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

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

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.

Other Keywords
Pinnacle Point • Paleoclimate • south africa • return rates • Paleoenvironment • Homo Sapiens • Geophysics • Foraging • Phytoliths • Vegetation Reconstruction

Geographic Keywords
AFRICA • South America

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)

  • Documents (14)
Documents
  1. Agent Based Models of Ache Foraging and Grouping (2015)
  2. Cryptotephra Discovered at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 May Correlate with the 74 ka Eruption of Toba in Indonesia: Implications for Resolving the Dating Controversy for Middle Stone Age Sites in Southern Africa. (2015)
  3. Environmental implications of marine bird remains in the late Holocene of Pinnacle Point. (2015)
  4. Foraging for bulbs in the Cape Floristic Region (2015)
  5. Foraging for shellfish in a predictable and productive inter-tidal environment, the south coast of South Africa (2015)
  6. A Late Pleistocene aridity and vegetation record from stable light isotope ratios of ostrich eggshell in Pinnacle Point (2015)
  7. Long and Continuous Record of Climate and Environmental Change from Speleothems of the Cape Floral Region of Southern South Africa (2015)
  8. Marine geophysics reveals the character of the now submerged Paleo-Agulhas Plain (2015)
  9. Paleoenvironmental implications of Stable Isotope analyses of Micromammal teeth from Pinnacle Point (Mossel Bay, South Africa) (2015)
  10. Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction using Fossil Phytolith Assemblages at Pinnacle Point caves 13B and 5/6 during Middle Stone Age, Mossel Bay, South Africa (2015)
  11. Peering into the past Cape vegetation during the Last Glacial Maximum using species distribution modelling and dynamic global vegetation modelling (2015)
  12. Stable carbon and oxygen isotopes in faunal tooth enamel from Boomplaas and Nelson Bay Cave record Late Pleistocene/Holocene environments in the southern Cape, South Africa (2015)
  13. Testing the Paleo-Agulhas Plain Migration Ecosystem hypothesis with serial isotope analysis of fossil fauna (2015)
  14. Wood foraging in the tree-limited environment of the Cape Floral Region of South Africa (2015)