Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/27

Rh bank of a tributary of the Buffalo river at East London. Its discovery was due to the opening of a way to a quarry, for it had the semblance of a natural hill, being covered with a deep layer of vegetable soil, in which trees and shrubs were growing; and this appearance it had presented as far back as could be traced. Upon examination—which was very thorough, as over thirty-two thousand cubic metres of it were removed to fill a lagoon—it was found to consist of a mass 45.72 metres or one hundred and fifty English feet long and 12.19 metres or forty feet deep, composed of oyster, mussel, cockle, periwinkle, and other shells, mixed with bones of animals of various kinds, ashes, and pieces of coarse pottery. A very few stone implements were found in it, but stones showing the action of fire were common.

This mass of shells must have been collected by a small community, for a large number of people could not have existed at the same time upon the food obtainable within walking distance. It must have been abandoned several hundred years at the lowest estimate, to allow time for dust and sand to be blown over it, and plants to grow and decay, until at length vegetable mould half a metre in depth was formed, sufficient to support large shrubs and trees. Some pestilence may have destroyed the whole of the people who obtained subsistence there, or they may have been attacked and killed by men of their own race who lived by hunting wild animals, or they may have existed until the arrival of Hottentot immigrants some time about the year 1400 of our era, when they would certainly have been exterminated. The cause of the abandonment of the mound is thus conjectural, and all that can be asserted concerning it is that it cannot have been more recently than 1400, and may have been many centuries earlier. Of the length of time required for the collection of such a vast mass of shells no estimate whatever can be made.

The other mounds composed of shells and refuse that have been discovered along the South African coast are exactly similar to the one at East London in character,