mary elizabeth barber, the bowkers and south african prehistory

South African Archaeological Society

Mary Elizabeth Barber, the Bowkers and South African PrehistoryAuthor(s): Alan CohenSource: The South African Archaeological Bulletin, Vol. 54, No. 170 (Dec., 1999), pp. 120-127Published by: South African Archaeological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3889290 .

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120 South African Archaeological Bulletin 54: 120-127, 1999

MARY ELIZABETH BARBER, THE BOWKERS AND SOUTH AFRICAN PREHISTORY*

ALAN COHEN 42 Meadow Road, Pinner Middlesex HA5 lED United Kingdom

E-mail: abcohen@,compuserve.com

ABSTRACT

A recent paper by Peter Mitchell (1998), in this journal, gave an account of the South African Stone Age collections of the British Museum. This article expands on the very earliest discoveries in the nineteenth century and some of the personalities involved Mary Elizabeth Barber was one of the first to appreciate the significance of the stone tools that her brother Thomas Henry Bowker had discovered As a natural historian, she was a major influence on many of her family members and friends. Between them this group of people collected and described a number of botanical and entomological species new to science, helped to establish the stratigraphic geology of South Africa for the first time, and began the exploration of its ethnology, archaeology and palaeontology. These early settlers, many of whom had only a rudimentary education and were largely self-taught, deserve better recognition.

*Received May 1999, reviewed September 1999

Introduction

The first suggestion that stone tools had been made by a people from "a very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world," was in a letter written by Squire John Frere of Hoxne to the secretary of the Society of Anti- quaries in London in 1797 (Frere 1800). However, it had not become generally accepted in Europe until the mid- 1850s, even amongst leading intellectuals, that they were the work of prehistoric humans. Charles Lyell, born in the same year as Frere's letter was written, began to publish his Principles of Geology in 1830, thus bringing to the attention of the general public the idea of the great extent of geological time. Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, although his ideas had become known much earlier. However, most intellectuals and scientists could still not bring themselves to oppose the Church's teachings that the time frame given in the Book of Genesis for Creation was laid down by the word of God and therefore had to be the literal truth. It was also very difficult for many people to accept that mankind and extinct animals had been contem- poraries, as that implied a much greater time-span for the history of the earth than contemporary interpretations of the Bible allowed. Some 200 years earlier Archbishop James Ussher had calculated the date of Creation from information in the Bible as 4004 BC and this was still firmly believed by the majority of people.

In the late 1 850s, two events settled the matter. In

Kent's Cavern near Torquay, stone tools were found in such proximity to the remains of extinct animals that they

had to have been contemporary. At first, Dean William Buckland and the Catastrophists denied the possibility, but in 1858 a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science oversaw further excavations and concluded that the original evidence was correct (Buckland 1823; West 1968). That same year Dr Hugh Falconer, an expert on fossil bones was on holiday in Abbeville in northern France and heard of the discoveries of stone tools by a local customs official called Jacques Boucher de Crevecoeur de Perthes, who had been an old friend of Napoleon and his sisters. Falconer persuaded the eminent English antiquarian John Evans, and the geologist Joseph Prestwich to travel to France to investigate these discoveries. In Prestwich's reports (1859, 1862) to the Royal Soci- ety he left no possible doubt that mankind had existed in Europe at the same time as extinct mammals such as the mammoth and rhinoceros. However, in a remote comer of the 'Dark Continent' a relatively unknown family of sheep farmers who had emigrated from England in 1820 and settled near Grahamstown, had anticipated their findings by at least a year.

The Bowker Family

Miles and Anna Maria Bowker of Gateshead, Northum- berland were reasonably well-to-do sheep farmers when they decided to emigrate to South Africa in 1820 in order to provide what they hoped would be better opportunities for their large family of nine sons and a daughter. We are con- cerned mainly with three of the Bowker children; Thomas Holden (1807-1885), Mary Elizabeth (1818-1899) and James Henry (1822-1900). Although Holden acquired some schooling in England, Mary and Henry had no formal education apart from lessons at a farm school set up by their father for his own children and those of his workers. How- ever, at an early age, Mary imbibed her father's love for the natural sciences, and in this she was encouraged by her oldest brother, John Mitford Bowker, her senior by eighteen years. As her eight older brothers explored the flora and fauna of this new world, Mary discovered the pleasures of close observation of a multitude of animals, birds, and plants in her attempts to follow in their footsteps. The death of Mitford in 1846 left Mary as the central figure around which the family's future scientific discoveries revolved.

