Africa: Southern Africa (Geographic Keyword)
101-109 (109 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ostrich eggshell (OES) is common in archaeological sites throughout Africa and Asia and is often recovered with evidence of pre- and postdepositional burning. The physical nature of OES protects some isotopic data that remain locked away in the crystalline shell matrix, allowing researchers to use these data thousands of years later to...
Using Surface Roughness to Identify Heat Treatment in Lithic Technology (2018)
The heat treatment of stone to enhance flaking attributes was an important advancement in the adaptive toolkit of early humans. The earliest evidence for this is the heat treatment of silcrete 164 ka at the Middle Stone Age site Pinnacle Point 13B in South Africa. Heating stone prior to knapping alters the physical and chemical composition of the stone, and it has long been recognized that flaked heat-treated stone has a glossier surface. We expect this glossiness to result from a smoother...
Using the Present to Uncover the Past: Reconstructing the Ecology and Behaviour of Extinct Large Mammals on the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain (South Coast, South Africa) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding the ecological role of extinct large mammals is an ongoing challenging research problem. The use of species traits (physical and behavioral) to characterize functional communities is becoming common in ecological modelling and is key to understanding the ecological role that species would have filled under historic conditions. This...
Using Ungulate Bones to Retouch and (Re)Sharpen Middle Stone Age End-Scrapers at Bushman Rock Shelter, South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone retouchers were first recognized in European Paleolithic assemblages at the turn of the nineteenth century. They have since been documented from sites across Eurasia, from Lower Paleolithic to Neolithic contexts. Notwithstanding their abundance in the archaeological record, the association between the characteristics of the retouch on...
What Drives the Variability in MSA Lithic Assemblages from Sibhudu Cave, South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After over a decade of excavation and analysis at the Middle Stone Age site of Sibhudu in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the team from the University of Tübingen has established a uniquely complete and well-documented record of cultural change from the end or the Middle Pleistocene until...
What Makes a Forager Turn Coastal? An Agent-Based Approach to Coastal Foraging on the Dynamic South African Paleoscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gram for gram, coastal shellfish have significant benefits over many terrestrial resources. They are higher in calories, fats, and proteins than most plants and are available in denser and more predictable patches than mammals. However, there are costs to foraging coastal shellfish....
White Iron and Red Gold: How to Identify Tin, Copper, and Bronze Derived from Rooiberg Mineral Deposits, South Africa (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Geological and Technological Contributions to the Interpretation of Radiogenic Isotope Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tin and copper ores around Rooiberg, South Africa, were exploited from 1000–1300 CE until about 1840. Geologists estimated that around 1,000 tons of the tin mineral cassiterite, equivalent to 792 tons of metallic tin, were mined there. Archaeological survey showed only a small amount of evidence...
Whole Assemblage Behavioral Indicators: Expectations and Inferences from Surface and Excavated Records at Elandsfontein, South Africa (2018)
Large scale surface surveys represent singular insights into the landscape scale variation in behaviors. Detailed investigations of the spatial distribution of artifacts across large spatial extents allow archaeologists to investigate a landscape as a single site. Surface assemblages have the advantage of large sample sizes and large aerial extents. However, biases associated with the formation processes of surface assemblages often undermine our confidence in the behavioral inferences derived...
Zooarchaeological Analysis of a Late Pleistocene Interglacial-Glacial Transition at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6, South Africa (2018)
Understanding if and to what extent early anatomically modern humans adapted to dramatic climatic events is essential to human origins research. Pinnacle Point — a complex of cave sites and rockshelters along the southern coast of South Africa — offers a unique opportunity to study human adaptability through time. The long sequence at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 (PP5-6) spans 164 - 44 thousand years ago and encompasses two Interglacial to Glacial Marine Isotope Stage transitions (Stages 5-4-3)....