Pinnacle Point 5-6 and Diepkloof Rockshelter (South Africa): Testing the OSL ages and constructing a standardised MSA chronology

Summary

Single grain optically stimulated luminescence (SG-OSL) dating has made a major contribution to our understanding of the chronology of the Middle Stone Age of Africa. The accuracy of many of the SG-OSL chronologies has been verified by other independent dating techniques. Diepkloof Rockshelter (DRS), however, has produced disparate chronologies that have resulted in a dating controversy. Criticisms raised have been used to cast doubt on and, in some cases, dismiss the chronology for the Howiesons Poort (HP) and Still Bay (SB) presented in Jacobs et al. (Science 322, 733–735, 2008). As a result, an alternative age model and interpretation of the ages, durations and relationship between the HP and SB techno-complexes has been proposed. In the process of doing so, the published ages for Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 (PP5-6) have also been questioned. In this presentation, I will demonstrate why the SG-OSL chronology of DRS is robust by directly addressing the concerns raised and by presenting new data. I will also present a complete chronology for the PP5-6 sedimentary deposits. These two new data sets will then be used to assess the merits of the two divergent age models for the HP and SB in southern Africa.

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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