Research visit by PhD candidate Precious Chiwara (Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town)

Precious Chiwara visited the Florisbad Quaternary Research Station for three weeks in September and October, to conduct a comparative analysis of ~ 120 000 year-old stone tools excavated at the Florisbad archaeological site. The visit formed part of her research project entitled “Early human social transmission during MIS 5: A perspective from the Kalahari Basin”.

Image: Dr Lloyd Rossouw, Head of Department: Florisbad Quaternary Research Station, National Museum

Florisbad Quaternary Research Station has recently been home to yet another successful field school. A group of 16 students from the University of Pretoria’s Geography and Environmental Sciences Honours class and two of their lecturers travelled 500km to put their long weekend to good use at this exclusive heritage and active research site, 40km north of Bloemfontein.

Image: Bailey Weiss uncovering a dinosaur fossil in the Eastern Cape

Bailey Weiss, an MSc student from the University of the Free State and currently working with Dr Jennifer Botha at the National Museum, Bloemfontein recently attended a field trip to the Eastern Cape with Professor Jonah Choiniere, from the Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwaterand, Johannesburg to prospect for dinosaur fossils.

Plants can get sick in a variety of ways. Perhaps one of the strangest is when a plant produces a large number of branches or shoots close together to form what is referred to as a “witches’ broom”. The plants stop reproducing and become locked into a “forever young” state – repeating their growth of shoots or branches from the same part of the plant again and again.

Oliewenhuis Art Museum is proud to announce Āvāhana-Invocation, the first iteration of a travelling solo exhibition by South African-born artist Amita Makan. Celebrated internationally for fabric constructions with embroidery and collage, Makan infuses her work with identity, memory and history by using vintage saris, and intuits the contemporary by integrating found materials – the detritus of plastic that litters our surroundings and pollutes our expressions of care.