Guy Atwater Gardner, archaeologist, naturalist and soldier, was the son of the industrialist William Huggins Gardner and his wife Emilia Montgomery Atwater. The family moved to England when Guy was eight years old and settled in Birmingham. He received his schooling at Abbotsholme School, near the town of Rocester in Staffordshire, and started studying engineering in Germany and France in accordance with his father's wishes. However, after his father's death he joined the Durham Light Infantry and came to South Africa to take part in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). After the war he decided to stay in South Africa, joined the Natal Militia and was on active service during the Zulu Rebellion of 1906. The letters he wrote in the field during this campaign are housed in the Strange Collection of the Johannesburg Public Library. In 1910 he married Florence Sarah Browne and left the military to take up farming, but when World War I (1914-1918) broke out joined the Durban Light Infantry and served in the South West Africa (now Namibia) campaign. After the war he retired with the rank of Captain and resumed farming, but rejoined the army again during World War II (1939-1945), finally retiring in 1944. He then built himself a house on his farm Pumula at Lion's River, Natal.
Gardner was an avid reader and collector of natural history specimens, particularly shells and birds' eggs. However, his main scientific interest was in archaeology, mainly classical archaeology and history, and the resulting collection of artefacts was catalogued with the meticulous attention to detail that was typical of all his field work. His interest in archaeology and military experience resulted in a request by his elder sister Elinor (who had an MA degree in geology and was a friend and collaborator of the archaeologist Miss Gertrude Caton-Thompson) to join her and Caton-Thompson on their archaeological expedition to the Fayum in Egypt during 1927-1928, to supervise camps and staff and organize transport. During this expedition he showed a natural aptitude for field work owing to his powers of observation and mastery of topographical detail. He gained valuable experience and advanced to manage an excavation of his own. He also contributed a chapter to The Desert Fayum (1934) by Caton-Thompson and Elinor Gardner.
As a result the Archaeological Committee of the University of Pretoria asked him to undertake an excavation at Mapungubwe, just south of the Limpopo River. Mapungubwe Hill had been excavated by Neville Jones and J.F. Schofield in 1934 and the results published in Mapungubwe: Ancient Bantu Civilization on the Limpopo, Volume 1 (1937) by L. Fouché. The findings posed the problem of Boskop-Bush skeletal remains in association with a Bantu material culture. Gardner decided to investigate the problem by means of an excavation on Bambandyanalo Hill, on the other side of the valley, and the middens at the base of Mapungubwe Hill. The meticulous excavations were conducted during 1935-1940 and yielded direct skeletal evidence of the Boskop-Bush inhabitants of southern Africa before the Zimbabwe era, as well as their burial practices and ceramic culture. This culture, dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, differs fundamentally from the gold and iron using Bantu civilization found on Mapungubwe Hill. Unfortunately work on the project was stopped by the outbreak of World War II, which also delayed publication of the results. Gardner published two papers on the findings in 1949 and 1955 in the South African Archaeological Bulletin (Vol. 4, pp. 117-121; Vol. 10, pp. 73-77)) and when he was elected president of the Archaeological Society of South Africa in 1958 gave some further details in his presidential address (Ibid, 1958, Vol. 13, pp. 123-132). The extent of the project only became apparent to the scientific community when The skeletal remains of Bambandyanalo (1959) was published by Professor A. Galloway. Meanwhile Gardner just managed to complete the manuscript of the second volume of Mapungubwe at the time of his death. It was eventually published in 1963 as Mapungubwe, Vol. 2. Report on excavations at Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo in Northern Transvaal from 1935 to 1940.
Meanwhile Gardner had been asked by C. van Riet Lowe and R. Dart to initiate the excavation of the Cave of Hearths in the Makapansgat valley, which he did in 1947.
He was married in 1910 at Ixopo, KwaZulu-Natal, to Florence Sarah Brown, with whom he had a son and a daughter. Most of his private collection he bequeathed to the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand.
