South African Archaeological Bulletin 63 (187): 12, 2008

South African Archaeological Bulletin

Volume 63

Number 187

June 2008

Editorial

Captain Howisons 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 Africas Eastern Cape. He owned a farm
near Grahamstown called Secretary's Farm and, in 1828, he
helped to found the local Freemasons Lodge (the Albany Lodge).
In honour of its constructor, the Palmiet River road cutting
became popularly known as Howisons Poort.
When the Grahamstown area was parcelled into farms, the
land cut through by the Poort was formally named and registered
as Howisons Poort and it continues to appear as such on modern
maps. Geologists, botanists, cartographers, road users and local
inhabitants all know the Poort as Howisons. And yet amongst
archaeologists, whose work has made the Poort world famous,
Captain Howisons name has been confused. Archaeologists
write the name in four different incorrect ways: Howiesons
Poort (with added -e), Howeisons 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 spellings 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: Howisons Poort. Should our journal continue 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 Howiesons
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
Howiesons Poort near Grahamstown. The first of our three misspellings therefore originates with the site name as it was first published. The cause of the misspelling is unclear. It is very unlikely
that Stapleton and Hewitt, two longstanding Grahamstown residents, 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 Howiesons 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 Howiesons 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 archaeologists in the field followed the original published spelling of
Howiesons 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 Howiesons 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 Howiesons Poort when
used separately. In Sampsons review of Charles Kellers book on
Montagu Cave and in his own The Stone Age Archaeology of Southern 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
Howiesons 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, conjunction is therefore inappropriate.
The second deviation is the flipping of the e and i to make
Howeisons. This seems to have begun with a repeated typographic 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, diplomatically, back and forth. So why after 40 years did Howiesons
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

South African Archaeological Bulletin 63 (187): 12, 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
Readers 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 conventions 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 Canadas 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 Reenens Pass
being a typical example. Well known places with an apostrophe include Devils Peak, Giants Castle, Hintsas Point, King
Williams Town, Mitchells Plain, Pilgrims Rest, Qachas Nek,
Shakas Rock and Simons 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, Rapers New Dictionary of South African Place Names is crystal clear on the spelling: Howisons Poort. The incorrect spelling Howiesons Poort is often encountered (2004: s.v.). Whilst
Raper notes the error of the added -e he does not even countenance 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 without good reason (Raper: xi). Even the militant apostrophe droppers 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 Howiesons 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 dropping 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. Howisons 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 publication 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 Howisons 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 Howisons Poort, but after the hotel
situated in the Poort. At the time when Stapleton and Hewitt
were excavating and publishing, the hotel was spelled
Howiesons and this means that our long-established archaeological spelling is correct in all respects.
Having given its name to a stone tool industry, the Howiesons 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 Howiesons
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 Howiesons
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 apostrophe in Howiesons Poort. I thank them for their assistance and advice.
My views may not be theirs.

Benjamin Smith
Research Article Editor
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