South African Archaeological Society

Editorial: Captain Howison's PoortAuthor(s): Benjamin SmithSource: The South African Archaeological Bulletin, Vol. 63, No. 187 (Jun., 2008), pp. 1-2Published by: South African Archaeological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20474985 .

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South African Archaeological Bulletin 63 (187): 1-2, 2008

South African Archaeological Bulletin

<< archaeologists

Volume 63 * Number 187 * June 2008

Editorial Captain Howison's Poort

When Captain Alexander Howison constructed a road through a gorge along the Palmiet River just south of Grahamstown in the 1820s, archaeological history would not have been on his mind. Archaeology did not exist as a discipline. Captain Howison was an 1820 settler in South Africa's Eastern Cape. He owned a farm near Grahamstown called Secretary's Farm and, in 1828, he helped to found the local Freemason's Lodge (the Albany Lodge). In honour of its constructor, the Palmiet River road cutting became popularly known as Howison's Poort.

When the Grahamstown area was parcelled into farms, the land cut through by the Poort was formally named and registered as Howison's Poort and it continues to appear as such on modern maps. Geologists, botanists, cartographers, road users and local inhabitants all know the Poort as Howison's. And yet amongst archaeologists, whose work has made the Poort world famous, Captain Howison's name has been confused. Archaeologists write the name in four different incorrect ways: Howieson's Poort (with added -e), Howeison's Poort (-e and -i reversed), Howiesons Poort (with added -e and missing the apostrophe) and Howiesonspoort (all one word). These four spellings have all been used to refer to a single Middle Stone Age industry. All spell ings have been used in submissions to this journal over the past five years; we have yet to receive a submission using the correct geographic spelling: Howison's Poort. Should our journal con tinue to allow a multiplicity of spellings for the same industry? If

we are to standardize, then which spelling should we choose and following what principle?

The industry got its name from a site excavated by Reverend P Stapleton and John Hewitt in the 1920s. Following the common practice, the new industry was named after the first site at which it was reported. Stapleton and Hewitt describe the site as a rock shelter "high up on the side of the krantz facing the Howieson's Poort Hotel, near Grahamstown" and they acknowledge the son of the proprietor of the hotel, Reginald West, as the discoverer of the shelter (Stapleton & Hewitt 1927: 575). The first publication on the site was titled: Stone implements from a rock-shelter at Howieson's Poort near Grahamstown. The first of our three misspell ings therefore originates with the site name as it was first pub lished. The cause of the misspelling is unclear. It is very unlikely that Stapleton and Hewitt, two longstanding Grahamstown resi dents, made a typographical error. It seems that the site was named not after the Poort itself but after the hotel, not just because it was near the hotel, but also because the local family running the hotel had found it. The 1927 Route Book of the Royal Automobile Club of South Africa confirms that the hotel was spelled Howieson's at the time of the excavation.

Subsequent writers followed the spelling of Stapleton and Hewitt for the stone tool industry. Miles Burkitt was the first to write on the site and he again makes explicit the connection to the hotel:

But perhaps the most interesting site near Grahamstown was a small rock-shelter difficult of access in the middle of a krantz which dominates the valley at Howieson's Poort. Leaving the hotel at the bottom of the Poort, one crosses the stream and strikes out so as to reach the top of the rocky krantz which faces one. Then, with the help of a rope attached to what appears to be none too secure a tree, one lowers oneself 30 feet below. The

site was only discovered a few years ago by the children of the innkeeper, who succeeded with monkey-like skill in reaching the rock shelter from below. (Burkitt 1928: 47). From the 1930s to the early 1970s all of the leading archaeolo

gists in the field followed the original published spelling of Howieson's Poort. Henri Breuil, Desmond Clark, John Goodwin, Ray Inskeep, Barend 'Berry' Malan, Revil Mason, Paul Mellars, Ronald Singer and Clarence 'Peter' Van Riet Lowe used only the version that contains both an -e and an apostrophe.

