Rising Star Cave
— — the chamber that gave up its dead.
Not only on a wall.
“A dolomite cave system in the limestone karst west of Johannesburg. The Dinaledi Chamber sits past a chute narrow enough to squeeze a shoulder through — the place that has yielded more hominin fossils than any single site on the continent. The studio paints the entrance, and the way the light stops just inside.
Rising Star Cave, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Rising Star cave system lies in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in Gauteng Province, about 50 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg. The cave is set in roughly 2.5-billion-year-old dolomitic limestone of the Malmani Subgroup. The fossil-bearing Dinaledi Chamber is reached only through a narrow vertical chute of about 18 centimetres at its tightest. The system was mapped by recreational cavers and brought to scientific attention in 2013, after which Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand led the recoveries that followed.
The chamber walls are dolomite, a magnesium-rich limestone that dissolves slowly along joints and bedding planes to open rooms like Dinaledi. The Cradle of Humankind sits in a karst landscape of more than a dozen fossil-bearing sites, including Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, where Australopithecus and early Homo remains have been recovered since the 1930s. The same rock that opened the room preserved the bones inside it, sealed away from scavengers and weather for hundreds of thousands of years.
Rising Star itself is a research site, closed to general visitors. The neighbouring Sterkfontein Caves, about 10 kilometres east, are open daily and run guided tours through the chambers where the Australopithecus skull known as Mrs Ples was found in 1947. The Maropeng visitor centre nearby holds the official interpretive exhibits for the Cradle of Humankind, including the Homo naledi material recovered from Dinaledi. Most travellers come on a half-day trip from Johannesburg or Pretoria.