Salona Reddy featured in NRF Women’s Month article
Nozizwe Mtshali, Talia Enoch, and Josh van Schalkwyk presented at the annual Postgraduate Research & Innovation Symposium (PRIS)
Jemma Finch and Trevor Hill attended the XXI INQUA Congress at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Boomplaas excavation May-June 2023
For five weeks, I was lucky enough to be selected to be part of an archaeological research team in Boomplaas cave, in the Western Cape. This project was directed by Dr Justin Pargeter who is a researcher at New York University. This project is part of the Human Origins, Migration and Evolution Research (HOMER) group. […]
Vice Chancellor’s research award for our lab!
March 2022 Jemma Finch was honoured to be awarded the 2021 Vice-Chancellor’s Research Award. Read more here: and here:
Train-ME2 Connect Summerschool
November 2021 by J. Finch Together with colleagues from the University of Greifswald (Germany; https://www.uni-greifswald.de/), the Council for Geoscience (CGS; https://www.geoscience.org.za/), Nelson Mandela University (NMU; https://www.mandela.ac.za/) and the University of Cape Town (UCT; https://www.uct.ac.za/), our lab helped to organise and run the South African leg of the Training School on Methods in Applied Earth and […]
Palaeolab hosts visiting researcher from University of Jena
July 2015 Read more here:
Past vegetation and fire history
Our research uses sediment records from wetlands to understand past environmental change. Pollen grains are used as a proxy indicator of past vegetation, and tiny charcoal fragments are an indicator of fire history. Together, these proxies provide insights into long-term ecological processes, and, when combined with supporting information from archaeology and palaeoclimate studies, can help […]
Past sea levels
This research uses single celled marine organisms called foraminifera, or ‘forams’, to understand how sea levels have changed through time. These organisms are about the size of a grain of sand, and produce shells called ‘tests’ that preserve in sedimentary environments like coastal salt marshes. In the salt marsh environment, forams are found in a […]
Jared Lodder
Jared Lodder Jared Lodder MSc Graduate Jared Lodder’s MSc research conducted a palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of the Cathedral Peak area in the Drakensberg. His key focus areas included the use of pollen analysis to reconstruct vegetation patterns, and charcoal analysis to interpret fire histories and possible impacts of fire on the vegetation structure of the region. […]