The P5 project archaeological reconnaissance along the Pondoland Coast, South Africa

Summary

South African sea caves preserve evidence for early modern humans’ longstanding interest in coastal resources. However, changes in coastlines location throughout the Pleistocene prevented the development of long-term and continuous records of coastal foraging and there are still many outstanding questions about when, where, and how coastal foraging developed. Pondoland (Eastern Cape Province) is one of the few places where we may be able to fill in these gaps. An exceptionally narrow continental shelf provides a unique opportunity to study coastal occupation and foraging in an area where coastline changes may have had negligible impacts on hunter-gatherer foraging patterns throughout the Pleistocene. Here, we summarize our results of a survey of the Pondoland coast that described >20 near-coastal rock shelters and open-air sites revealing occupation from the Early Stone Age onwards. We also describe the first direct ages of the coastal red sands that contain Acheulian and early Middle Stone Age stone tools. These OSL ages show that humans have inhabited Pondoland for >300,000 years, predating the currently-known origins of the modern human lineage and systematic coastal foraging. Pondoland, therefore, is anticipated to be a productive area for discovering long-term and continuous records of coastal occupation and intertidal resource use.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Building the Hunter-gatherer’s Paleoscape on the South African Coast: the archaeological record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage