Southern African Humanities

Elands Bay Cave provides the opportunity to characterize Holocene technologies and hunter-gatherers adaptations in the West Coast of South Africa. In this paper, we discuss the question of adhesives uses and manufactures by applying a biomolecular and technological analysis to three unpublished organic artefacts recovered from the 1970s excavation. The first piece is a large handle made of adhesive and with a tear-drop shape (the ‘handle’), the second piece is a kind of pencil grip wrapping a microlithic quartz segment (the ‘grip’), and the last piece takes the form of a macro-residue likely sealing the perforation of an ostrich eggshell flask (the ‘sealant’). The results of our study document the selection and transformation of Podocarpus resin, mixed with quartz sand to produce adhesive. One case study (the sealant) suggests that fat was added to the recipe in order to modify the adhesive’s properties. The paper provides a unique insight into Holocene organic technologies and fuels ideas on how hunter-gatherers adapted and took benefit from local natural resources. We suggest that Podocarpus, in South Africa, has been specifically chosen for adhesive manufacture since, at least, the MIS4.

This article presents the results of the anatomical identification by scanning electron microscopy of wood charcoal from excavations in 2011 at Elands Bay Cave (EBC), South Africa. The samples are from Robberg Group D layers (18/19 ka cal BP); the Early Later Stone Age (LSA) Group F layers (22–24 ka cal BP), and the late Middle Stone Age (MSA) Group H-I-J layers (35–39ka cal BP). Noticeable differences in the vegetation are present in LSA layers, which have more diverse thicket elements represented in Groups D and F than in Group H-I-J layers—with their heavier reliance on Afromontane and mesic thicket taxa during the late MSA. Published charcoal results from previous excavations at EBC chart a progressive change over time from xeric thicket and asteraceous shrubland vegetation, through proteoid fynbos and general thicket to mesic thicket, riverine woodland and proteoid fynbos, ultimately to Afromontane forest. Climatic or soil moisture factors may have played a significant part and contributed to some or all of the taxa having very different phytogeographical distributions compared to their modern counterparts, but is also necessary to consider to what extent the people using EBC at different times might have collected (and selected) woody resources from a mosaic of vegetational communities, some local, some far away.

The Early Middle Stone Age (EMSA) of southern Africa represents a poorly defined period in terms of chronology, palaeoenvironments, subsistence strategies and technological traditions. This lack of understanding is directly related to the low number of EMSA deposits that have been excavated, but concomitantly, it also reflects the poor interest accorded by most of the recent archaeological projects. In this context, the excavation that we undertook at Elands Bay Cave (EBC) in the West Coast of South Africa in 2011 provides a good opportunity to discuss the oldest occupations at the site, which have been assigned to the ‘MSA 1’ by T. Volman (1981) and which purportedly belong to the earliest MSA traditions of southern Africa. In the present paper, we provide a technological study of the ‘MSA 1’ lithic assemblage. Our results demonstrate the near-exclusive use of local quartzite by the inhabitants of EBC. This raw material was preferentially selected in the form of slabs and large flakes to produce blanks that were used without further retouching. We identified various reduction sequences that we unify under a concept referred to as ‘POL-reduction strategy’. Furthermore, we perform intersite technological comparisons and conclude that on technological grounds the ‘MSA 1’ of Elands Bay Cave dates back to MIS 6, in agreement with the luminescence dating. We acknowledge current difficulties in building a chrono-cultural framework at a subcontinental scale. Thus, we discuss the relevance of the term ‘MSA 1’ and instead advocate a more neutral and generic label of ‘EMSA’ (understood here as late Middle Pleistocene MSA technologies). The analysis of the EMSA of EBC sheds new light on the patterns and changes that characterise behaviours and organisations of Anatomically Modern Humans over the last 200 ka.