Projects
Adaptations to Marginal Environments in the Middle Stone Agea
My post-doctoral research at the McDonald Institute stretches my PhD interests in two dimensions:
- back in time from the Later to the Middle Stone Age (MSA) and
- across space from the intra-site to the landscape level.
Our understanding of the diversity of early behaviourally modern human adaptations in Africa is severely compromised by poor chronological control at many MSA sites and a geographical research bias towards the southern African coasts. This project addresses these issues by exploring highland landscape use by MSA societies in eastern Lesotho, an inland region with an unusually high density of MSA sites.
Over the next three years I will excavate MSA levels at two significant rockshelter sequences Melikane and Sehonghong. These levels will be dated using various techniques (OSL, ESR, AMS C14) and a number of palaeoenvironmental and geomorphological analyses will be performed. A holistic approach will be taken, integrating the new chronometric, archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data with those from fresh surveys of numerous open-air MSA lithic scatters and quarries in the area to discern regional patterns in subsistence-settlement dynamics throughout the Later Pleistocene. Emphasis will be placed on evaluating how MSA hunter-gatherers adapted to high-altitude, inland grasslands under the climatically deteriorated conditions of the last Ice Age.
The project will be a step towards correcting the coastal imbalance and coming to grips with unique socio-economic systems characteristic of behaviourally modern hunter-gatherer groups using technologies and occupying ecological habitats very distinct from those known ethnographically in sub-Saharan Africa.