The archaeology of the lower Sundays River Valley, Eastern Cape province, South Africa: an assessment of Earlier Stone Age alluvial terrace sites
[摘要] The lower Sundays River Valley, within the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa,has featured in a range of papers over the last century. A large portion of thesefocuses on improving our understanding of a series of river terraces that border thepresent channel. Earlier Stone Age (ESA) artefacts were first noted to occur in thesedeposits in the 1950s, but since this initial research there has been no attempt toinvestigate these further.Our understanding of the Eastern Cape’s early archaeology is poor and this can beattributed to a lack of research. Only a single ESA site, Amanzi Springs, has beenfully excavated for the entire province, and although the artefacts here provide someindication as to what characterises this region’s early archaeology, the significance ofthis site is limited by our inability to date it. Well-dated ESA sites are thus completelyabsent in the Eastern Cape.More recently, a study has provided a series of dates for the Sundays River terraces.Most importantly, this research confirmed the presence of these ESA – morespecifically Acheulean – artefacts within three of these dated deposits, namely: AtmarFarm dated to 0.65 ± 0.12 Ma (millions of years ago), Bernol Farm dated to 1.14 ±0.2 Ma, and Penhill Farm date to <1.37 ± 0.16 Ma and more recently constrained bythis research to >0.485 ± 0.051 Ma. Accordingly, it has been the purpose of thisresearch to investigate these deposits through both survey and excavation, and toprovide details on this archaeology.This research thus provides the first ever comprehensively described and dated ESAsites for this region, and from this we can now begin to construct our understanding ofthe local Acheulean Tradition. This research also provides a contextual assessment forthe formation of these deposits and what processes have influenced their formationand modification. Furthermore, from the detailed analysis of the artefacts, we canbegin to understand the strategies employed in their production.Our investigations have shown that largely different contextual conditions are presentat each of the three sites. This has had significant impacts on the integrity of theseassemblages, and the preservation and retention of assemblage components are highlyvariable between them. All of the artefact assemblages show the followingcharacteristics: simple strategies in core reduction, low levels of reduction in bothcores and formal tools, simple and expedient production of retouched artefacts withlittle emphasis on careful edge modification, and large cutting tools (LCTs) that areflaked bifacially but have limited shaping overall.For the first time in half a century our research now provides comparative materialfrom three dated sites that can be used to help understand variability in the localAcheulean Tradition. This has important implications for not only the Eastern Cape,but also to sites elsewhere in the interior.
[发布日期] [发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand
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