Building the hunter-gatherer’s paleoscape on the South African coast: Environment, landscape, and foraging resources

This symposium summarizes our climatic and environmental modeling, chronology, and experimental studies of resource productivity in the ancient paleoscape of the Cape Floral Region (CFR) of South Africa. Traditional paleoanthropological approaches to paleoenvironmental data seek to increase the resolution of both records in order to show meaningful correlations. Although heuristically useful, these strategies typically fail to illuminate causal relationships because they lack connective theory. To build that connective theory we need to 1) understand the links between our paleoenvironmental proxies and the distribution of resources relevant to foragers 2) construct “paleoscape” models of the distribution of those resources under different climate conditions, 3) simulate forager actions and decisions in those paleoscapes, and 4) compare the model output to empirical archaeological observations. The CFR, a floristically hyper-diverse ecosystem bordered by a super-rich coastal zone presents a useful laboratory for the development and testing of paleoscape models. Our project is a large international consortium exploring the co-evolution of people and ecosystem by creating the paleoscape models of the CFR, simulating how hunter-gatherers utilized this changing ecosystem, and then testing these models with high resolution paleoenvironmental and archaeological data, and here we focus on the contextual results.