In 1838 she borrowed a book, probably from the library of the local surgeon Dr John Atherstone, that changed her life for ever. The Genera of South African Plants, Arranged According to the Natural System (Harvey 1838) had just been published in Cape Town as an outline of botany for interested collectors. It was the first substantial botanical book of its kind to be published in South Africa. Mary was so enthused by it that she began a correspondence with the author, William Henry Harvey, which continued until his untimely death in 1866. Harvey was the Colonial Treasurer from 1835 to 1842, and was a keen amateur botanist. He established contacts with many plant collectors throughout the colony before returning to Dublin in 1842 where he became Professor of Botany and Keeper of the Trinity College Herbarium. As a result of Mary's connection with Harvey, she also corresponded with the Directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, first Sir William Hooker,



South African Archaeological Bulletin 54: 120-127, 1999 121

then after his death, with his son Joseph Dalton Hooker, and his successor William Thistleton Dyer. Mary's letters are all preserved in the archives at Kew.

Harvey named a number of plants after Mary and her brother Henry, who was closely involved with Mary's botanical researches, including the genera Barberetta Harv. and Bowkeria Harv.; the asclepiad species, Brachystelma barberae Harv. ex Hook. f.; Ceropegia bowkeri Harv. subsp. bowkeri and Ceropegia bowkeri Harv. subsp. sororia (Harv. ex Hook. f.) R.A. Dyer; an orchid, Liparis bowkeri Harv.; a shrub, Pavetta bowkeri Harv., and a pelargonium, Pelargonium bowkeri Harv. Over the years, Mary sent about one thousand specimens to Harvey, which are still in the Herbarium of Trinity College Dublin, and many more to the Hookers at Kew. Harvey (1859) commented in his Thesaurus Capensis when discussing Bowkeria triphylla Harv. (now in synonomy under B. verticillata (Eckl. & Zeyh.) Schinz):

The generic name is designed to commemorate the services rendered to South African Botany by Henry Bowker Esq., and his sister, Mrs F. W. Barber (formerly Miss Bowker); who have both contributed largely to our knowledge of the plants of the Eastern frontier. . .

Frederick William Barber had been studying analytical chemistry and met his cousin William Guybon Atherstone while the latter was studying for his MD at Heidelburg University in Germany in 1839. They became close friends and, after qualifying, travelled together for several months on the continent. During their holiday, Guybon persuaded his cousin to accompany him back to South Africa. There, Frederick decided to take up sheep farming rather than chemistry as a career. By 1842 he had met and married Mary Elizabeth Bowker (Fig. 1) whose older brothers were already beginning to become known for their prowess as hunters, soldiers and politicians.

At that time, the scientific community in the Eastern Province was not very active. Although as early as 1841 a public library had been instituted in Grahamstown for the benefit of all those who sought such enlightenment, most had to rely on the rare but often very comprehensive private libraries such as that of the Atherstones. In 1844 Frederick wrote to his brother Henry in New York:

A few gentlemen have lately turned their attention to the geology of the Frontier-Several certain fossil remains have lately been found hitherto undescribed-& which have been sent to the Geological society of London & we are anxiously waiting to hear the result. Several new minerals have been found. But we sadly want an experienced hand to set us on the right tack. We have neither chemists, mineralogists or geologists to direct us-I have hitherto not been able to send home for books, apparatus, or chemical substances, but I am about sending home now for some.

Frederick was here talking about the fossils that Andrew Geddes Bain had collected and sent to the Geological Soci- ety of London in April, thus opening a correspondence with prominent geologists and palaeontologists in England such as Richard Owen of the British Museum. The exhibition of his collection in Grahamstown before their shipment to England led to much public interest in South Africa, and persuaded Guybon Atherstone to take up the study of geology more seriously.

In 1862, Mary discovered entomology. Roland Trimen (1840-1916) was another of those young men in poor health who sought improvement in both mind and body by travelling to Africa. He joined the Cape Civil Service as a clerk in 1858 and in his spare time assisted the Curator of the South African Museum, Edgar Leopold Layard (the

Fig. 1. Mary Elizabeth Barber at about age 60. Courtesy of Gareth Barberton.