The first deviation from Howieson's appeared around 1972 when Garth Sampson published: The Stone Age Industries of the Orange River Scheme Area and South Africa. In this he used the term Magosian-Howiesonspoort-Modderpoort complex (1972: 62), but stuck to the conventional spelling of Howieson's Poort when used separately. In Sampson's review of Charles Keller's book on Montagu Cave and in his own The Stone Age Archaeology of South ern Africa, both of 1974, he shifts entirely to Howiesonspoort. Janette Deacon (1974a), Creighton Gabel (1975) and Philip Rightmire (1975) all follow this single word spelling in their reviews of the book in three different journals. Since then the conjoined version has been occasional (e.g. J. Deacon 1976b;

McBrearty 1990), but never common. The conjunction of Howieson's and Poort would be correct if the word Howieson was of Afrikaans origin. There are many such conjunctions amongst Afrikaans South African place names and archaeological sites: Meiringspoort, Moordenaarspoort, Olieboompoort or Ezeljagdspoort. However, the word Howieson is not of Afrikaans origins and, even though Poort is derived from Afrikaans, con junction is therefore inappropriate.

The second deviation is the flipping of the e and i to make Howeison's. This seems to have begun with a repeated typo graphic error by Thurston Shaw (1975), but it has cropped up quite regularly since this time (e.g. Barton et al. 1996), mostly in books and papers by authors who do not work directly with the southern African Stone Age. Editors of this journal have always corrected this spelling before publication.

It has been the dropping of the apostrophe that has been the most pernicious of the deviations and which seems to have a dedicated following today. The grammatically wanting Howiesons Poort is prominent amongst those writing recently and regularly about the South African Stone Age, but it is by no means dominant. The choice to drop the apostrophe splits into two distinct schools, with those consistently not using the apostrophe comprising: Marlize Lombard, Lyn Wadley and Sarah Wurz. Those consistently still using the apostrophe include Richard Klein, David Lewis-Williams, Peter Mitchell, David Pearce, David Phillipson, Philip Rightmire, Nick Walker and Pamela Willoughby. Others, notably Peter Beaumont, Hilary Deacon, Janette Deacon and John Parkington have shifted, diplo matically, back and forth. So why after 40 years did Howieson's lose its apostrophe? The answer appears to lie in this journal.

The dropping of the apostrophe occurs suddenly in SAAB in 1984. We see this in two book reviews by Lyn Wadley. In 1983 the apostrophe is in place, but in 1984 it is gone. After 1984 there is a level of consistency in the dropping of the apostrophe in SAAB that can only be ascribed to editorial intervention. One can see in the cases of Beaumont, Parkington and Francis Thackeray that

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2 South African Archaeological Bulletin 63 (187): 1-2, 2008

their papers outside of SAAB very often contain the apostrophe. So why did SAAB drop the apostrophe? The reason for the timing may never be known; it was not a matter that attracted discussion or comment in 1984. It seems that Janette Deacon, as a good SAAB editor, recognized the need to standardize the multiple spellings and acted accordingly. She remembers her reasons for dropping the apostrophe as follows:

I dropped the apostrophe on the advice of someone involved in the spelling of place names. He told me (in the 1980s) that the apostrophe is usually dropped in place names, and he used the examples King Williams Town and Simons Town. At the time, I noticed that the road signs for these places did not use an apostrophe. However, on reflection, I think he (and the people who made the road signs) might have been influenced by Afrikaans, which runs the words together and never uses an apostrophe, because I have just checked these names in the Reader's Digest Atlas for 1984 and the Postcodes book for 2007 and they both use the apostrophe. So, perhaps you should standardise according to common usage in the 21st century and return to the apostrophe. (J. Deacon, pers. comm. 2008)

