Louis Péringuey was an unlikely archaeologist. The director of the South African Museum in Cape Town from 1906 to his death in 1924, Péringuey identified himself as an entomologist, but in fact he had no formal education in science. Born of Basque parentage in Bordeaux in 1855, he went to war against the Prussians in 1870 without completing high school. Roger Summers suggests that his distress at the defeat of France in the war affected him greatly and he decided to ‘seek his fortune outside of France’ (Summers 1975, 56). What followed was several years of travelling through Senegal, The Gambia and Madagascar, with Péringuey finally arriving in South Africa in 1879. He obtained employment as a teacher of French, but it was at this time that he seems to have developed his lifelong interest in beetles, as a result of which he joined the South African Museum in 1884. His job as scientific assistant in the museum's Department of Entomology brought him into contact with the Phylloxera infestation that was decimating South Africa's vineyards in the 1880s. He became an inspector of vineyards in 1885 and was appointed colonial viticulturist in 1889, about which Director Trimen complained that the colonial government was using museum staff instead of setting up their own entomological service (Summers 1975, 57). Although these posts took him away from his entomological work at the museum, it was these new tasks that first exposed him to archaeology.

Péringuey excelled at his entomological work despite his lack of formal education. He published multiple papers on South African Coleoptera (beetles) between 1884 and 1906 and in 1907 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from the University of the Cape of Good Hope in appreciation of his scientific achievements (Summers 1975, 97; Plug 2020d).

Péringuey's work in the soil of vineyards revealed ancient stone tools and triggered an interest that would consume him for the rest of his career. In 1899 he, along with George Steuart Corstorphine of the South African College, made a major archaeological discovery of Palaeolithic artefacts similar in form to the Acheulian in Europe, which they termed ‘Stellenbosch’ after the district of their discovery (Péringuey and Corstorphine 1900, xxiv).

Péringuey's archaeology was breaking new ground in Africa.