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from the Peers’ excavations in Skildergat Kop, now widely known as Peers Cave, were nine

human skeletons situated at various levels, obviously burials and obviously modern in
morphology. Six of these (two nearly complete females and four children) were easily

ascribed to the marine shell-dominated upper levels with Wilton-like tools. A further two
were also ascribed to this level. One more though, the one that became known as ‘Fish Hoek

Man’, may, according to the Peers’, have come from the MSA levels. Given that all burials
must necessarily by definition have been interred down into lower levels from higher ones, it

is understandable that there may have been some doubt as to the age of interment, especially

under the rather crude excavation procedures of the day. More of this later. There were also
rock paintings on the cave walls consisting of patterns of dots and lines in browns and

yellows, with apparently superposed handprints. (Deacon & Wilson, 1992). (Figs. 2.5 – 2.15)

The finds at Peers Cave created widespread interest, such that visiting archaeologists
attending the 1929 meeting of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science

in Cape Town went directly from the mailship to the cave before going anywhere else.

Speaking at the 1932 conference of the Association General Smuts declared that the cave
promised to be the most remarkable site yet found in South Africa. (Deacon & Wilson, 1992).

Developments: post WW II

Barend ‘Berry’ Malan was one of Goodwin’s students at UCT during the 1920s. In 1935 he
became Secretary of the Johannesburg-based Archaeological Survey of South Africa that had

been founded by van Riet Lowe with the support of Smuts. His involvement with the
assemblages from the Trappies Kop and Skildergat Kop sites during the late 1940s and early

50s enabled him to play a creative role in the early post-World War II development of the

Goodwin and van Riet Lowe temporal scheme of ESA, MSA and LSA. By now the evidence
for the chronological sequence was emerging from the whole of the African continent, but the

chronological constructs still preceded the appearance of reliable radiocarbon dating. Malan
supported the idea that Howiesons Poort assemblages should be placed in a Second

Intermediate Phase, thought to be temporally sandwiched between MSA and LSA. There was
another First Intermediate Phase between ESA and MSA. There were other assemblages from

further north in Africa that were placed in these ‘intermediate’ phases, usually undated

assemblages that were placed on the assumption of gradual evolutionary change through time.