Lithic Analysis of an Early Later Stone Assemblage at Malony’s Kloof, a Rock Shelter in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Temporal organization systems which separate lithic artifacts into designations based on age, geographic area and technology are vital in order to operationalize archaeological information and allow for researchers to make their findings transferable and reproducible. Each Stone Age has characteristics that allow researchers to designate technologies accordingly. For instance, during the Later Stone Age, there was a massive technological shift. Specifically, the miniaturization of stone tools. This clear determination allows researchers to move on and set forth hypotheses that explain the phenomenon. But what about patterns that do not fit established criteria? The Early Later Stone Age (ELSA) is a designation applied to a technological pattern that has emerged within several sites in South Africa, but it is not well characterized. In order to understand whether the ELSA reflects a new technological industry separate from what is happening in non-ELSA sites at the same time frame, the ELSA must be clearly defined. This paper will contribute to the overall body of evidence by focusing on one site, Malony’s Kloof, a rockshelter cut into large tufa fans that developed over the Ghaap Escarpment, located about 70 km northeast of Kimberley in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24529