younger brother of Sir Austen Henry Layard, the excavator of Nineveh), to arrange the Lepidoptera on a proper scientific basis. He soon realised the need for a book on the butterflies of the region. In November 1861 Layard introduced Trimen to James Henry Bowker (Fig. 2), who became one of his chief sources of information, and eventually co- author of a major work on South African butterflies, (Tri- men & Bowker 1887). In the meantime, Trimen produced a small book on butterflies (Trimen 1862), similar in ap- proach to Harvey's Genera (1838) and Layard's later publication, (1867) on the ornithology of South Africa. As soon as the first part was printed, Henry Bowker started to dis- cuss with Trimen the illustrations for the next volume, and suggested that Mary might be interested to undertake the task. He wrote to Trimen on 14 July 1862 (Bowker, J.H. 1862) from Fort Bowker:

... I am trying to get my sister Mrs Barber to illustrate a copy as she can do it well and the book would be valuable I think I told you that she painted the whole of the Albany butterflies and Moths it was a work of many years, but was valuable as it were well done and mostly done upon the flowers which they loved to frequent ...

This introduction led not only to many years of close friendship with Trimen, but to contacts with Charles Dar- win, and in 1878, to election to membership of the newly formed South African Philosophical Society, the precursor to the Royal Society of South Africa-a singular honour for a woman in those days of general female exclusion from the ranks of membership of scientific societies. Roland Trimen, like Harvey, named a number of new discoveries after Mary and her brother, such as Bowker's hairstreak, Jolaus bowkeri Trimen, and, in particular, the smallest known butterfly, the dwarf blue, Brephidium barberae.




-~ /~j I~

Fig. 2. James Henry Bowker about 1889. From a carte-de- visite in the Linnean Society.

Amongst her other, but none the less important, interests were geology and prehistory. Her eldest brother, Mitford, was her main partner and mentor during their early years in 'geologising' as she put it. Whenever apart, they wrote to each other comparing discoveries. While Mitford was in charge of a Burgher volunteer unit during the Seventh Frontier War of 1846-7, he made time to go "poking about amongst the rocks" and reported to Mary (Bowker, J.M. 1846) that

... my discoveries here lie like your own in the plistocene (sic) formations the drip calk in this kloof is a conglomerate of sticks, leaves seeds flags &c all beautifully perfect the leaves having their finest fibrous veins quite perfect you can tell to what trees they belong, I should suspect your bones to belong to recent animals sea cows harte beasts &c save specimens if you can.

They used the new term 'Pleistocene' in much the same way as Sir Charles Lyell did. He had defined the word in 1839 as a deposit in which 90-95% of the fossil species contained within it were still to be found alive in modem times. It was not until 1846 amid great discussion that Edward Forbes, the palaeontologist to the Geological Sur- vey, suggested it would be more suitable if the name was used for the period following the Pliocene and during which the glacial and interglacial deposits had been formed (Forbes 1846). This remains the modem usage of the term.

In her reply, Mary described her findings of fossils in the area around the farm Portlock, where she was then staying near Graaf Reinett (Barber 1847):

We have found a good many fossil bones up here, but they are very much broken and the rocks that they are in are mortal hard Fred found a pretty piece of a fossil fish with the colour of the scales beautifully preserved, and they say that there is a large bed of fossil shells up in the Snew bergen but we have not seen any of them yet so I cannot tell you any thing about them.

She retained her interest in fossils throughout her life, though she missed a great opportunity to make her name more famous in 1878. In a letter to Trimen (Barber 1 878a),

she commented that while she and her daughter Highlie were bathing that morning in the Vaal River they found:

... upon the slaty rocks that were cropping out into the river, the footprint of one of the creatures of "the days that are no more," it might have been the impression of a bird's foot, two of the toes were quite perfect, the third was only partly visi- ble, owing to the rock having crumbled away by the wear and tear of atmospheric influences, this foot print greatly resem- bled some of those, which are pictured in Lyell's introduction to geology-.

Sir Charles Lyell's book The Elements of Geology (1865) had a fairly extensive discussion, with illustrations, of fossil footprints which had been reported from the New Red Sandstone of Connecticut in the United States as early as 1842, from Pennsylvania in coal measures in 1844, and also from the New Red Sandstone at Storton Hall near Liv- erpool, England in 1853. Although most of those found were from creatures that had either four or five toes, Lyell did mention the discovery of bird-like prints from a creature apparently up to four times larger than an ostrich amongst those found in Connecticut. These would most likely to have been originally made by a dinosaur such as Tyranno- saurus rex, at that time as yet unknown. Mary's description is one of the earliest recorded findings of what sound like footprints of a bird-footed dinosaur in South Africa. Although she obviously did recognise what she had found, unfortunately Mary could not realise its true importance at the time. Neither did Trimen because he made no comment on her discovery. The knowledge was just not available at that time. Although Atherstone and his friend Andrew Ged- des Bain had in 1845 discovered fossil bones 'bigger than those of an ox!' and named them the 'Cape Iguanadon' as they felt it must be related to the Iguanadon discovered by Gideon Mantell's wife Mary in Sussex in 1822, it was not until 1992 that it was finally realised that their discovery was the first true dinosaur fossil to be found in South Africa. It was a stegosaur, now known as Paranthodon africanus (De Klerk et al. 1992:48).

