Brandewyn Remembrance Project

The Remembrance Project is based on Vleiplaas farm in the Agter-Pakhuis region. Coming out of the relationships built during the Wild-foods Co-Create Project. The primary goal of the Remembrance Project has been to re-engage the interest and community links to the archaeology of the last-500 years and the Holocene period.

Over the last 3 years, the project has worked with the community from the Bynerskop settlement on Vleiplaas farm. The community has a deep sense of ancestry in this region, and some have identified as Khoekhoen and San descendants. In the period of the last-500 years, this region of the Cape colony became a critical meeting point between indigenous groups and colonial settlers.

The Cederberg can be viewed as an early corridor of colonial period interactions. It is within this corridor, that new identities were formed. Communities which have been. formally identified as Khoesan, and others identified as Basters or Griqua, and Korana to mention a few. This period led to cultural entanglement and material exchange which developed new expressions of identity.

The Remembrance project is interested in these interactions and the expression of Khoekhoen and San identity in the pre-colonial period. How is identity expressed and maintained in the last-500 year period. Further to this, what is the contemporary expression of these various cultural identities. The project group comprised on myself and Emeritus Prof. John Parkington along with our community collaborators from Bynerskop and other researchers have worked to build virtual maps linking the archaeological sites, archival documents and contemporary remembrance as a means of protecting the