Double rainbow at Victoria Falls It’s the end of the first week of the 2018 season and “expect the unexpected” pretty much sums up the last 10 days. Very little has gone to plan, right from the start. On arrival last Wednesday all the excavation kit was impounded by Customs. I was asked for a […]
…It’s off to Zambia we go. Again. The second season of the ‘Deep Roots’ archaeological project starts in a few days with a new team of students from the UK and Zambia along with specialist support arriving later on. We’ll be back at the World Heritage site of Victoria Falls building on last year’s work* […]
They say you shouldn’t go food shopping when you’re hungry because you buy impulsively. I’m now a firm believer in that piece of wisdom. More than two weeks after returning from Zambia, I’m still recovering from acute food poisoning that struck during the final few days of the project. The culprit, I think, was a […]
Before Victoria Falls formed, the Zambezi River was very much like we see it today above the falls – wide and shallow. But the old Zambezi was not where the Zambezi flows today. It has left remnants of its former presence 12-15m above the modern river in the National Park, and the gravels it left […]
Everything in archaeological investigations requires patience – and nothing more so than dating. While we waited for Geoff Duller to arrive we had to work quickly, but we knew also we had to make sure we were digging in areas that would be most relevant to dating the sands and their archaeological record. No time […]
This first season of the Deep Roots project is ending but there’s much to catch up on since last time, so I’ll try and condense the frenetic activity of the last two weeks into two, or possibly three posts. Parks and not much recreation We moved into Mosi oa Tunya (aka, the smoke that thunders, […]
English as spoken in Britain offers a rich vocabulary that sometimes just defies understanding, but hits the spot when it comes to conveying meaning. We had been digging and sieving in the gravels of the old Maramba River all morning, finding nothing. I said to my partner on the sieve, ‘not a sausage’. Maggie looked […]