The Discovery of Stone Tools

It is likely that Mary was one of the first people in South Africa to know of the existence in the colony of prehistoric stone implements and to appreciate their significance. Mary's brother Thomas Holden Bowker (Fig. 3) has been called South Africa's first real antiquary (Goodwin 1935: 295), but was better known at the time as a Commandant of Burgher forces during the Frontier Wars and as a parliamentarian. In the war of 1850-53 he famously defended the small township of Whittlesea (named after the birthplace of Sir Harry Smith) against the Xhosa. He also founded the settlement which became known as Queenstown, using a hexagonal defensive system which he designed but which came to be known as the Cathcart System after the then Governor of Cape Colony Sir George Cathcart, who was a great friend of Holden's. He served for many years in the Cape Legislature and in 1863 was nominated for Presi- dency of the Orange Free State. However, he was outvoted and Jan Brand became the new President.

Holden collected stone tools mainly from his home area, Tharfield, in Albany, and around the Great Fish River. However there is some dispute over the date of the actual discovery of these implements. In a paper to the Interna- tional Congress for Prehistory and Archaeology in 1869, George Busk, soon to be the President of the Anthropologi- cal Institute of London, wrote of him:

The importance lies in his recognition of the material at a




'7 Fig. 3. Thomas Holden Bowker. From a drawing made dur-

ing a public meeting to thank Holden and the Cradock Commando for their help in defending Whittlesea in the war of 1850. Present whereabouts of original unknown.

time when very little was known about prehistoric Archae- ology anywhere in the world. It is Bowker's recognition of human evidence from a purely geological deposit that is of such importance to our subject. (Busk 1869).

In a much misquoted comment Busk also stated that he had received a letter from Thomas Baines the artist, who wrote that while on a visit to the South African Museum in Cape Town in 1855, the Curator Edgar J. Layard had shown him specimens of flint artefacts dug up by Bowker from near the Fish River, and from about eighteen feet below the surface.

Layard presented two of Holden's artefacts to Thomas Baines, who gave one to the museum of the Anthropologi- cal Society of London and the other to the museum of his hometown, Kings Lynn in Norfolk. However, the date of 1855 must be wrong. Busk could have misread 8 for 5, as the numbers were very similar in the script of the time. Baines was in England from September 1853 to March 1855, then sailed to Australia where he remained until 1857 before returning to England. He left again with Living- stone's Zambezi Expedition on 10 March 1858 but was dis- missed for a petty offence and was for a while in Cape Town between 1858 and 1860 and again from December 1864 to May 1865. The chances are that he actually saw these implements during 1858, a date which also fits with Layard's remark about receiving Bowker's parcel some ten or twelve years before he wrote his article dated 1870. In most modemn literature the implication is that Busk himself saw these stone tools in the South African Museum. This a mistake which was first made by A.J.H. Goodwin in his

survey of South African archaeology (Goodwin 1935:295) and copied ever since (Goodwin 1955:2; Malan 1970:88) Busk never visited South Africa. It was Baines who saw the stone tools and wrote to Busk about them.

What actually happened was that sometime during 1857-8 Holden was in Cape Town, attending a parliamen- tary session, when he visited Layard's office and was shown some specimens of Stone Age tools that had just arrived from Europe for the museum. Layard was attempt- ing to build a representative collection of these implements in the South African Museum. Holden recognised them as being similar to stone flakes that he had found as a young- ster and had in fact used himself on hunting expeditions. He promised to search his barn when he got back to Albany to see if any were still around. Not only did he find them, but he went back to the area at the Kowie Mouth and the sand- drifts at the Kleinemonde (two small rivers in Lower Albany opening on to the beach on Bowker-owned land), where he had originally found them and excavated further specimens, which he sent back to Layard at Cape Town. These were among the first real archaeological excavations undertaken in South Africa. Layard himself published an account of his dealings with Holden Bowker in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (Layard 1871):

It may not be uninteresting to place on record the name of the earliest discoverer of South African stone implements, and the circumstances of their detection. The name of Thomas Holden Bowker, of Tharfield, in the district of Albany, is well known in the colony ...

