New blog post: The Stranded Scarab

In June 2025, whilst leading a field school at an abandoned post-industrial diamond-mining site near Kimberley, South Africa, Jan-Bart Gewald chanced upon a scarab beetle in stone.  Two metres in length, the stone beetle was covered by petroglyphs of human and humanoid forms, as well as rhinoceroses, eland and abstract geometric etchings. Transfiguring the whole were the scratchings of quasi-literate vandals dating from 1898 onwards. A glimpse of a worldview that had since been destroyed.

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