Qualla: Boomplaas Cave

Boomplaas Cave: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bakkesc, CC0. Someone placed a painted river cobble face-down into the dirt, deliberately, while the red ochre depicting an ostrich with outstretched wings was still wet. That gesture -- careful, intentional, perhaps ritualistic -- happened thousands of years ago in a cave at the foot of the Swartberg mountains. It is one small detail in a record of human presence at Boomplaas Cave that reaches back 60,000 to 80,000 years, preserved in five meters of stratified sediment that archaeologists have been reading like a book since the 1970s.

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Image: Bakkesc | CC0

Boomplaas Cave: Layers Upon Layers

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bakkesc, CC0. Boomplaas Cave sits in the Cango Valley, in the foothills of the Swartberg range north of Oudtshoorn in the Western Cape. Hilary Deacon of the University of Stellenbosch led excavations here from 1974 to 1979, uncovering a stratified sequence that spans from the Middle Stone Age ...

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Image: Bakkesc | CC0

Boomplaas Cave: The Painted Stones

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bakkesc, CC0. Among Boomplaas's most striking finds are four painted stones from Holocene-era layers, a regional tradition in the Southern Cape where hunter-gatherers marked river cobbles and limestone with images of animals. Three of the stones were associated with storage pits containing Pap...

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Image: Bakkesc | CC0

Boomplaas Cave: Khoi Pottery and Shifting Worlds

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bakkesc, CC0. The upper layers at Boomplaas document a transition that fascinates archaeologists: the shift from hunter-gatherer to herder societies. Pottery sherds excavated from the most recent major layer include fine clay vessels with ochre applied to their outer surfaces, fired at high te...

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Image: Bakkesc | CC0

Boomplaas Cave: Digging Deeper

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Llez (H. Zell)., CC BY-SA 3.0. Boomplaas nearly fell into neglect before a 2015 effort, supported by the Leakey Foundation, helped refurbish its decaying research infrastructure. In 2020, J. Tyler Faith and Brian M. Chase joined the excavation team to reestablish research, focusing on the critical transition b...

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Image: Llez (H. Zell). | CC BY-SA 3.0