Some ten or twelve years ago, while attending to his more peaceful duties as a member of the Colonial Legislature, he happened to be present while I was unpacking a small con- signment of flint implements received from Copenhagen. He was much interested when I showed him those ancient forms, and, to my astonishment declared that he had not only picked up scores of similar flakes in the Eastern Province, but had, moreover, when a boy, actually used them as heads for his own arrows, finding them from their shape peculiarly adapted to his purpose, the usually concave form causing the arrow to spin like a rifle bullet and thus travel with greater accuracy. I should mention that my friend is one of the great rifle shots of South Africa. He did not seem to have known that they were 'the works of men's hands', and, on my expressing some doubt as to the identity of the forms, he declared that he still had some remaining, stowed away on a beam in an old barn, which he promised to send me if the barn had remained undisturbed. . .

Chance, or fortune favoured the further discovery of South African celts! Mr. Bowker's parcel arrived several months afterwards while a chance visitor was present. This lady, the wife of Dr. Dale, the Superintendent-General of Education, was inoculated with my enthusiasm on beholding veritable South African stone implements. Coarse and rude though they were, they were the first that had been discovered in that region of the world, and I showed to my interested listener all the types I could gather from the museum stores.

The real importance of these events is that Holden Bowker, and presumably his sister Mary, had recognised these implements as those of early humans before the scientific establishment in Europe had done so. In a letter (Bowker, T.H. 1864) to Layard which accompanied some of his discoveries he said:

. . . I had strong impressions that I had hit upon the implementary remains of some perhaps very ancient and doubtless extremely rude and savage people, & that the sand drifts or rather the hard clayey sub soil was like the bottom of a threshing floor, covered with the rude but imperishable remnants of all the various tribes or races of men who have dwelt upon, or roamed over the light sandy or loamy soil, that like the straw on the Bamn floor, allows, thro' its facility in moving, the subsidence of anything heavy left on it.




Holden and Layard sent parcels of artefacts to several people in England. One set went to General Sir John Henry Lefroy, a noted geologist who was in charge of the collections of the Rotunda Museum of Artillery at Woolwich who said they were made of obsidian or lava. They are likely to have been neither and unfortunately, as they have been lost, we can no longer tell. Another set went to Holden's cousin Lord Redesdale the parliamentarian. A third went to Sir George Grey the Governor of the Cape, who exhibited them at a meeting of the Ethnological Society in London on 23 November 1869 (Grey 1870), and a fourth-accompanied by the extract of Holden's letter quoted above, went to Sir Richard Owen at the British Museum. Owen (1865) replied that he was hoping to use "Bowker's interesting and novel implements" in a South African Gallery, as soon as the new building for the Natural History Department was open. Coincidentally these were not the only Bowker family contacts with Richard Owen. Probably quite unknown to any of them, a William Scurfield Grey had become a devo- tee of the study of microscopy, and then also became very interested in fossils especially the new discovery of the archaic bird Archaeopteryx. For a while in the summer of 1859 he was in London visiting and seeking advice from Owen. Grey was the son of Miles Bowker's sister Dorothea, and therefore a first cousin to Holden and Mary, and he lived in Norton, Stockton-on-Tees.

According to Colonel Henry Wemyss Feilden (1883), Holden Bowker also presented 41 implements from middens to the Rotunda Museum in June 1866. These appear to be the artefacts mentioned by J. Hewitt (1955: 94-95) as being illustrated in the Albany Museum by a photograph. The label reads Stone Arrowheads, spear-heads and other objects from the mouth of the Great Fish River, South Africa. These objects are found under the sandhills of that region, and are occasionally exposed by their shifting: presented by T.H. Bowker Esq., through Assistant Commissary General G. Bennett, June 1866. On the back of the photograph, in Holden's handwriting, is the comment "Discov- ered by Mr. T Holden Bowker in the year 1858, and afterwards found by him in various places towards, and at the mouth of the Great Fish river, and since found in many places in and beyond the Colony by J H. Bowker at the Bashee, and by Mr. Miles Bowker, junior, near de Bruins in the Fish River Valley, and by Messrs. Layard, Fairbridge and others on the Cape Flats, Green Point, etc. " They were said to have been transferred to the Royal Armouries, in the Tower of London in 1924 (transfer voucher no.10). How- ever they still appeared in the Royal Artillery Museum's catalogues for 1934 and 1960 as item number 118, Stone arrow-heads, spear-heads, and other objects from the mouth of the Great Fish River, South Africa (three cards). These objects were found under the sand hills of that region. Presented 1866. Unfortunately they now seem to have vanished and their present whereabouts is unknown. The British Museum has in its Christy Collections a series of artefacts (Christie numbers 7539-7580) said to have been found at the Zulu War battlefield site of Rorke's Drift and presented by 'Colonel Bowker' to the Museum in August 1880. Originally thought to have been donated by Holden, they were almost certainly found and presented by James Henry Bowker, who visited the battlefields during the Queen's Cross Expedition to erect a monument in memory of the French Prince Imperial who was killed nearby. The Colonel, as Mary often referred to Henry, had spent his life in the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police, eventually becoming Commandant. In this capacity he had served in a

