The Earlier Stone Age Occupation of Wonderwerk Cave: Combining the Archaeology and Geology

Summary

The archaeology and geology of the Earlier Stone Age of Wondewerk Cave (Northern Cape Province, South Africa) present a paradoxical picture. On the one hand there is a record of hominin occupation spanning a period of at least one million year that includes multiple proxies indicating the use of fire. However, the micromorphological study of the sediment shows almost no anthropogenic signal and the density of artifacts is extraordinarily low. This paper presents an overview of the current state of research including the new excavations at the site that began in 2013 in collaboration with Liora Kolska Horwitz and Francesco Berna. Although many questions remain about site formation processes in the early phases of hominin occupation at Wonderwerk the evidence suggests that the nature of occupation during this early period was different from the cave occupations familiar from the Middle Stone Age and Middle Paleolithic. The research at Wonderwerk provides an example of the critical role that micromorphology plays in the archaeology of early hominins.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

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