Top 10 Lyn Wadley Quotes

It is a personal honour to be elected to the British Academy, but I particularly hope that my appointment will contribute towards raising the international profile of Wits University.

The best way to preserve our heritage for future generations is to teach young people about it and involve them in the process of acquiring such knowledge for themselves

We have incredible archaeological sites in this country and we frequently recover new and exciting data.

I have dedicated my life to African archaeology because the deep past in Africa is everyone’s heritage and it must be protected.

Sub-Saharan African rites of passage into adulthood are sometimes marked by gender-specific physical mutilations such as circumcision, dental modification or scarification, together with other forms of symbolic marking that invariably adopt a binary gender system as the norm.

The initiations are largely designed to instruct initiates about behavior appropriate for men and women of reproductive age belonging to a specific community

Some aspects of initiation rites may be detected archaeologically through skeletal alterations, rock art motifs, and props such as scarified dolls.

In some parts of Africa such as Mali, men and women are buried with the artifacts they owned in life, while in Ethiopia, stelae mark the gender of the deceased. Elsewhere, as in the Stone Age of southern Africa, gender-undifferentiated grave goods are placed with men, women, and children, suggesting a genderless ancestral world.

Gender roles can be identified in some archaeological sites in parts of Africa, and these roles sometimes appear to have altered through time.

Gender roles changed with environmental shifts, and certain tasks such as big-game hunting disappeared as a result. In other cases, gender roles were revised because of social pressures imposed on specific communities.