Middle Stone Age (Other Keyword)
26-50 (52 Records)
Located between modern-day South Africa and Tanzania, both of which have well-known and extensive Stone Age records, Mozambique and its Stone Age sequence remain largely unknown in the broader context of African Pleistocene prehistory. This is in spite of the country’s critical position linking southern and eastern Africa, and of its clear potential to inform various models about recent human evolution. Specifically, the geography of Mozambique makes its sea coast a natural area of interest to...
The Middle Stone Age at Gona, Afar, Ethiopia: Implications for Regionalization and Migrations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tentatively dated to MIS 5/4, the YAS-1 (Ya’alu South 1) site at Gona, Ethiopia is a high-density open-air archaeological site preserving classic Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone tools such as Levallois cores, Nubian cores, points, and blades in addition to a variety of fossil fauna, some with bone modifications including...
The Middle Stone Age Record in Egypt and Sudan: Implications for Out of Africa 2 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Africa is the continent of origin for Homo sapiens and thus is the source for human colonization of the Old (and eventually New) World. Out of Africa 2 (anatomically, then behaviorally, modern humans) is supported archaeologically by African stone artifact industries found outside of Africa. Two routes widely...
Modeling Mobility and Lithic Raw Material Transport in the Late Pleistocene along the Southern Coast of South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how hunter-gatherer groups move around the landscape is essential for answering questions about human behavioral ecology and evolution of the social landscape. Lithic raw material proveniencing sheds light on how far people in the past were traveling for toolstone and...
The Msikaba Red Sand Dunes: Middle Pleistocene Lithic Technological Variability in Pondoland, South Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Msikaba Red Sand Dunes along South Africa's Pondoland coast are a recently discovered open-air site complex that documents Middle Pleistocene lithic technological and morphological change. The deposit comprises ancient dune surfaces stacked over time with repeated sea-level highstand events. Initial excavations and...
Multiple functions for an assemblage of Middle Stone Age Points: Use-Wear Evidence from Magubike Rockshelter, Tanzania. (2017)
Preliminary lithic use-wear evidence from Magubike Rockshelter, Tanzania, suggests a mixed function for an assemblage of Middle Stone Age points, including a possible projectile point role. The development of hafted hunting weapons during the Middle Stone Age is thought to have marked a major juncture in human behavioural evolution. Not only did the emergence of this technology likely have a major impact on the foraging strategies of hunting and gathering populations, many have speculated that...
Narabeb Pan: Exploring Middle Stone Age Archaeology of the Namib Sand Sea (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The vast Sand Sea region of the Namib desert in western Namibia has begun to yield evidence of long-term human occupations. In the past decades, several Early Stone Age (ESA) sites have been identified and described but the Middle Stone Age (MSA) human presence remains poorly understood. Here we describe in detail the newly documented site of Narabeb Pan,...
The ochre assemblage from Pinnacle Point 5-6 (2015)
In recent years, southern Africa has figured prominently in the modern human origins debate due to increasing evidence for precocious behaviors considered to be unique to our species. These significant findings have included bone tools, shell beads, engraved ostrich eggshell, and heavily ground and engraved ochre fragments. The presence of ochre in Middle Stone Age (MSA, ~250-40kya) archaeological sites in southern Africa is often proposed as indirect evidence for the emergence of symbolic or...
Ochre in the desert: Preliminary sourcing and colorimetric results from two Stone Age sites in the central Namib Desert (2016)
Ochre becomes ubiquitous across Southern African archaeological sites beginning in the Middle Stone Age and continuing throughout the Later Stone Age. For the last decade, ochre research has focused upon the utilization of ochre, cognitive implications of its use, and of the ochre assemblages themselves. Recently, a growing number of ochre studies have attempted to source ochre through a variety of analytic techniques. This study attempts to differentiate ochre raw material sources with a novel...
Ostrich Eggshell taphonomy and distribution at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (2017)
Analysis of ostrich eggshell (OES) fragment distribution at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (KEH-1) revealed taphonomic patterns. The variation of OES features and its distribution indicates that the OES was being used and processed differently in temporal and spatial context. KEH-1, a cave on the southern coast of South Africa, was inhabited by early modern humans throughout the Middle and Late Stone Age. Hearth features are prevalent throughout the sequence, providing evidence of occupational...
The P5 project archaeological reconnaissance along the Pondoland Coast, South Africa (2015)
South African sea caves preserve evidence for early modern humans’ longstanding interest in coastal resources. However, changes in coastlines location throughout the Pleistocene prevented the development of long-term and continuous records of coastal foraging and there are still many outstanding questions about when, where, and how coastal foraging developed. Pondoland (Eastern Cape Province) is one of the few places where we may be able to fill in these gaps. An exceptionally narrow...
Paleolithic Survey on the Upper Luangwa Valley, Zambia (2017)
The northern half of the Luangwa Valley, Zambia, a southern branch of the East African rift system, is archaeologically unexplored territory in an area that may have served as an important biogeographic corridor between eastern and southern Africa during the Plio-Pleistocene. This paper summarizes the first systematic survey in this region. Paleontological reconnaissance in 2013 incidentally revealed multiple Paleolithic sites which may range from the Acheulian through the MSA. Representative...
PP5-6 Mineral Pigment Artifact Analysis Data (2018)
The artifact analysis data set for the PP5-6 mineral pigment assemblage. The first page (PP5-6 Data Notes) provides information on the coding fields, while the second page (PP5-6 Data) provides the complete data set.
Revisiting Grassridge rockshelter in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa: results of the 2014 field season (2015)
Grassridge rockshelter is located at the base of the Stormberg Mountains approximately 200 km inland in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Previous excavation by Dr. Hermanus Opperman in 1979 focused primarily on the Later Stone Age (LSA) and Holocene occupations at Grassridge, but he also identified an underlying Middle Stone Age (MSA, ~300-30 ka) sequence containing abundant typologically MSA lithic material, well-preserved faunal remains, and charcoal. With particular interest in the MSA...
A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma: what can Central African Sangoan and Lupemban technologies tell us about the origins of rainforest foraging? (2016)
Despite almost 100 years of scientific research, the archaeological record of Central Africa remains stubbornly peripheral to ongoing debates centering on the origins of rainforest hunting and gathering. Currently available chronological, palaeobiogeographical and technological data converges to indicate that the initial settlement of the central African rainforest belt may have been first undertaken c.300 ka BP by archaic Homo sapiens. The appearance of new tools suitable for hafting as stone...
The Scatter between the Scatter between the Patches: A Tephrostratigraphic Approach to Low-density Archaeological Sites in the Eastern Lake Victoria Basin of Kenya (2017)
Among recent groups, foraging activities are unevenly distributed across the landscape. Archaeological traces of past foragers are also spatially variable as a result of multiple factors, including the redundancy of site use, a bias towards tasks that leave well-defined material traces likely to preserve into the present (e.g., stone tool manufacture), and local sedimentological factors that mediate site preservation through burial as well as subsequent recovery through erosion or excavation....
Silcretes from Nearby Sources Display Different Responses to Rapid Heating: Implications for Models of Early Human Heat Treatment (2017)
Heat treatment of silcrete in the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa has been taken to indicate cognitive complexity. This inference is based on the argument that silcretes require well-regulated heating and cooling rates to avoid thermal fracture. Alternative arguments have been made that silcrete can be heat treated with limited control over temperature gradients, and thus that heat treatment may have been a relatively simple process. These apparently contrasting positions elide the fact that...
Site Formation Analysis of Middle Stone Age Locality GaJj17 in the Koobi Fora Formation, Northern Kenya (2017)
The Koobi Fora Formation (KF Fm.) of the Turkana Basin in Kenya is comprised of a Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary sequence that has produced unprecedented paleoanthropological discoveries. Previous work in the KF Fm. reported an archaeological locality, GaJj17, exhibiting in situ Middle Stone Age (MSA) material eroding from an indurated sandstone. Understanding the depositional context of this locality required further geologic study as few MSA localities are represented in the KF Fm. This is due...
