Dr Natalie Swanepoel is a University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa/Syracuse University, New York, USA, -trained Historical Archaeologist with fieldwork experience in South Africa, Ghana, the United States and the US Virgin Islands. Her specific research interests center on the archaeology of culture contact, missions, slavery and conflict. Dr Swanepoel's doctoral dissertation (2004) focused on the impact of slave-raiding on decentralized (acephalous) village communities in nineteenth-century northern Ghana and how the subsequent economic and political relationships that emerged were materially expressed in the landscape of trade routes and fortified sites. This was explored through a detailed case study of the site of Yalingbong, a fortified hilltop site in the Sisala area of Upper West Ghana. This work involved the juxtaposition and analysis of archaeological material along with oral and documentary sources.
Since the completion of her PhD, she has continued active research in Ghana, expanding the scope of her original research question to look at other defensive sites in a comparative context in the Sisala area. Dr Swanepoel is currently busy writing up the results of work at the hilltop site of Wutoma and the walled town of Gwollu. As part of a small cohort of archaeologists (both Ghanaian and international) who conduct research in northern Ghana, she is also involved in the Komaland figurine sites project, a project led by Professor Benjamin Kankpeyeng at the University of Ghana, Legon. This project is focused on understanding ritual practice at the figurine sites in Komaland dating to approximately 1 000 to 1 200 years ago. This project is being pursued with colleagues from the University of Ghana, Legon and the University of Manchester, UK.
In South Africa, she is particularly interested in the political economies of colonial-era societies and how they were shaped by the new people, goods and ideas that were being circulated within and between different societies. Dr Swanepoel is currently exploring these interests through a study of the political economy of the Botshabelo Mission Station in Mpumalanga, a nineteenth/twentieth century Berlin Missionary Society station (partially funded by an African Origins Platform NRF grant, 2013-2015). Botshabelo was an extremely important educational center for the bulk of its history and the archaeological work there is shedding important insights on the institutional nature of the mission, gender and race relations, agricultural activities and rural households in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the dynamics of South Africa's educational system in the first half of the twentieth century, and the impacts and legacies of apartheid-era laws such as the Group Areas and Bantu Education Acts, resulting in forced removals and the closure of educational activities at the mission. There is a plethora of source material relating to the site, both documentary, pictographic, oral and archaeological and thus careful attention is being paid as to the best way to navigate the use of such sources so that the best use possible might be made of the archaeological record to highlight data that is not available in other sources.
Additional research interests include how archaeology is represented in popular culture and how place name changes are reflective of broader social and political trends within societies.
Dr Swanepoel a Member of the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists; the Society of Africanist Archaeologists; the West African Archaeological Association, the Pan African Archaeological Association and the World Archaeological Congress. She served on the council of the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists (ASAPA) for 5 years from 2006 to 2011, from 2008-2011 as Chairperson. From July 2020 she will serve as the Editor-in-Chief of the South African Archaeological Bulletin.