Modeling Mobility and Lithic Raw Material Transport in the Late Pleistocene along the Southern Coast of South Africa

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Understanding how hunter-gatherer groups move around the landscape is essential for answering questions about human behavioral ecology and evolution of the social landscape. Lithic raw material proveniencing sheds light on how far people in the past were traveling for toolstone and whether people from different sites were accessing the same raw materials but can be challenging. We applied digital methods for spatial analyses to create predictive models of raw material source access for silcrete for three late Pleistocene sites in South Africa, two coastal and one inland. Silcrete, a terrestrial sedimentary rock, is rare along the southern coast of South Africa and becomes more common inland at higher elevations. The discrete outcrops of silcrete and its relatively low frequency on the landscape provides an opportunity for geochemical proveniencing. We performed least-cost analyses to determine which sources people from each site should acquire silcrete raw materials from if they are trying to access the least energetically costly sources based on terrain and distance to source. Future research will include collecting samples from these locations and comparing the geochemical composition of collected samples with silcrete artifacts from the sites to see if the artifacts come from the modeled raw material collection locations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36462.0