Sourcing Lithic Raw Materials in the Namib Desert: Exploring land use and technological organization (2017)
Under a technological organization perspective, archaeologists seek to understand how prehistoric societies organized their activities across landscapes and how variation at individual sites articulates with changes in large scale land use systems. Lithic sourcing offers a powerful tool for testing hypotheses about technological organization and land use, but its application across the globe has, until recently, been hindered by expense and methodological difficulties. In this paper, we use pXRF...
Spatial and chronological components of Middle Stone Age artifact assemblage variability in deeply buried alluvial fan contexts (2015)
Alluvial fan deposition characterizes the geological setting of many Stone Age sites in the East African Rift System. In these settings, researchers must consider multiple origins of technological variability, such as chronology, spatial trends, and depositional history. Because of logistical constraints, deeply buried artifacts in alluvial fans can only be examined through small excavation windows or where deposits have been heavily eroded. Under both scenarios, variability in in situ artifact...
Taphonomic evidence for human accumulation of small mammals from Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 and other MSA sites in South Africa (2015)
Our capacity to detect the utilization of small prey resources by MSA humans can help shed light on subsistence strategies, cognition, and social organization during this critical period in human evolution. Recent analyses of South African MSA faunas suggest an expansion of dietary breadth after ~100 ka with the increase in the exploitation of small mammals (<5 kg) during MIS 4, but until now there has been little taphonomic evidence to support these conclusions. I present the results of a...
The tip of the horn: extractive foraging strategies and stone tool technologies in northwestern Ethiopia during the Middle Stone Age (2016)
We present data from open-air MSA sites situated along the trunk tributaries of the Blue Nile River in the lowlands of NW Ethiopia that provide information about the behaviors of anatomically modern Homo sapiens in the Horn near the time of its movement out of Africa. The diverse fauna includes mammals, reptiles, birds, and fish from a wide range of body sizes. Stone raw materials include cryptocrystalline quartz and basalt cobbles, both found on the local gravel bars and in exposed basalt...
Two Rockshelters in the Namib: Land use, site use, and risk over the Middle to Later Stone Age transition in Southwestern Africa. (2015)
The shifts in land and site use strategies that occurred over the Middle to Later Stone Age (MSA to LSA) transition remain poorly understood across the full diversity of environments in Southern Africa. In the Central Namib Desert of Namibia, two rockshelters, Erb Tanks and Mirabib, provide insights into these dynamics within the context of a persistent arid to hyper-arid climate. Employing data from an ongoing lithic sourcing survey, we argue that groups equipped with MSA-type lithic...
Using C and N stable isotopes in ostrich eggshells to develop paleoenvironmental records for Late Pleistocene East African rock shelter sequences (2017)
The Middle to Later Stone Age transition in East Africa ~30-60 ka has been hypothesized as a response to increased resource risk due to cooler, drier Late Pleistocene environments with greater short-term variability. Local paleoenvironmental records are needed to test such hypotheses. Ostrich eggshell (OES) fragments are common in African archaeological sequences, are amenable to 14C and U-series dating, and their δ13C and δ15N values are known to correspond to the C isotopes of vegetation and...
Variability in the Middle Stone Age of the Horn of Africa: a technical tradition of southeastern Ethiopia (2016)
The Middle Stone Age (MSA) is traditionally defined by flake, point and elongated blank production associated with retouched tools (e.g. scrapers and retouched points). However, a great cultural variability is observed, whether it is linked with spatial (e.g. Brandt 1986, Clark 1988), or temporal (Early vs Late MSA, e.g. Douze 2011) variability. Here we present results from a comparative analysis of the lithic assemblages from Porc-Epic Cave (e.g. Clark and Williamson 1984, Pleurdeau, 2005) and...