that this is not an innovation. From the beginning of the Paradijs project, interested members of the public, especially those attending the University of Cape Town’s summer school lectures, were encouraged to participate in the excavation, and a schools project was also organized by senior students who took groups of pupils, especially those from disadvantaged communities, to a variety of sites during weekends and holidays.

At present, a new school curriculum, which will include archaeology, is being introduced. In order to thoroughly prepare teachers, students, and scholars for this study, Hall established the Multimedia Education Group. At the same time, the project moves archaeology at the University of Cape Town firmly into the twenty-first century, as the focus is very much on the creative and interactive use of computer-generated information as a teaching aid. Hall’s theoretical work, too, is already well ensconced within the ambit of the new millennium as he ponders the possibilities as well as the pitfalls the expansion of the Internet offers. Seeing this expansion as a kind of “virtual colonization,” he suggests that it might subject less-advantaged communities to the same kind of indignities they suffered during the period of real colonial expansion by the advantaged nations (Hall 1999).

One must conclude that a great deal has been accomplished considering the relatively late and slow start, the limited research funding available, and the small number of professional archaeologists in South Africa compared to Europe and the United States. But an abundance of work remains to be done, especially in the northern and eastern regions of the country, where mission stations, the Boer War, industrial archaeology, and indigenous African-European contact offer vast potential for historical archaeologists. The archaeology of the Great Trek, which began in 1835, also remains largely unexplored. The discovery of diamonds and gold during the late nineteenth century, the ensuing vigorous growth of towns, and the development of a vast mining industry have thus far yielded only one ongoing historical archaeology project: the systematic survey of an explosives factory at Modderfontein. One mission station, at Schoemansdal, has been excavated and restored as a museum.

As far as contact archaeology is concerned, the work of Simon Hall must be mentioned. Working at the interface between Iron Age and historical archaeology, Hall uses principles from both types of archaeology to understand