Acheulean artifact accumulation and early hominin land use, Garden Route Casino Road, Pinnacle Point, South Africa

Abstract

An Early Stone Age Acheulean lithic assemblage collected along a 1.5-km transect at the Garden Route Casino near Pinnacle Point, Mossel Bay, South Africa, was examined in order to assess the relative degree to which assemblage variability is impacted by post-occupational processes and/or terrain. It was found that post-occupational variables do vary across the study area, and they affect the positions of artifacts to different degrees. Terrain structure was determined to have minimal effect on artifact movement. Three analysis sections were identified as having artifacts that were likely close to their original positions and compositions. Future interpretations of differential land use can now be tempered with considerations of the post-occupational processes that formed the recovered assemblage.

Cave life histories of non-anthropogenic sediments help us understand associated archaeological contexts

“…As clearly shown in the case of Staircase Cave, most caves above ~10 m (that is for the moment the ~20 m high stand) were undercut and collapsed. This may explain why Acheulian technology is so far absent from the PP caves, but is abundant on the landscape above the cliffs (Thompson, 2009). More speculatively, perhaps this also explains the general lack of Acheulian stone tools in coastal sea caves in South Africa.…”

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

“…However, different types of coastal behaviors occurred in the past, and these have formed varying signatures from dense shell middens to scarcer lithic scatters [31,32], or evidence related to ephemeral beach activities such as algae collection or cetacean scavenging [33][34][35], where evidences are prone to disappearing with the tides. The invisibility of some of these coastal activities is well-known though, captured in southern African ethnographic records since the 17 th century [35][36][37][38][39][40].…”

“…Wellpreserved cave deposits along the southern Cape coastline of South Africa provide suitable excavation conditions and they provide a detailed vision of MSA subsistence and technical behaviors along the coast. In contrast, very few coastal ESA sites have been excavated and when they have been, they barely preserve fauna, their site-formation processes are complex, and/or the archaeological deposits are usually disturbed [32,[57][58][59][60][61]. Consequently, the contrast that exists between ESA and MSA site preservation and data resolution is highly likely to impact our current understanding, and this should be considered more carefully when we explore the proliferation of technical behaviors and strategies, especially if there is the potential for some of these activities to be more deeply rooted in time.…”

“…In addition, since the beginning of the 20 th century authors have reported that ESA artifacts are present in coastal deposits (marine terraces, also called "raised beaches", river terraces from "near coastal rivers" [56] and sand dunes) all over southern Africa [see review in 62], and especially along the Atlantic coast where the arid and semi-arid environments of the Karoo-Namib and the Cape fynbos prevail [62][63][64][65][66]. Good examples are provided by Klasies River and Pinnacle Point, where ESA artifacts are numerous and found scattered on the surface [32,65,67], in contrast with the well-stratified and -preserved MSA cave records in the same area [3,24,68,69]. This confirms the antiquity of human occupation along the coast, prior to MSA coastal adaptation, but also points towards potentially different trends between MSA and ESA coastal landscape occupations [70].…”