Wood foraging in the tree-limited environment of the Cape Floral Region of South Africa

Summary

Wood is an essential resource for hunter-gatherers. It is necessary for cooking fuel, heat, and potentially safety, and hence influences site location choice and group size. Due to a low diversity and abundance of trees, wood may have been a limited resource for early humans in the Cape Floral Region (CFR) of South Africa. Drawing from behavior ecology foraging models, experiments with modern wood foragers were conducted to test this hypothesis. Foragers were observed collecting indigenous wood fuel species in the seven biomes present in the CFR and central place foraging models were applied. Experimental fires were also performed to assess the quality of the wood fuels. Preliminary results indicate that woody fynbos species provide sufficient fuel for human needs in a stable environment, despite the low abundance of tree wood. Future experiments will investigate how fire events and depletion due to human exploitation affect wood availability. Results will be built into an agent-based model of the paleoscape of the CFR.

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

• Building the hunter-gatherer’s paleoscape on the South African coast: Environment, landscape, and foraging resources   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage