In 1951, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution ad the Harvard Peabody Museum, Laurence and Lorna Marshall and their two children, Elizabeth and John, set out to find, study and document the way of life of the Bushmen who lived by gathering wild bush foods and hunting game with poison arrows. After a week of hard traveling in desert-adapted vehicles, the Marshalls reached Nyae Nyae and made contact with ≠Oma Tsamkxao and his Ju/'hoan band at a waterhole called /Aotcha. Without any formal training in anthropology, the Marshalls would spend almost five years, between 1951 and 1962, with ≠Oma and his family studying and filming the Ju/'hoan way of life in Nyae Nyae. Experts from several disciplines including archaeology, linguistics, and ethno-botany participated in the expeditions.
While in Nyae Nyae the Marshall family documented everyday life as well as unusual events and activities, producing a massive body of work that continues to define the fields of anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking today.
Lorna Marshall produced a number of articles and wrote The Ju/'hoan of Nyae Nyae which is a basic ethnography of Ju/'hoan society. Elizabeth Marshall wrote her popular book The Harmless People. John Marshall shot over 500,000 feet of 16mm color film recording a broad overview of Ju/'hoan traditional culture. Marshall's early anthropological films including he Hunters (1957), Argument About a Marriage (1969) and Rite of Passage (1972) document a rich variety of Ju/'hoan activities- men hunting, women and children gathering, people marrying, women giving birth, children playing and healers trancing.
Colonel Hoogenhout, Administrator of S.W.A.
John Neer, Secretary for S.W.A.
H. J. Allen, Chief Native Commissioner of S.W.A.
Claude V. McIntyre, Commissioner of Bushman Affairs, S.W.A.
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