Heritage Cases

This application seeks permission to destructively sample food waste shells for serial oxygen isotope measurements from two Later Stone Age sites, Elands Bay Cave (EBC) and Nelson Bay Cave (NBC), to extend previous successful research. This method provides, firstly, climatic reconstructions of seasonal sea surface temperature conditions across parts of the Holocene and Marine Isotope Stage 4 and 5, and, secondly, enable assessments of the seasonality of shellfish harvesting by hunter-gatherers. This project engages with longstanding debates about the significance and organization of shellfishing activities for hunter-gatherers. Well-preserved Cymbula granatina (n=112) and Turbo sarmaticus (n=51) shells were selected from EBC and NBC, respectively, from the assemblages (stored at the University of Cape Town Archaeology Department) (see attached list). A previous project (Loftus et al., 2017; Loftus et al., 2019) sampled shells from Klasies River and PP5-6, and successfully developed climatic and subsistence records for these sites, but ultimately the conclusions were limited by small sample sizes – the additional, newly excavated shells from these sites will help to better understand the environmental and behavioural shifts observed at these sites. The shells from EBC are part of a Leverhulme-funded research fellowship at the University of Cambridge to develop analogous shell-based records for the West Coast. Previous sites sampled for this project dated to the late-Holocene, and have so far provided valuable pilot data that demonstrates the utility of this approach on the west coast (i.e. Loftus et al., 2018). Both sites have good radiocarbon chronologies to constrain the age of the shells, and are the focus of extensive previous and ongoing research – thus there is detailed information available at each site to contextualise and inform the present study. These proposed analyses will allow comparisons of the annual scheduling of shellfish harvesting alongside evaluations of climate changes reflected in local oceanographic conditions.