Browsing by Author "Humphreys, Robyn"

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    Critically engaged archaeology: Prestwich Street burial grounds as a case study
    (2026) Humphreys, Robyn; Ackermann, Rebecca Rogers; Hutchison, June Bam; Black, Wendy
    This thesis illustrates how archaeological heritage practice structures the relationship between communities and human remains from archaeological sites. Using Prestwich Street burial ground (PSBG) as a case study this project explores how the development of historical, contract, social and post-colonial archaeology in Cape Town, starting in the late 1980s, informs post-apartheid archaeological heritage practice. PSBG is a large late 18th century colonial era burial ground that was discovered in 2003 in, Green Point, South Africa, during urban development. The discovery resulted in significant public contestation and challenged archaeologists to consider new heritage values, of memory, justice and healing. Previous research on PSBG-related heritage practice connected archaeologists' detached responses to new heritage priorities to a history of empiricist archaeological practice that developed in the 1960s. Based on stakeholder engagement and archival research, this thesis instead argues that archaeological practice at PSBG was historically informed by contract archaeology which had developed in the late 1980s and the early 1990s when Cape Town was implementing neo-liberal spatial planning initiatives. Historical archaeologists viewed development as an opportunity to access new sites, produce histories of the underclass of colonial Cape Town, and develop social archaeology, while also embedding archaeology in development heritage management processes. In the early 1990s, post-colonial archaeology was theorized as an educational programme that gave back precolonial histories to previously marginalised African communities in South Africa. This research reveals that post-colonial, and social archaeology could not facilitate community centred archaeological practice, because they didn't engage with activist heritage practice in Cape Town. Post-colonial and social archaeology were presented as transformative disciplinary practice; however, they relied on colonial relations of knowledge production. Contestation around PSBG challenged these knowledge hierarchies and called into question the centrality of the archaeologist for producing history. The thesis further argues that because we have not interrogated how colonial power structures are maintained while trying to decolonize the discipline as revealed by PSBG, the legacy of paternalistic relations continues to shape communities' ii relationships to human remains from archaeological sites. I show this by exploring the current heritage practice related to the management of human remains from archaeological sites.
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    Using a mouse model to understand the effect of hybridization on skeletal and pelage trait variation in mammalian hybrids
    (2018) Humphreys, Robyn; Ackermann, Rebecca Rogers
    Hybridization is thought to have played an important role in human evolution, with hybridizing groups having significant differences in soft tissue trait variation. Ectodermal trait variation is of interest because primate hybrids show increased atypical non-metric dental and cranial trait variation thought to be the result of interactions between parental genomes which have diverged for ectodermal trait development (including hair and tooth development). There were also differences between hybridizing hominin groups for limb measurements which have changed significantly throughout human evolution. Here a mouse model is used to look at the effect of hybridization on coat morphology and long bone length. Using standardized photographs, the differences in mean RGB values for the dorsal and ventral coat were used to determine whether the hybrids were different from their parents for pelage colour of different regions of the body, dorsal ventral colour contrast, and levels of variation in coat colour. The sample is composed of parents from one specific and three sub-specific crosses, as well as F1, F2 and first generation backcrossed (B1) hybrids. Long bone measurements of the forelimbs and hind-limbs were collected from micro-CT scans of the sub-specific F1 hybrids and their parents. Previous data have shown that hybridization can have variable morphological outcomes: hybrids can look like one of the parents, they can be intermediate, or they can have extreme traits outside of the range of variation of the parents. Our results indicate that morphological outcomes for coat colour in F1 hybrids depends on factors such as genetic distance. However, the genetic background of one of the strains used for this experiment might contribute the transgressive phenotype of some of the F1 hybrids. Hybrid morphology also changes in subsequent generations (F2 and B1) as new recombinants formed, with transgressive coat colour phenotypes sometimes appearing even if they are not present in the F1 hybrid groups. Phenotypes produced in F1 hybrids are also seen in subsequent generations of hybrids. All sub-specific F1 hybrids were transgressive for long bone length. Compared to parental groups hybrids have a different relationship between the long bones of the forelimb (ratio of humerus to ulna). This is in line with previous data from primate hybrids, that shows that changes in the relationships between different regions of the body occurs in hybrids producing novel phenotypes. The inter-membral indexes are not significantly different from one of the parents for two of the crosses. This data shows that hybridization can produce novel pelage phenotypes over multiple generations. There were many transitions in hair/skin morphology during human evolution and these tissue groups were and are under a great deal of selective pressure due to their direct interaction with the environment. Thus, understanding how these traits are impacted by hybridization will be important for disentangling how hybridization affected our evolutionary trajectory and ability to occupy new regions of the world. Post cranial data, indicates that F1 hominin hybrids might have longer limbs in relation to parental populations, more work needs to be done on the post cranial remains of posited hominin hybrids as well as pedigreed mammalian hybrids to determine if this is a pattern which can be used to identify hybrids in the fossil record.