Middle and Late Stone Age of the Niassa Region, Northern Mozambique. Preliminary results

Summary

Located between modern-day South Africa and Tanzania, both of which have well-known and extensive Stone Age records, Mozambique and its Stone Age sequence remain largely unknown in the broader context of African Pleistocene prehistory. This is in spite of the country’s critical position linking southern and eastern Africa, and of its clear potential to inform various models about recent human evolution. Specifically, the geography of Mozambique makes its sea coast a natural area of interest to evaluate recent scenarios about the importance of coastal adaptations to the success and diffusion of Homo sapiens outside of southern Africa. Here, we present the results of field survey in the Niassa lake region. Two main contexts were surveyed: river valleys running to the Niassa (Malawi) lake and limestone bedrock exposure where Middle and Late Stone Age sites and deposits were found during 2014, including dozens of surface sites as well as a few in situ localities in rockshelters with both lithic artefacts and well preserved faunal remains.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage