Archaeological Survey in the Lower Save River Valley, Southern Mozambique

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th 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, the area represents a major gap in our knowledge due to civil war and political instability in the late 20th century. In 2023, we began a systematic 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 reconnaissance survey in 2019 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 ~2 m-thick soil exposed in a quarry. Later Stone Age (LSA) were found in a buried contexts within the well-developed soil. An OSL age of 40+/- 3 ka provides the oldest dates for the LSA in Mozambique. Here, we report the preliminary results survey and test excavations of Zimuara.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40093.0