A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites

A Millimetre of Dust is the story of a journey from Cape Town to the Northern Cape and back to visit some world-class Stone Age archaeological sites. In the tradition of writers such as Barry Lopez, W.G. Sebald, Gary Snyder and Bruce Chatwin, this travel memoir combines extensive research with personal narrative to explore how a particular woman's experience raises questions that are political, ecological, and philosophical. The sense of deep time which places such as Wonderwerk Cave or Kathu Townlands evoke is presented amid contemporary concerns ' from the domestic immediacies of small children on a long trip to intense disquiet about the local impact of global climate change. As in many travellers' tales, the protagonist leaves home, 'discovers' unfamiliar territory, and returns with an altered view of her place in the world. At Wonderwerk Cave the duration of a human life measures just one millimetre of dust in the deep, long accumulation of sediment, yet each breath we take is a link to those who came before us, and to all beings.