Prof Shadreck Chirikure to give the Keynote Lecture at ASAPA 2026 at the University of Mpumalanga in Mbombela
Professor Shadreck Chirikure, Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science, will be giving the keynote lecture at this year's Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists 2026 Conference which will be hosted by the University of Mpumalanga in Mbombela,.
Click here to download the full conference programme.
Further members of our community, past and present, will also give talks as follows:
Professor Peter Mitchell will give a talk titled: 'Canine connections: Dogs and southern African farming communities.'
Dr Russell Kapumha (Postdoctoral Researcher, New Bantu Mosaics project) will be giving a talk titled: 'Kubiku'
Dr Alice Williams (Postdoctoral Researcher, New Bantu Mosaics project) will be giving a talk titled: Alice Williams: 'Synthesising archaeobotanical evidence for crop dispersal in southern Africa'
Dr Mica Jones (Postdoctoral Researcher, New Bantu Mosaics project) will be giving a talk titled: 'Cattle and social integration at Great Zimbabwe'
Dr David Witelson (Postdoctoral Researcher) will give a talk titled: 'Performative displays of unseen reality in southern African hunter gatherer rock art'
Dr Laurent Frantz (PalaeoBARN) will give a talk titled: 'A genomic history of African cattle'
Current DPhil student Muchen Zhou will be giving a talk at the conference titled: 'The imitation market: Replicas of form and power in southern Africa, CE 1500-1800'.
School alumni Dr Michaela Ecker and Dr Emma Loftus will give talks titled: 'A perspective on the Kalahari's deep past from the southern Kgalagadi district, Botswana' (Ecker) and 'Lipid analyses of farmer ceramics found in forager rockshelters, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa' (Loftus). Emma will give a further talk titled: 'Refining Early Iron Age chronologies: Incorporating indirectly dated sites into temporal models'.
Professor Tim Forssman (Associate Professor in Archaeology at the University of Mpumalanga, and Research Associate here at the School) serves as Chair of the Local Organising Committee for the ASAPA 2026 meeting and will be giving a talk titled: 'Gwalala Hill and the early networks of the Thulamela region: Trade, settlement, and interaction at the Limpopo-Luvuvhu Confluence' and a second talk titled: 'How generative AI can connect students with archaeological knowledge.'
University of Mpumalanga, Mbombela, South Africa
