“Synergy is the creation of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts”
The Antarctic Legacy of South Africa project of Stellenbosch University is collaborating closely with University of South Africa (UNISA) postgraduate student Tara van Niekerk on her archaeological research at Marion Island, now being written up for a Master of Arts degree.
Tara, who has a Bachelor of Science Honours degree in Archaeology from the University of Cape Town obtained in 2007, has conducted research over three relief voyages to Marion Island when a member of the Social History Collections Department of the Iziko Museums of South Africa. Her work, in collaboration with Jaco Boshoff of Iziko Museums, has consisted of diving on the 1908 wreck of the Norwegian sealer Solglimt in Ship’s Cove on the island in 2011 and 2014 and in conducting excavations ashore in 2013 at the site of the shipwreck “village” erected above the cove by the sealer’s crew.
ALSA has obtained published and unpublished information from Norwegian contacts on the shipwreck and its aftermath, including newspaper articles, diary entries and the legal enquiry that followed. With the support of its National Research Foundation (NRF) funding some 60 pages of Norwegian texts have now been translated into English, making them available for the first time for study in South Africa.
The translated texts, along with photographs of the shipwreck site obtained by ALSA from old team members and their descendants and newspaper articles from the time, have recently been passed to Tara, so that she may freely consult them when writing her thesis, with of course, due acknowledgement to their sources.
Tara van Niekerk plans to submit her thesis, provisionally entitled “An archaeological study of the Solglimt Survivor Camp on Marion Island” around year end. She is being supervised by Dr Natalie Swanepoel, a Senior Lecturer in historical archaeology in UNISA’s Department of Anthropology and Archaeology.
An early outcome of this collaboration will be the presentation of an accepted paper on the Solglimt incident that concentrates on the Norwegian texts, co-authored by John Cooper, Jaco Boshoff and Tara van Niekerk, to a multidisciplinary conference entitled “The Historical Antarctic Sealing Industry: History, Archaeology, Heritage, Site and Artefact Conservation, Biodynamics and Geopolitics” at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK this September.
The collaboration between historical and archaeological disciplines at Marion Island and more broadly within the South African National Antarctic Programme (SANAP) will surely lead to more synergistic outcomes and points a way forward for archiving South Africa’s Antarctic legacy over the coming years.
ALSA thanks Erik Evensen for finding and his son Anders Evensen for translating the Norwegian Solglimt texts and Jay Gates for help obtaining newspaper articles.
Feature Photograph: The 2014 team that dived on the Solglimt; from left Heather Wares, Jaco Boshoff and Tara van Niekerk. Photograph by John Cooper
Reference:
Boshoff, J. van Niekerk, T. & Wares, H. 2015. Preliminary investigations on the wreck of the SS Solglimt, Marion Island. Bulletin of the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology 39: 53-59.
John Cooper, Principal Investigator, Antarctic Legacy of South Africa, Department of Botany & Zoology, Stellenbosch University, 14 June 2016