Coastal Foraging at a Shifting Shore: Assessing Late MIS 3 Coastal Resource Use at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 on the South Coast of South Africa

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.

The early MSA coastal forager record of the African southern coast includes considerable variation in foraging strategies. The earliest sites show evidence of systematic use of coastal resources as part of a broader foraging strategy. True shell middens appear slightly later and demonstrate the presence of a full-fledged coastal foraging adaptation (CFA). From MIS 5 to the early part of MIS 4 foragers invested in cultural knowledge systems that maximized efficient and regular access to coastal resources. But between the beginning of the penultimate glaciation and the intensified CFA of the Holocene, nothing is known about how coastal foragers dealt with the perturbations of shifting coastal ecosystems on the southern continental shelf. At Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1, we identify evidence of coastal foraging and a brief transgression at the end of MIS 3. Using micromorphological, stratigraphic, and taxonomic data we assess whether this is evidence of a true CFA, and to what extent strategies were comparable to both earlier and later regional sites with coastal resource exploitation. We note that simply identifying the use of coastal resources does not necessarily demonstrate continuity in the cultural knowledge needed to support this adaptation.

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): 50701