Southern Africa (Other Keyword)
1-8 (8 Records)
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Assessing hominin involvement with the faunal assemblages from Bundu Farm and Pniel 6, Northern Cape, South Africa (2015)
The transition from the Early Stone Age (ESA) to the Middle Stone Age (MSA) represents an important technological shift in hominin behavioral evolution in southern Africa. Subsistence behaviors during this transition, however, are relatively unknown due to a lack of faunal preservation or insecure associations between lithic and faunal accumulations. Often, these sites originate from riverine, lakeshore, and spring deposits, locations that likely attracted hominin hunters and other carnivores in...
Beyond the Shadow of a Desert: Illuminating Southern Africa’s Foraging Spectra (2015)
There is arguably nowhere more susceptible to the tyranny of the ethnographic record than southern Africa. From Man the Hunter’s quintessential foragers to the revisionists’ marginalized proletariat, Kalahari hunter-gatherers cast shadows far longer than those created by the desert sun. There is no denying that this extraordinary record – central to both economic and social approaches to southern African prehistory – has greatly enriched our picture of the past. Unsurprisingly, however, the...
Cinciliths: A new term describing systematic small-unretouched tool production (2016)
The term “microlith” has grown to include a range of small tool technologies beyond those for which it was originally intended (small retouched geometrics). This definitional dilemma has resulted in a loss of precision in studies of technological miniaturization. Miniaturization includes the production and use of small-unretouched flakes from small cores. This paper proposes a new term for this phenomenon, Cinci-liths (Cinci: isiXhosa for small) that solves the problem of distinguishing these...
Explaining intraregional assemblage variability in southern Africa during MIS 2: Different strokes or different folks? (2015)
In southern Africa Marine Isotope Stage 2 was a period of intense cold, and palaeoenvironment and geoarchaeological data indicate inverse moisture availability in the different rainfall zones. Sea levels fell rapidly, exposing the continental shelf while the number of archaeological sites across the subcontinent decreased, likely a result of populations concentrating along the now-submerged coastline. There were, however, pockets of inland ‘refugia’. People contracted into centres of occupation...
Middle and Late Stone Age of the Niassa Region, Northern Mozambique. Preliminary results (2015)
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...
Preliminary results from new excavations of the Late Pleistocene occupations at Grassridge Rockshelter, South Africa. (2017)
Grassridge Rockshelter sits at the base of the Stormberg Mountains in the northern part of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. This region has only been the focus of two previous major archaeological projects, with research at Grassridge last conducted in 1979 and identifying Holocene Later Stone Age and Late Pleistocene Middle Stone Age occupations. The Grassridge Archaeological and Palaeoenvironmental Project (GAPP) renewed research at Grassridge in 2014. In this presentation, we summarise the...
The roots of global trade in the southern African Iron Age (2017)
During the African Iron Age from 800 to 1200 AD, overseas trade began to expand out of southern Africa across the Indian Ocean, which caused an increase in the export of raw materials such as ivory. Archaeological evidence of ivory working has been found on sites across southern Africa dating to this period, including KwaGandaGanda and K2 in South Africa, Kaitshaa and Bosutswe in Botswana and Ingombe Ilede in Zambia. It is unknown whether the raw ivory was obtained locally or traded in, whether...