Worksheet.
Theme: “Evidence at Melville Koppies”.
People
come to Melville Koppies to look for very special kinds of evidence.
1. Archaeologists
look for evidence of people who have lived at Melville Koppies, so that they
can work out how they lived.
2. Geologists study rocks
and rock formations for evidence of how our continent was formed.
3. Flora (plant) and fauna (animals)
researchers come to find evidence so that they can gain
information and also to try and prove theories (ideas).
4. Management. We would like
you to come and find evidence that Melville Koppies is looked after.
1. Archaeologists.
The
History of the past is not always written. One of the ways that we can
reconstruct what might have happened in man’s past is to look at things that
have been left. The evidence can be oral, for example in stories and songs that
have been passed down through families. It can be in things (artefacts) that
people have used, like a grindstone. It can be in the remains of buildings or
old bones. Archaeologists examine things that people have left behind to find
out how they lived.
Archaeologists
have studied evidence left at Melville Koppies by Stone Age man, Iron Age man
and Modern man. Some of it is primary or the real thing, like the ruins of a
kraal wall. Some of it can be called secondary which means that it has been
reconstructed, for example the original ruin of the cattle kraal wall has been
rebuilt in a way that someone thought it should be done.
Just to get a little more complicated, there
are original grindstones at the Koppies, but they were brought there from other
places as examples for people to look at. Are these primary or secondary
evidence?
There
is one replica grindstone which was made with a power tool. Is this primary or
secondary evidence?
The table
below has a list of things (evidence) on Melville Koppies which belonged to these
three groups. Try and work out which group the evidence belongs to. Some
Group
1 is Stone Age man, group 2 is Iron Age man, Group 3 is Modern man.
|
|
Evidence
which may be found at Melville Koppies |
1 |
2 |
3 |
|
1 |
500
year old furnace for making iron |
|
|
|
|
2 |
Bird
bath |
|
|
|
|
3 |
Bird
with a ring on its leg |
|
|
|
|
4 |
Blast
hole to look for gold |
|
|
|
|
5 |
Bones
of buck |
|
|
|
|
6 |
Broken
glass |
|
|
|
|
7 |
Clay
leopard |
|
|
|
|
8 |
Electricity
pylons |
|
|
|
|
9 |
Gabions
to stop the river bank from falling down |
|
|
|
|
10 |
Grindstone
to crush sorghum seeds |
|
|
|
|
11 |
Information
boards |
|
|
|
|
12 |
Iron
spears |
|
|
|
|
13 |
Plastic
bottle |
|
|
|
|
14 |
Pottery
sherds (broken pieces of clay pots) |
|
|
|
|
15 |
Replica
of iron spear and hoe |
|
|
|
|
16 |
Slag
(waste from the iron furnace) |
|
|
|
|
17 |
Stone
and Cement paths |
|
|
|
|
18 |
Stone
axe |
|
|
|
|
19 |
Trigonometry
beacon |
|
|
|
|
20 |
Wooden
bridge |
|
|
|
2 Geologists just love the rocks and rock
formations of Melville Koppies because they are amongst the oldest rocks in the
World. The rocks are evidence of the age of Melville Koppies.
The
ridges of Melville Koppies are 2 900 million or 2.9 billion years old. They are
made of very hard rocks called quartzite.
If you want to drill a hole in these rocks you have to use a power tool
In
places you will find beautiful little white rocks or even veins of white in the
rocks. These were formed by super hot boiling water that bubbled up from the
centre of the Earth and dissolved silica to form the white rocks which are
called quartz. Very expensive
drinking glasses are made from crushed quartz.
The
Millions
of years ago, Melville Koppies was covered by a huge inland sea. We can find
evidence of this in some ripple marks on
rocks
The
way the rocky ridges are tilted we
think is evidence of the weight for the sea to the south, the weight of the
Ventersdorp lavas, and to a degree the huge meteor that struck about 60km away
near the present day town of Parys. The ridges were squashed up against each
other and then they tilted to one side.
After your
walk through Melville Koppies, did you see
Quartzite
rocky ridges? ______
Little
white quartz rocks? ______
A
white quartz vein? ______
Shale? ______
Tilted
rocky ridges? ______
3 Research by studying
evidence of flora and fauna.
We
learnt about some of the research projects that people are doing at Melville
Koppies.
Tell
about one research project that you heard about.
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
4 Management.
What evidence did you see at Melville Koppies that shows it is being looked
after?
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
5
Why should property developers not be allowed to build houses all over Melville
Koppies?
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________