Charting Late Pleistocene Social Networking in Southern Africa Using Strontium Isotope Geochemistry

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The roots of long-distance social networking run deeper than Facebook. At some point in the Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers began exchanging ‘non-utilitarian’ artifacts like beads and other ornaments over hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of kilometers. Among ethnographically documented foragers these networks symbolically link distant groups, acting as social adhesives that enhance fallback opportunities, information availability, and reproductive potential, among other benefits. Charting the evolution of long-distance social networks can thus help determine when, why and how our species began harnessing material culture to mitigate risk. The archaeology of Pleistocene Africa is, as usual, central to this endeavor given our species’ anatomical and behavioral origins. This paper presents the preliminary results of strontium isotope analyses of ostrich eggshell beads recovered from late Pleistocene and Holocene contexts in two sharply contrasting southern African environments: the Namaqualand Desert (South Africa) and Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains (Lesotho). Our data demonstrate the existence and persistence of highland and dryland exchange networks, and hold implications for tracing the development of social strategies for long-term survival in the southern African interior.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25901