number of largely unexplored regions and in all of them spent a considerable time seeking out unknown plants, butterflies and prehistoric remains. He became probably the leading collector of butterflies in South Africa and was almost never seen without his net. He was affectionately known to his troops as 'Butterfly Bowker' and was reported on at least one occasion to have downed weapons in the midst of a fierce battle in order to capture an unusual butterfly.

When Layard unpacked Holden's parcel containing the first Stone Age implements to be discovered and recognised in South Africa, he was accompanied by a visitor, Mrs Emma Dale, the wife of Reverend Langham Dale, the Superintendent-General of Education for the Cape Colony. Layard wrote that "she was inoculated with my enthusiasm" and went home to tell her husband. He too was encouraged to set about exploring the area around Cape Town immediately, thus setting in train the explorations of a whole group of amateur archaeologists in South Africa. On 11 September 1867, the newly formed Albany Natural History Society held its first meeting. Proudly exhibited amongst other findings, for the first time, were some of Holden's stone 'arrowheads' together with some fragments of a skull (which Guybon Atherstone stated to be female) and 'Bushman' potsherds which he and Holden had found on the beach near Tharfield. By then similar specimens had been found in many other parts of the colony, notably on the Cape Flats by Langham Dale and Charles Busk (the brother of George Busk), by George McKay (1896, 1897) near East London, and by Alfred 'Gogga' Brown (1870) around Aliwal North. Dale himself published in the Cape Monthly Magazine, usually under the pseudonym of A, the Greek letter Delta (Dale 1870a, 1870b, 1871,1874), and sent some of his finds to Britain where many can be found in the British Museum collections.

One consequence of all these South African discoveries was their use by Sir John Lubbock in his battle for domi- nance of the ethnological and archaeological fraternities in Britain over Thomas Huxley. As a result of Lubbock's publication of these finds by the Bowkers, Langham Dale and others (Lubbock 1869, 1870a, 1870b, 1871), he was able to establish his credentials as a leading authority on the Stone Age. In 1871, he was elected President of the newly formed Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

A few years later Mary Barber's own investigations in the diamond diggings amply bore out her initial thoughts on the date of the original users of Holden's stone implements. She already knew that there was a considerable difference between the stone tools used by the more recent Bushmen and those of their long gone predecessors. "The minute agate, or flint arrow-heads used by the modem Bushmen for poisoned arrows, differ widely from the ancient stone implements of South Africa, which probably belonged to another era." (Barber 1962). By October 1871, when she wrote an article for the Cape Monthly Magazine discussing her findings at the diamond fields (Barber 1872a), she had already come to the conclusion that the tools were of a very great age. "To me it seems far more probable that these relics found their way within these reef-bound hollows at the same time and in the same manner as the broken and perfect diamonds have done," she wrote, "and that the ac- cumulation was a work of time and great climatic changes." By the time she came to write her journal of her Wander- ings in South Africa in 1879 she could say, no doubt refer- ring to Bishop Ussher's date of 4004 BC for the Creation:




. . . let it be remembered that [water worn stone implements] would become worn only during the commotion of floods; at all other times they would remain motionless in the bed of the river. What are 6000 years in the chronology of the world's history when compared with the lithography scattered over its face?

