Stone Age Archaeology in the Lower Save River Valley, Southern Mozambique

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Southern Mozambique, with extensive Quaternary-aged deposits, shows great potential to inform on early modern human behavior. Despite its geographic proximity to well-known southern African hotspots of Stone Age archaeology, southern Mozambique represents a major gap in our knowledge due to civil war and political instability in the late twentieth century. In 2019, we conducted a reconnaissance survey of the lower Save River valley in the southern half of Mozambique. This area had no previously documented sites, but we chose this valley because of the occurrence of exposed Quaternary gravel and sand deposits along drainages leading into the Save River. The initial survey found that these deposits on the north side of the valley contained abundant raw material in the gravels and lithic scatters dated to the Middle and Later Stone Age. Testing at one locality, Zimuara 1, confirmed the presence of stratified deposits in a paleosol exposed in a quarry. Later Stone Age (LSA) were found in a secure context below a buried weathering surface. An OSL age of 40 ± 3 ka provide the oldest dates for the LSA in Mozambique. Here, we report the preliminary results of our testing and survey in the vicinity of Zimuara.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32631