Here the principle of compatibility with broader societal con ventions in the orthography of place name is correctly invoked. For Afrikaans names the apostrophe is indeed dropped, but South Africa has never had a clear policy on the inclusion of the apostrophe in its English and indigenous place names. The United States of America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand all followed the 1898 Geographic Board of Canada's decision that "the possessive form of names should be avoided whenever it could be done without destroying the euphony of a name or changing its descriptive application.... If the possessive were retained, the apostrophe should be dropped" (Rayburn cited in Jenkins 2007: 62). Elwyn Jenkins (2007: 63) comments on this statement noting that "South Africa never knowingly applied the 1898 rule. In this country, the possessive form is common, and these names usually take the apostrophe, Van Reenen's Pass being a typical example". Well known places with an apostro phe include Devil's Peak, Giant's Castle, Hintsa's Point, King William's Town, Mitchell's Plain, Pilgrim's Rest, Qacha's Nek, Shaka's Rock and Simon's Town. As Jenkins notes (ibid.: 63) the only time that the apostrophe is regularly dropped is when it appears in a possessive name ending in -s, such as Richards Bay (named after Sir Frederick William Richards) and Jeffreys Bay (named after a Mr Jeffreys). Exceptions to this, one being Bushmans Kloof, are comparatively rare. For our archaeological Poort, Raper's New Dictionary of South African Place Names is crys tal clear on the spelling: "Howison's Poort.... The incorrect spell ing Howieson's Poort is often encountered" (2004: s.v.). Whilst Raper notes the error of the added -e he does not even counte nance the possibility of dropping the apostrophe. On changing older place names, he states a general principle: "Existing names that are satisfactory and acceptable should not be changed with out good reason" (Raper: xi). Even the militant apostrophe drop pers of the Geographic Board of Canada accepted this in the 1970s when they amended their rules "to permit the apostrophe where it was well established and in current use" (Rayburn cited in Jenkins 2007: 63).

Returning to SAAB, the removal of the Howieson's Poort apostrophe has been inconsistent since Janette Deacon handed over the SAAB editorship at the end of 1993. Interestingly, amongst the first papers to reuse the apostrophe in the pages of SAAB were two papers by Janette and Hilary Deacon in 1995. Since 1994 the decision seems largely to have been left to authors. We have therefore returned to our unsatisfactory multiplicity of spellings. And ten years of editorial apostrophe removal by SAAB have shifted behaviour; whilst very few researchers were drop ping the apostrophe before 1984, many now do it as a matter of routine both in and outside of the pages of SAAB. Other writers, including the authors of recent syntheses on African archaeology such as Mitchell, Phillipson and Willoughby, rigidly stick to the original use of the apostrophe. Acknowledging that SAAB was largely responsible for creating the current problem, the onus falls on this journal to fix it.

We now have a rich array of spellings available and we need to pick one and then stick to it. Howison's is certainly the correct name for the Poort, but is it the correct name for the industry? The issue of whether the name was misspelled in the original publica tion is of no significance because misspellings in the names of other traditions and industries have been corrected. Phillipson, for example, corrected the originally used spelling of Tschifumbasi to Chifumbaze when he coined the central African Iron Age Complex. On this principle we should therefore go back to Howison's Poort if the site was named after the Poort.

In her personal communication above, Janette Deacon recommends we return to using the apostrophe because this is most in keeping with 21st century apostrophe usage in South Africa. As usual, I agree with her. I think there are two other good reasons also for us to restore the apostrophe. Firstly, by far the bulk of our archaeological literature contains the apostrophe; the shift away is partial, recent and brief. Second, I showed at the beginning of this editorial that the archaeological site was named, not after Captain Alexander Howison's Poort, but after the hotel situated in the Poort. At the time when Stapleton and Hewitt were excavating and publishing, the hotel was spelled Howieson's and this means that our long-established archaeo logical spelling is correct in all respects.

Having given its name to a stone tool industry, the Howie son's Poort Hotel was subsequently renamed after the stone tools in its nearby archaeological site. By the 1960s it was called the Stone Crescent Hotel and the origins of the spelling Howieson's then became lost in the elisions of time.

In this issue of SAAB Nick Walker and Jocelyn Bernatchez both submitted manuscripts using the spelling of Howieson's Poort that contains an apostrophe. I corrected both at proof stage and then lost confidence in my decision. I began the investigation that led to this editorial. All uses of the term in this issue have an apostrophe and I hope that this practice will continue in future issues. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Extensive discussions were held with Janette Deacon, Elwyn Jenkins, Marlize Lombard and David Pearce on the use of the apostro phe in Howieson's Poort. I thank them for their assistance and advice. My views may not be theirs.

Benjamin Smith Research Article Editor

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