Nik van der Merwe 1940–2025

Africa in 1940. In 1958, he won a scholarship to attend Yale University, from which he graduated in 1962 with a BA in Anthropology.Yale was then very active in the development of archaeological sciences, and under the supervision of the archaeologist Kwang-chi Chang, the radiocarbon scientist Minze Stuiver and the geochemist Karl Turekian, he obtained some of the earliest radiocarbon dates for the Iron Age in southern Africa.For his doctoral dissertation, he investigated the feasibility of dating prehistoric iron-carbon alloys (steel and cast iron) with radiocarbon.