Outing to the Heritage Treasures of Toppieshoek
By: 
Guide: Vincent Carruthers
Date: 
Sun, 14/07/2024 - 09:30
Branch: 
Northern
Outing to the Heritage Treasures of Toppieshoek 

Guide: Vincent Carruthers 

Date: Sunday, 14 July 2024 
Time: 9h30 for 10h00 
Venue:         Toppieshoek, Broederstroom. 
Charge:         Members R120 and non-members: R170.

Toppieshoek, a campus of the Tshwane University of Technology, situated south of the Hartbeespoort Dam, is home to two unusual heritage treasures. The much later one, encompass the buildings and telescopes of the Leiden Southern Station Observatory, which operated here from 1953 to 1978. In 1971, Arnout van Genderen, subsequently Professor of Astronomy at Leiden University, began work at the Leiden Southern Station and for the next seven years he and his wife and small daughter lived in a cottage at the Observatory, overlooking Hartbeespoort Dam. 


Visitors admiring the Franklin Adams Telescope at Toppieshoek.

The other much-earlier heritage treasures comprise the Broederstroom Early Iron Age archaeological site. On this property Van Genderen found decorated potsherds, grindstones, iron slag and remains of hut floors. Realising that these ancient artefacts may be important, he contacted Dr Revil Mason at Wits University. Mason immediately grasped that these potsherds were a thousand years older than those he had found at the Late Iron Age site at Olifantspoort. Thus began a series of excavations here, firstly by Mason and later by Professor Tom Huffman. This site recorded the first arrival of Black African immigrants into the region, ancestors of the majority of South Africans. Our guide, Vincent Carruthers has spent his entire adult life living and working in the Magaliesberg. He led the campaign to have the region proclaimed a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2015. He is an award-winning, influential environmentalist, and has written and contributed to a wide range of publications, amongst others, The Magaliesberg, A Complete Guide to the Frogs of Southern Africa, with Louis du Preez, and more recently, The Illustrated History of the Hartbeespoort Dam. 
 
Directions: From Johannesburg travel north along Malibongwe Drive that becomes the R512 towards Hartbeespoort Dam. At the T junction with the R104 turn left and still proceed along the R512. At the Mountain Lake Centre, about 1 kilometre before the entrance to the Pecanwood Estate, turn right into Oberon Street that becomes Toppieshoek Road. After a few kilometres you will see the Entrance to Toppieshoek TUT to your right. Drive in and park at the parking lot. We will all meet at the Lapa. Toilet facilities are available. There will be some easy walking of about 15 minutes to the first site so wear comfortable walking shoes, a hat, bring sunblock and drinking water. Transport will be available to those who may find the walking problematic.
Bring a picnic lunch and some folding chairs as afterwards we will enjoy a convivial lunch together.

Please take note of the following information about booking and payment: 
Contact Anne Raeburn to book, preferably by email: anner@mweb.co.za or if email not available then by phone: 072 349 6507.
Do not pay until you have confirmed your booking with Anne.
If you pay before your booking is confirmed and an outing is already fully booked, we must refund your payment.
Please deposit the fee in the BRANCH account given below (and NOT in the Cape Town membership account). SA Archaeological Society, Standard Bank, Account number 001 945 920 Reference: SURNAME and EVENT.
Send the deposit slip to Anne Raeburn e-mail anner@mweb.co.za or cell: 072 349 6507. If you pay by cash or cheque, you must please add R40 for bank fees. 

Please take note of the following guidelines for outings: 
1. Arrive on time and immediately report to the committee member who has the attendance register.
2. Sign the attendance register and indemnity form. 
3. Only people who have booked and pre-paid may come on outings, we do not accept bookings or cash on the day. 
Since this outing will be limited to 30 visitors it is advisable to book promptly if you wish to participate in this outing.

Report back on Outing added 01 August 2024

Outing to the Heritage Treasures of Toppieshoek: 14 July 2024
Guides: Vincent Carruthers and Justin Bradfield
 
Our July outing was to “Toppieshoek” near Oberon on the south bank of the Hartbeespoort dam, a 56-hectare site owned by the Tshwane Institute of Technology (TUT). It is home to two remarkable examples of our heritage, one very 20th-century, the other going back to the early Iron Age.


Bill Murray, vice-chair of the Northern Branch welcoming participants to the Toppieshoek outing.
 
The outing began, as they all do at this time of year, under a watery sun and smoke-hazed sky. We collected plastic chairs from the shaded boma area and put them out to form a crescent auditorium in a sunny spot on the mown lawns. Vincent Carruthers, who is a leading authority on the Magaliesberg region, gave us an excellent lecture on the two linked elements of heritage found here. Firstly, the telescopes of the Leiden University Southern Observatory, then the Iron Age discoveries of the 1970s. Vincent illustrated his talk with early photographs of the old observatories and the people who ran them, plus a selection of potsherds which could be identified as being of the early first millennium. 
 
In the 1970s the resident astronomer at the Hartbeespoort observatory was Arnout van Genderen from Leiden. He was also an amateur archaeologist, and it was he who, in 1971, first found Iron Age artefacts at the site. Knowing these finds to be important, von Genderen took samples to the University of the Witwatersrand and showed them to pioneer archaeologist professor Revil Mason.
 
