From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Coastal-focused narratives have dominated our understanding of the behavioral diversity seen in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological records of southern African during the past 20 years. However, these narratives tend to overlook the persistent presence of hunter-gatherers in diverse landscapes in the interior regions of the continent. Recent fieldwork and research demonstrates the presence of hunter-gatherers in montane, desert, semi-desert, grassland, and riverine environments from at least the Late Pleistocene onward. This session will therefore bring together researchers working across the distinctive environments found within southern Africa to contribute toward a more cohesive understanding of hunter-gatherer landscape use in this region during the past 100,000 years. In this respect, rather than focusing on one biome as a source of innovation, this session will emphasize the presence of hunter-gatherers across southern Africa’s diverse environments, and the connections and interactions across these landscapes, as a means to better approach an understanding of the past in this region.