Narabeb Pan: Exploring Middle Stone Age Archaeology of the Namib Sand Sea

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The vast Sand Sea region of the Namib desert in western Namibia has begun to yield evidence of long-term human occupations. In the past decades, several Early Stone Age (ESA) sites have been identified and described but the Middle Stone Age (MSA) human presence remains poorly understood. Here we describe in detail the newly documented site of Narabeb Pan, a site situated deep in the dune fields that is the first to provide a tentative estimate for the chronology of Late Pleistocene MSA occupation of the Sand Sea. We also examine recent evidence for an unexpectedly high degree of dynamism in the region's unique environment, with implications for broader questions of MSA land use patterns and adaptive flexibility. Together, these data help fill in important gaps in our current understanding of diversity in Late Pleistocene human adaptations in Southern Africa.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36281.0