The finds immediately caught Mason’s interest. He proceeded to explore the site thoroughly, and in the mid-1970s spent several winter seasons excavating it. He found 49 hut floors, numerous potsherds, remains of clay smelting furnaces, iron slag heaps and evidence of ritual burial using pots as a coffin. Radiocarbon dating indicated that the site had been occupied from about 350 CE onward. In Mason’s view, which at the time was politically controversial, the evidence from this site proved that African farming groups had settled in the region, pre-dating Bartholomew Dias’s rounding of the Cape of Storms by over a thousand years. This view fitted in with evidence from other Early Iron Age sites, and has long since been accepted by scholars.
 
The site, which became known as Broederstroom, was later re-excavated by Professor Tom Huffman of Wits University. Where Mason had argued that there was no evidence that cattle had been kept at the site, Huffman argued the opposite. The controversy continues today among archaeologists.
 
The Broederstroom site, proclaimed as a National Monument in 1980. has long since been grown over by grass and bush. Recently Vincent Carruthers has been in correspondence with Arnout van Genderen on the subject of the artefacts he found in 1971. In 2023 Arnout donated his collection of artefacts to the University of the Witwatersrand.
 
After Vincent’s introductory lecture, the ArchSoc group split into two parties, with Vincent taking two sessions to talk about the telescopes in their observatory buildings, and Justin Bradfield addressing two sessions on the evidence of metal working and huts still hiding in the long, dry grass.
 
Leaving the boma and car park area, we walked up the rough track to the observatory buildings. Here the telescopes had been re-located in the 1950s from the Union Observatory in Johannesburg, where light pollution was becoming a problem from the rapidly expanding city.
 
Each of the two observatory buildings comprises an unprepossessing red brick block topped by a metal box-style roof structure mounted on rollers. The idea is that the roof can be slid back to expose the telescope within to the night sky, ready for observations to take place. As we entered the first building it was clear that the apparatus within had seen better days, with the sliding roof jammed shut.
 
The first telescope we observed was the Franklin Adams telescope which, in 1910, in its earlier life, had taken excellent photographs of Halley’s Comet. In its new position at Hartbeespoort, it had been used to produce tens of thousands of 12-inch by 12-inch glass photographic plates of the night sky of the southern hemisphere. Important research was conducted here into “Cepheid” or binary stars, systems where two stars orbit each another. Perhaps the most important discovery of the Franklin-Adams telescope was the star Proxima Centauri, at 4.2 light years away the star closest to our solar system. 


Vincent Carruthers telling the group of the telescopes that were used at Toppieshoek.
 
The second observatory building we entered contained the Rockefeller Twin Astrograph. This consists of two six-inch telescopes mounted side by side on the same frame. It was initially planned in the 1920s. After numerous delays, and after a cost of $100,000 had been paid by the Rockefeller Foundation, first observations were begun in 1938. The lenses used were found to be flawed and new ones had to be ordered from the Carl Zeiss firm in Germany. The Second World War intervened and the new lenses were installed only in 1949. These protracted delays created the opportunity for the development of new technology, in the form of photo-electric detectors, to take over from the more laborious work of using photographic plates.  
 
Vincent pointed out the clock-drive mechanism that was used to counter the rotation of the earth while the telescope was focused on a single celestial object. A pendulum clock, of extraordinary accuracy, sent a signal to an electric drive gear to tilt the telescope, countering the movement of the earth’s rotation about its axis. Unfortunately, the mechanism has not been in working order for many years.


Justin Bradfield discussing the archaeology of the Broederstroom site. 
 
Leaving the observatory area, we walked back down the hill to a spot among the trees where we met Justin Bradfield, who is an Associate Professor in the Palaeo-Research Institute at the University of Johannesburg. “Can anyone here identify this?” he asked, holding up a dinner-plate-size lump of earth. “Slag,” the group replied. He went on to describe the archaeological discoveries made here in the late 20th century. Clearly there had been a settlement here of metal workers, but where had they sourced their iron ore? The answer lay not 200m away up the hill where a donga had exposed an iron ore deposit. 
 
Justin discussed the factors that had made Broederstroom a most suitable site for Iron Age settlement – the presence of water from perennial rivers, deep rich soils for both cultivation and grazing, iron ore, and a narrow defile through high hills (where the Hartbeespoort Dam wall stands today) for ambush hunting. 
 
All this begs the question: Would there be value today in re-excavating and expanding Revil Mason’s original dig, clearing the trees and long grass from the site, and reviewing the original artefacts collection? And in addition, re-building and restoring the telescopes and their buildings to make a high-end tourist facility? All it needs is money.
 
Archaeology and astronomy over, we returned to the boma for an enjoyable picnic lunch, with the smoke-haze morning giving way to a warm Highveld afternoon.
 
Report by Bill Murray. Photographs by John Wright.
 
Further reading
Vincent and Jane Carruthers, The Heritage Treasures of Toppieshoek, Magaliesberg Association for Culture and Heritage, 2024.