Town Archaeology Professor Martin Hall told Reuters. It is a happy coincidence that the conference follows hard on the heels of the announcement that South African archaeologists had discovered the skeleton of an ape man who could prove to be the long sought evolutionary missing link. The irony is that it is being held in a province that is the last outpost of power for the National Party,'' Hall said. The National Party ran South Africa under rigid racial lines from 1948 until it was ejected from power in the country's first all-race elections in 1994. It still forms the provincial government in the Western Cape, the region around Cape Town.
Archaeology is the study of where people came from and what they did.
The question that still is raised in South Africa and in many disputed territories around the globe is who arrived there first. We have taken it to mean the descendants of the Khoisan people who were here before the Dutch came in the 1650s,'' Hall said. The term Khoisan was coined in the 1930s, lumping together the San bushmen and their more settled agrarian Khoikhoi neighbours who lived in the Cape before the arrival of the black Xhosa and Zulu peoples or the whites. I hope this conference can help change that,'' he added. He admitted that in itself could be a problem taking place less than six months before national elections with all parties as likely to delve into the past as peer into the future in search of suitable brickbats to hurl at each other.