Frosty and cold winter .. . .

July 11th  at 0730. A frosty morning the Witwatersrand University research station at Komati Gorge.

For a Swede it does not really make sense to leave for 25 degrees South and 1600 m above sea level in the middle of July, when summer finally has come to the northern hemisphere. But the attraction, in spite of cold mornnings and cold lecture halls, is the combination of a meeting in Komati Gorge and surrounding Bokoni area with the network "African Farming: an interdisciplinary pan-African perspective on farming" and the long row of papers presented on the "Farmers" session of the combined meeting in Johannesburg of The 14th Congress of Pan African Archaeological Association for Prehistory and Related Studies & The 22nd Biennial Meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists. Four papers and two poster presentations report on work in the interdisciplinary Bokoni research programme, where one component has been the cooperation (2010 to 2012) between South African archaeologists and Swedish geographers under Swedish-Research Links programme.  New to me this time were the commendable efforts to make Bokoni sites accessible for the general public and to cooperate with local communities in this. This webpage is an example of this. It provides a good overview of the fascinating history of the Bokoni people and their system of intensive and terraced agriculture.