For some twenty years, Guybon Atherstone and his great friend Andrew Geddes Bain had been saying that at some time in the distant past there had been a vast inland sea covering much of the interior of the continent. Guybon was also convinced that the diamonds originated from some as yet unknown source and had been washed into their present domain long ago. In a lengthy letter to her brother Henry (Barber 1872b), mainly about her thoughts on the origins of diamonds, she commented:

... one thing is certain, that is that the men who used stone arrows, inhabited this country nearly all the time that these diamonds were collecting here in these 'kopjes' for I have in my possession dozens of stone arrow heads that have been dug out of 'claims' at various depths from the surface to at least twenty feet in depths, I scarcely ever go through the 'claims' without picking them up, you find them in the heaps that are cast out from the sieves they are mostly encrusted on either one or both sides with a coating of tufa limestone in our claim one was found aft] 10 feet and another at about seven, in Blakes claim they were found at 19 or 20 feet down, but when you get beyond this you find diamonds, but not arrow-heads, so it appears to me, but I am not at all certain about the depth at which they were to be found, but one thing I am certain about and that is that in the green-stone heaps that are carted away out of very deep 'claims' I have never yet picked up an arrow-head, it is very evident to me that wherever these arrow-heads are found in the claims, no matter what the depth is, it was at the time that the arrow head was dropped there, the surface of the earth, pieces of ostrich egg shells are also found associated with the arrow-heads and I have heard of three whole ostrich egg shells being found, one at a depth of 20 feet, it was a perfect shell and quite silici- fied (fossil) out of George Cummings 'claim' I have got a lot of pieces of which appears to me to have been some clay utensil of a peculiar shape, Mr Impey says that he also saw something in a claim which he took to be portions of a clay pot-bones of animals are also something found but they have mostly been found near the surface (comparatively).

Henry passed on this information later in 1872 when he was at Cape Town. An article on 'Stone implements and shell caves' was published in the Cape Monthly Magazine written by P.D. Martin (1872) together with a 'comment by Commandant JH Bowker being now in town.' In his 'comment' Henry discussed the origin of perforated stones, a topic of great interest to ethnologists of the time. In his opinion they were not made by Bushmen but used "by some pre-historic race for a purpose not yet discovered." In this he was again merely reiterating his sister's thoughts on the subject. She had often tried to obtain information about their origin from the locals that she met and the invariable answer she was given was "Oh, they were made by people of the olden times". In fact, apart from Mary and her brother, many other researchers including W.D. Gooch and the ethnologist W.H.I. Bleek had failed to find a Bushman capable of making them, although they appeared to be used over a wide area for weighting digging-sticks (Gooch 1881:129; Barber, H.M. 1892). Nevertheless Henry did make at least one original comment "however the stone, bronze and iron ages may apply to other countries, I do not believe that any change has ever taken place in South Africa in this respect." He did not think that "until the introduction of metals by the Portuguese and Venetian navigators that there had been any change in usage from man's creation or existence in South Africa."

Mary certainly had a great influence on those around her. Her enthusiasm for all topics remotely connected with

natural history was highly catching. Henry had developed a life-long interest in stone tools in addition to butterflies, from at least 1867. Mary later wrote (Barber 1962:50) that he was the first to discover stone implements in the diamond diggings of Pniel on the Vaal River near Barkly West, and scattered all over the surrounding area. At the time he was in command of a detachment of Cape Frontier Armed and Mounted Police. W D Gooch (1881) in a survey of what was known of the archaeological history of South Africa up to that time, wrote that the only known cave- deposit excavation in South Africa, had been carried out by J H Bowker in Basutoland. The contents had then been sent to Sir Joseph Hooker who was both Director of Kew Gar- dens and President of the Royal Society. Gooch quotes a letter from Henry to Hooker dated 28 July 1870. Unfortu- nately there is no record of these excavation finds in the Director's Correspondence at Kew. Henry did in 1884 re- late a visit to the 'cannibal' caves at Putiasaiza that he had made in 1868 and says that he collected and sent specimens of bones and flint implements to the South African Museum and to Sir Charles Lyell. However, by 1884 Henry's memory was getting faulty. In actual fact, because at the time he did not know Lyell's address, he sent a box of spear and arrowheads by a friend, Dr Close of the 5h Fusiliers, directly to Hooker. In May 1867, Henry wrote to Hooker (Bowker, J.H. 1867) that they had been:

... collected at East London where they are very numerous in fact to judge by the appearance of the spot it seems to have been a sort of Pre Adamite arsenal, as broken pieces such as I send are to be found by the cart load accompanied by the usual smash of clay pot and edible shellfish remains.

