stone artifacts, which were associated with extinct kinds of animals found in Europe. Penning (1886), a geologist of Stow’s generation, appreciated that surface finds were not necessarily recent in age. The land surfaces of southern Africa had not been glaciated in the Ice Age, as had happened in Europe, and therefore they were not covered with glacial debris. In a region not affected by glaciation, artifacts occurring on the surface may still be tens and even hundreds of thousands of years old.

Perhaps the clearest statement on how old artifacts in the South African landscape might be came from L. Péringuey, a French-trained entomologist. Péringuey’s work took him to the vineyards around Stellenbosch where Acheuean artifacts are regularly plowed out of the ground. Such artifacts were also known to occur in great quantities in the gravels mined for diamonds along the Vaal River and had been found as far afield as Swaziland and Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Péringuey recognized that similar kinds of stone artifacts were known from the oldest deposits in France and claimed that the stone artifacts from Stellenbosch were as old as the most ancient in Europe (Péringuey 1900). At the turn of the century it was a revolutionary idea that people may have had as long a history of living in Africa as in Europe.

Péringuey became the director of the South African Museum, and after the turn of the twentieth century, with the growth of museums in South Africa, he and other museum directors were active in promoting archaeological studies. The museums became the storehouses for collections, and the close association between archaeology and museums has continued to the present. One of Péringuey’s counterparts, J. Hewitt, a zoologist and director of the Albany Museum in Grahamstown from 1910 to 1954, spent weekends and holidays investigating coastal shell middens and excavated a number of rock shelters. His most important excavations in the 1920s and 1930s were on three farms: Wilton near Alicedale, Howiesons Poort near Grahamstown, and Melkhoutboom, which is inland from Port Elizabeth. These were among the first systematic excavations undertaken in South Africa. Although trained as natural scientists and not as archaeologists, researchers like Hewitt brought a new rigor to the fledgling subject of archaeology.

Beginnings of Professional Studies

The first South African to be trained as an archaeologist was Astley John Hilary Goodwin. Born in Pietermaritzburg in 1900, Goodwin studied archaeology under Miles Burkitt and Alfred Haddon at Cambridge University and returned to South Africa in 1923 (J. Deacon 1990; Schrire, Deacon, Hall, and Lewis-Williams 1986). He gave himself the task of making archaeology a more systematic study. The museum collections had been accumulated by casual rather than systematic collecting, and they represented a body of information that needed to be put in order. In a series of writings in the 1920s, Goodwin developed and publicized his ideas. The culmination was the publication of the Stone Age Cultures of South Africa, written in collaboration with Clarence van Riet Lowe (Goodwin and van Riet Lowe 1929). The concept of the book owed much to Goodwin, and van Riet Lowe supplied the information on the archaeology of the interior of the country that he had gathered while working as an engineer engaged in building bridges.

That publication had a lasting influence on the development of archaeology in South Africa. In it, the authors proposed a three-stage division of the Stone Age into the earlier, middle, and later Stone Ages. The earlier Stone Age was characterized by large bifacial (flaked over both faces) artifacts with Acheulean hand-axes being the diagnostic form. The middle Stone Age was characterized by the use of prepared or Levallois-type cores to produce triangular or parallel-sided flakes. The definition of the later Stone Age suggested a technology designed to produce microlithic tools and blades but stressed the association with the San, rock art, and burials. The later Stone Age, therefore, was the link with historical times.

The three Stone Ages proposed were properly technological stages much like christian jürgensen thomsen’s three-age system or the three-fold division of the Paleolithic adopted in Europe in the nineteenth century. Goodwin