The Middle Stone Age Goes Alpine: Preliminary Results of New Excavations at Ha Soloja Rockshelter, Lesotho, Africa

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While settlement of the world's high plateaus represents a final chapter in Homo sapiens’ global colonization, there were surprisingly early dispersals into high mountain systems. Africa possesses evidence for an early hominin presence in such settings, yet the processes by which human-highland engagements unfolded remain obscure. This paper introduces a new project to understand when, why, and how humans began exploiting southern Africa’s highest mountain system, the Maloti-Drakensberg. We present the preliminary results of renewed excavations at Ha Soloja (2,300 m asl), a large rockshelter in the uplifted Sehlabathebe region of southeastern Lesotho. We opened two new trenches at Ha Soloja, data from which form one prong of a multidisciplinary program of rockshelter excavation, paleoenvironmental reconstruction, landscape survey, and heritage valorization. From the uppermost levels we obtained infinite radiocarbon dates, suggesting the entire ~3.2 m Ha Soloja sequence predates ~50 kcal BP. The cultural material recovered is heavily dominated by flaked and fire-cracked stone artifacts. Low artifact densities, high rates of retouch, and abundant small flaking debris suggest that the site was recurrently a short-term logistical camp, lending preliminary support to our hypothesis that Ha Soloja functioned as a deep time high-altitude hunting station.

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): 41534.0