Nikolaas Johannes Van Der Merwe, 85

Memorial Hall Tower is pictured through fall foliage.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community
Nikolaas Johannes Van Der Merwe, 85

Memorial Minute — Faculty of Arts and Sciences

February 4, 2026 3 min read

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Feb. 3, 2026, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Nikolaas Johannes van der Merwe was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Born: August 11, 1940
Died: August 26, 2025

Nikolaas Johannes van der Merwe died in Cape Town on Aug. 26, 2025, at the age of 85. He was a pioneer in the field of archaeological science and his contributions to African archaeology ranged from hominin evolution to the archaeology of recent farming communities.

Van der Merwe was born in Riviersonderend, South Africa, in 1940. He won a scholarship to attend Yale University, where he completed a B.A. in Physics in 1962 and then an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1966. His doctoral thesis was on the development of a method to radiocarbon date steel by measuring the trace amounts of carbon isotopes present in the iron alloy, and he was later the first to radiocarbon date rock art pigments successfully.

Van der Merwe’s greatest contribution to the field, however, was the development of carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis as a dietary and environmental tracer. In 1977, he and the South African radiocarbon scientist John Vogel published a seminal paper in American Antiquity that established the field of isotope-based dietary reconstruction, now a key tool not only in archaeology but also in biology, ecology, forensics, and related fields. Measuring the proportions of the stable carbon isotopes carbon-13 and carbon-12 in archaeological human bone collagen spanning the first millennium CE in eastern North America, they showed that maize did not become a major cultigen in this region until after 800 CE, considerably later than previously thought. This led to a major re-assessment of the later prehistory of eastern North America and to the recognition of earlier cultivation of a wide range of Indigenous crop plants.

In subsequent work, van der Merwe collaborated with colleagues to track the spread of maize agriculture throughout Central and South America, which led to the discovery of the “canopy effect,” an atmospheric effect in which carbon cycles in rainforests differ from those of more open-air environments. Later he used isotopic tracers to establish the provenance of elephant ivory and rhino horn, now a regular tool in wildlife conservation.

Van der Merwe began his career as Assistant and Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton from 1966 to 1974 and then returned to South Africa in 1974, when he became the first full Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town. In 1988, he was appointed the first Landon T. Clay Professor of Scientific Archaeology at Harvard University, a position he held until 2001, when he retired from Harvard. He became Professor of Natural History at the University of Cape Town in 2000.

Van der Merwe was awarded the John F.W. Herschel Medal from the Royal Society of South Africa in 1994 and the Pomerance Medal for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology from the Archaeological Institute of America in 1998. He is survived by his wife, Karen, his daughters, Kerstin and Nicolina, and their families.

Respectfully submitted,

Jason Ur
Christina Warinner, Chair

In the preparation of this Minute, the van der Merwe Memorial Minute Committee is indebted to the assistance of Professors Judy Sealy (University of Cape Town), David Killick (University of Arizona), and Julia Lee-Thorp (University of Oxford).