Cave Life Histories of non-anthropogenic Sediments helps us "raise the bar" in our understandings of anthropogenic Sediments

Summary

A series of sea caves and rock shelters with strong anthropogenic contributions are found at Pinnacle Point (PP) near Mossel Bay in the Western Cape Province, South Africa. Two of these (PP13B and PP5-6) have been the target of extensive archaeological excavation and both document anthropogenic and geogenic contributions waxing and waning over time. A variety of caves at PP do not bear anthropogenic remains, such as Staircase Cave and Crevice Cave. A third, PP29, is filled with sediment but there are no archaeological remains visible on the surface and it has not been excavated. However, all three (as do most caves at PP) have extensive remnant and extensive sediments that provide clues to the "life history" of caves in the region. These caves offer the opportunity to understand the purely geogenic signature of the locality under the same geologic and sedimentary conditions as those caves with anthropogenic contributions, and thus offer a geogenic baseline for the PP locality. Archaeologists normally focus only on sites with strong anthropogenic signals, but by building cave life histories we enrich our knowledge of the baseline geogenic signal and "raise the bar" on our contextual knowledge.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology in Context: The Influence of the Geoarchaeological Career of Paul Goldberg   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage