Of Pigments and Tools: Lithic and Ochre Raw Material Procurement Strategies during MIS 5 at Mwulu’s Cave (Limpopo, South Africa)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Local and/or Exotic Interactions: Symbols, Materials, and Societies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Middle Stone Age was a period of important innovations for Homo sapiens, including but not restricted to heat-treatment of silcrete, hafting adhesive, symbolic behaviors such as engravings, or exploitation of ochre. Though southern African Middle Stone Age lithics and ochre are commonly studied, combined studies of their provenance remain scarce. While each of them bears the potential to document the mobility and trade networks of past societies, combining them could increase our understanding of past cultural behaviors and social networks. Here we present results of lithics and ochre provenance studies for the MIS 5 site of Mwulu’s Cave in Limpopo, South Africa. Using a naturalistic approach—the analyses of archaeological and geological raw materials by petrography, pXRF, PIXE and ICP-MS—we question the local provenance of the lithics and ochre retrieved at Mwulu’s Cave. Our results highlight the existence of nuanced procurement strategies with local provenance for lithic raw material and a combination of local and nonlocal provenance for ochre materials. We question this interaction between exotic and local materials in terms of population mobility as well as their social-symbolic meanings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Local and/or Exotic Interactions: Symbols, Materials, and Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39944.0