Gooch's paper also states that Henry found implements in Mozambique, Laurenco Marques (now Maputo) and In- hambane on a trip up the East Coast, and at sites in Cambridge and Panmure, now part of East London in the Eastern Cape Province. He also referred to shell middens on the Albany shore examined by Henry and Guybon Atherstone. After the death of Prince Louis Napoleon, the heir to the French throne, during the Zulu War, Henry was involved in what became known as the Queen's Cross Expedition. He accompanied a party of Royal Engineers who were to set up a memorial at the site, prior to a visit by the Prince's mother Empress Eugenie. In the Natal Witness of 17 April 1880, he wrote:

Some [prehistoric implements] were dug out in excavating the foundation for the Queen's Cross, and in cutting the drains, whilst that through the lime and ironstone deposits, jutting out of the sides of the donga, brought to light the place where the implements occurred in greatest quantities. The implements differ but little from those I have found in Cape, Griqualand West, Free State etc. No polished ones were found, all of the ordinary type, and some carefully chipped from agate, spar, sandstone and fossil wood. The usual core and flakes struck off, together with old pointless weapons were met with, in greater numbers than the perfect weapons, which vary in size from maximum of ten poids weight to only a few grains.

He also recorded palaeoliths from the dongas and hollows around the battlefields of Rorke's Drift and Isandlwana. These were also sent to Sir Joseph Hooker, together with a horse's hoof and tooth rom one of the animals present when the Prince Imperial was killed (Knight & Castle 1993). Hooker passed them on to Wollaston Frankcs of the British Museum. The palaeoliths found their way into the museum collections but, unfortunately, like so many of the Bowker finds, the mementoes of Prinlce Napoleon have now disappeared.

By 1880, Edward J Dunn (1880) could comment that




"Among the best known collectors of stone implements in South Africa are Mrs Barber, Commandant Bowker, Mr T. Bain and Mr McKay of East London."

Henry was also interested to find contemporary ethno- graphic equivalents to these prehistoric implements. Feilden (1883) recorded that Henry had told him that he had found evidence whenever he camped in Basutoland with his troops that the local Bushmen had used discarded soda- water bottles as a source to fashion their arrowheads. He commented on what seemed a close relationship between the forms of the older and more modem types of imple- ment. Mary had obviously instilled an abiding passion into her younger brother. It was not only her siblings that were infected by her enthusiasms. She managed to pass them on to her sons Freddy (Frederick William Barber) and Hal (Henry Mitford Barber). Apart from becoming great hunters, prospectors and explorers, both were keen naturalists from an early age. Both collected plants and butterflies on their travels which they passed on to Roland Trimen in Cape Town, and the Hookers at Kew. Freddy amassed one of the finest collections of animal heads and horns, which he eventually sold to the New York Zoological Society in 1909. Hal (Barber, H.M. 1892) even published a paper in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute on the perforated stones of South Africa.

Conclusion

After many years at the diamond fields, Mary Barber and her family moved back to Grahamstown, and then were involved with the early discoveries of gold in the Witwa- tersrand. But that, as they say, is another story. She remained actively investigating the wonders of the natural world to the age of eighty-one, dying at her daughter's home in Pietermaritzburg on 4 September 1899. During an eventful life she produced a number of articles and papers on a variety of different subjects which were read to or published by the Linnean Society, the Entomological Soci- ety of London, the Gardeners' Chronicle, the Kew Bulletin and several other journals and newspapers (Barber 1869- 1962). She painted birds, butterflies, plants and landscapes, some of which may still be seen in the Albany Museum Grahamstown or in the Library of the Royal Botanic Gar- dens at Kew, and, in the last year of her life, had published a volume of her poetry. Her brother Thomas Holden Bowker predeceased her in 1885, and James Henry Bowker died a year after her, on 22 October 1900.

Mary Elizabeth Barber and her brothers, Thomas Holden and James Henry Bowker, were three of the earliest South Africans to investigate and realise the significance of Stone Age tools. In this they were for a time, arguably in advance of their European counterparts, and deserve wider recognition as pioneers in the field of South African archaeology.

Acknowledgements My thanks are due first to Alison Roberts and Peter

Mitchell who introduced me to these fascinating characters. I must also thank the many people who helped me to track down biographical information. In particular Lesley Price, Archivist at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Gina Douglas Librarian and Archivist at the Linnean Society, Fleur Wyn- Jones and Cecilia Blight of the Albany Museum and Cory Library in Grahamstown, Gareth and Roland Barberton (great-grandsons of Mary Elizabeth Barber), and the staff of

the Natural History Museum Kensington, and the Royal Entomological Society of London, for access to their files of correspondence. Also to Kate and Zoe Henderson, Wil- liam Jervois and many others in several continents who have contributed useful snippets of information.

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mary elizabeth barber, the bowkers and south african prehistory

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