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  • Wonderwerk
  • Julia Martin (bio)

At the base of a hill near Kuruman in South Africa, in a place of grasses is the dark mouth of a cave. The cave is wide and very deep, extending far into the body of the hill. Until the first property owner built a farmhouse on this land, people had been living in the cave since the beginning. The roof is black from their fires, and the floor holds traces of their habitation.

The cave is fenced now and excavated. The fire is out, and the people who come to it are visitors. Yet the swallows return to their nests each spring, and climbing the hill you can see fine, tough plants still growing, and beyond, the blue rim of the world.

* * *

Like many other farms whose names evoke the joy of a longed-for homecoming—names like Weltevrede or Welverdient—the property was called Wonderwerk, a miracle. The first white owner, N. J. Bosman, lived with his family in the cave from 1900 to 1907 while their farmhouse was being built. After that, they used it for a stock shelter and a wagon house, and for several years in the 1940s, they mined a layer of prehistoric deposits and sold this as bat guano, used as fertilizer.

The first archaeological excavations of Wonderwerk Cave began when someone noticed bones and stone artefacts in the so-called guano. From the late 1970s onwards, the archaeologist Peter Beaumont and others worked at the site. I understand that their findings, as yet largely unpublished, will change some aspects of the way that the Stone Age is understood.

Passing through a gated entrance, Michael parks the car near a cluster of small face-brick buildings. Across the mouth of the cave is a big steel railing. I had not expected these: keys and a gate. But there has been vandalism, including graffiti, and the barrier is probably necessary. I interrupt the meeting in the little information centre a few metres away to ask for the key. Peter comes out and offers to escort us.

"I really don't mean to take you out of your meeting."

"Oh, there are various reasons why one might want to be out of a meeting," he says. "I can have a smoke for one thing."

"Well, we're really lucky to have a world authority as our tour guide."

"I don't know about that." [End Page 13]

The cave is huge. It stretches 139 metres into the hillside, Peter says, and is about 17 metres wide, big enough to keep a fire. Inside the entrance, a single giant stalagmite stands like a guardian of the threshold. There are paintings, what is left of them, on the wall near the mouth of the cave. Painted buck, finger marks, wriggled lines, and stripes seethe ochre and white on the surface of the rock: traces painted over other traces, layer on layer, touch of hands on stone, successive generations.

Peter switches on the halogen lights, and the darkness beyond is illumined. The excavation of the site reaches as far back as we can see. Deep trenches lie on either side of the narrow walkway that leads into the hill, and the entire floor of the cave has been dug up and marked with string. This net stretches like a perspective drawing converging to a vanishing point in the distant dark, each square labelled with a small piece of paper. Looking back into the cave, we see that the space is hatched across with lit-up string squares that mark the darker regions of excavated earth, their bright labels gleaming in the light.

I give each of the twins a small box of juice. The layer of dust on the ground near the entrance of the cave is thick, and the twins want to pound about, to stir it up. Peter looks concerned.

"Don't do that," I say.

Peter tells us that Wonderwerk Cave is the only place in the world known to have been inhabited, whenever possible, from about 1.2 million years ago until the early twentieth century, when the last people to live there were the Bosman family. The information...

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