67,000 years of coastal engagement at Panga ya Saidi, eastern Africa

Abstract

The antiquity and nature of coastal resource procurement is central to understanding human evolution and adaptations to complex environments. It has become increasingly apparent in global archaeological studies that the timing, characteristics, and trajectories of coastal resource use are highly variable. Within Africa, discussions of these issues have largely been based on the archaeological record from the south and northeast of the continent, with little evidence from eastern coastal areas leaving significant spatial and temporal gaps in our knowledge. Here, we present data from Panga ya Saidi, a limestone cave complex located 15 km from the modern Kenyan coast, which represents the first long-term sequence of coastal engagement from eastern Africa. Rather than attempting to distinguish between coastal resource use and coastal adaptations, we focus on coastal engagement as a means of characterising human relationships with marine environments and resources from this inland location. We use aquatic mollusc data spanning the past 67,000 years to document shifts in the acquisition, transportation, and discard of these materials, to better understand long-term trends in coastal engagement. Our results show pulses of coastal engagement beginning with low-intensity symbolism, and culminating in the consistent low-level transport of marine and freshwater food resources, emphasising a diverse relationship through time. Panga ya Saidi has the oldest stratified evidence of marine engagement in eastern Africa, and is the only site in Africa which documents coastal resources from the Late Pleistocene through the Holocene, highlighting the potential archaeological importance of peri-coastal sites to debates about marine resource relationships.

Human-ecodynamics and the intertidal zones of the Zanzibar Archipelago

“…The re-analyses of the Kuumbi Cave data and comparison with other Unguja/Pemba assemblages reinforce the initial interpretation of Faulkner et al (2019b), that these assemblages primarily reflect a combination of foraging and transportation, with the latter being the key driver explaining the high similarity in assemblage structure and composition through time. Similar issues were flagged in South Africa (e.g., Plug, 2006;Steele and Klein, 2013) and at Panga ya Saidi in Kenya (Faulkner et al, 2021). The Kuumbi Cave assemblages therefore reflect selectivity for transportation, with the movement of key taxa from the coast in the order of 7-8 km during the Pleistocene, and c.2.5 km over the last 2,000 years.…”

“…In archaeology, nestedness has been used to complement assessment of the relationship between taxonomic composition and sample size. In these analyses, smaller assemblages with low richness should nest within larger assemblages if they have been derived from the same community (e.g., Wolverton et al, 2015;Faulkner et al, 2021). This also has the potential to shed significant light on past human behaviours, such as foraging strategies, selection, and transportation.…”

Evidence for Earlier Stone Age ‘coastal use’: The site of Dungo IV, Benguela Province, Angola

“…Consequently, it is hard to assess a coastal adaptation phenomenon without relying on a large corpus of contemporary sites, where we can then collectively assess multiple strands of evidence to develop more holistic understandings of early human behavior. When the archaeological record reflects coastal resource exploitation, that are not the primary subsistence strategy focus, then the expressions "coastal use" [41] and "coastal engagement" [42] have instead been suggested.…”

Coastal adaptations on the eastern seaboard of South Africa during the Pleistocene and Holocene? Current evidence and future perspectives from archaeology and marine geology

“…Throughout the article we follow our recent definition of the term 'coastal adaptations' as a multifaceted array of behavioral traits in a population beneficial to their fitness, consisting of the regular and systematic acquisition, consumption and use of marine resources as well as an expansion of settlement systems that included repeated and planned occupation of coastal landscapes (for a more detailed discussion of the concept see Will et al, 2016: 70;Will et al, 2019: 36; for an even broader approach of 'coastal engagement' see Faulkner et al, 2021). The majority of evidence on such Pleistocene use of coasts by Homo sapiens has come from the African Middle Stone Age (MSA), with the longest record for the consumption of marine resources deriving from sites in northern and particularly southern Africa (for northern Africa see Steele and Alvarez-Fernández, 2011;Campmas et al, 2016).…”

“…Vast gaps in knowledge plague the African record, such as in western or eastern Africa (see e.g. Niang et al, 2020;Faulkner et al, 2021), and even in regions that are comparatively well-studied such as South Africa. In contrast to abundant evidence of Pleistocene coastal sites on the western and southern seaboard, the eastern Indian Ocean coastline and the province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN; Figure 1) in particular have not played any role in recent discussions due to the perceived scarcity of relevant data, and those often deriving from old publications.…”