Professor Lynette Wadley
- Wits University
One of Africa’s leading archaeologists, Professor Lynnette Wadley first worked as a teacher in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
She obtained her Bachelor of Arts and masters degrees in Archaeology from the University of Cape Town and a PhD from Wits where she is currently Honorary Professor of Archaeology in the Evolutionary Studies Institute.
Her research is multidisciplinary and two projects have dominated her work for the last 25 years – Rose Cottage Cave in the Free State and Sibudu in KwaZulu-Natal, the latter achieving international status with its nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Of particular importance are her experiments with everyday tasks that would have been conducted by people in the Stone Age. She has shown that these, for example making compound adhesives for hafting tools and heat treating rocks, require complex cognitive processes that link our minds with those of humans that lived more than 100 000 years ago.
