In September 1997, Cape Town's District Six Museum organised a sculpture festival in the field of debris left after one of the apartheid government's exercises in racial cleansing. Artists crafted installations from the debris, evoking memories of the diverse communities who had lived in this portside suburb from the mid-nineteenth century. Several thousand people, many of them former residents, came to listen to the music and speeches and wander around the artworks. Igshaan Jacobs, forcibly removed from Constitution Street and an avid collector of ceramic sherds, gave form to his concept of history through an intuitive archaeology: "This porcelain is how I relate to my history. If I could just piece together one small cup from all the pieces I've gathered I would have something to hold on to”. The District Six Sculpture Festival is an apt emblem for the World Archaeological Congress and the One World Archaeology movement. Apartheid had been the issue around which the Southampton Congress of 1986 and its formalisation as WAC were shaped (Ucko 1987). In the mid-1980s South Africa was a police state in the midst of a long revolution that had started with the Soweto uprising of 1976. The Group Areas Act, which had enabled the forced removal of more than 50,000 people from the slopes of Table Mountain to make way for a whites-only suburb, was one part of an edifice of legal discrimination that set South Africa apart as a pariah nation-state. WAC's founding statutes specifically excluded South Africans from membership until such time as South Africa abolished legalised racial discrimination. This change had happened more rapidly than anticipated: in 1994 South Africa had been admitted and the decision made to hold the fourth plenary congress in Cape Town. The symbolic taking back of District Six and the construction of memory from the debris of the past, by the descendants of a dispossessed community, was centrally representative of what the One World Archaeology movement stood for.