Joining the Gobabeb (rogues(?)) gallery of Research Associates

Revelling in being a Research Associate of Gobabeb, or joining the ‘rogues gallery’ (Magg-Kölling, 2023)

Revelling in being a Research Associate of Gobabeb, or joining the ‘rogues gallery’ (Magg-Kölling, 2023). In 2022 I got back to fieldwork in the Namib Sand Sea, and back to Gobabeb for the first time since two wonderful conferences here in 2012: SASQUA XIX Biennial Congress and the SAAG Biennial Conference.

For this trip I was with a wonderful group of colleagues, George Leader, Rachel Bynoe, Dom Stratford, Kaarina Efraim and all facilitated by the navigational know-how of Eugene Marais. As part of George’s S.A.N.D.S. project, I had been awarded UoManchester SEED funding for sediment sampling and luminescence dating of our first set of samples, most from the site of Namib IV.

Namib IV (S23° 44.829’, E14° 19.720’) is one of few Earlier Stone Age sites in the Sand Sea of the Namib Desert, and a rare example of a tool-rich and fossil fauna-bearing pan system in the Namib Sand Sea. So far the team have published a paper that presents some preliminary results from the first visits to Namib IV.

leader_etal_2023_acheulean_namibivDownload

The ‘green’ dunes of the western Thar

Sunset in the dunes near Bhuwana in the western Thar, Rajasthan.

In September 2023 I took my first trip to the Thar desert, with Shashank Nitundil (now PhD student in the Geography department here in Manchester) who headed here during his MSc in Environmental Monitoring, Modelling and Reconstruction to undertaken his dissertation research. See Nitundil et al. (2023) for an excellent paper that has set up the use of the portable-luminescence reader in this region, based on the training set calibration approach I developed in southern Africa.