Assessing the intensity of coastal resource use by micromorphological analyses

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Micromorphology has become a vital part of the toolkit for site formation process analyses in any archaeological context. The technique has been little applied in coastal settings, with most of the work focusing on shell-matrix sites in a few coastal areas of the world. In such anthropogenic deposits, micromorphology is essential to obtain high-resolution information on natural and anthropogenic sedimentation, and the pre-depositional history of sedimentary components. Through micromorphology, it is possible to identify activity areas within shell-matrix sites, abandonment episodes, trampling, platform building, dumping, and variations in coastal resource use. Geoarchaeological research in shell-matrix sites showed that shell mounds and shell middens can be used as environmental proxies since humans typically forage invertebrate fauna from the surroundings and carry it to the sites, together with natural sediments and aquatic microorganisms (e.g., algae, foraminifera). In this presentation, examples of micromorphological studies in coastal sites will be presented, focusing on the role of micromorphological analyses in assessing the intensity of coastal resource use, with particular emphasis on the formation of shell middens as evidence of coastal adaptations versus the episodic consumption of intertidal resources.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52320